Fistful of Yen

Once again, a broken disc has marred our viewing plans. Fortunately, I went (in person! first time in the pandemonium!) to the library and picked up Enter the Fat Dragon (2020). It's a comic martial arts film starring fat Donnie Yen.

Donnie Yen is a crack Hong Kong policeman getting married to Teresa Mo, a TV actress in costume dramas. He is supposed to go to the photographer in his monkey suit for the wedding photos, but gets held up stopping crime. Not only does this cause her to break the engagement, but he gets in trouble with his superiors. He is busted to a desk job in the evidence room. He starts to eat a lot of junk food, and well, he gets fat.

To give him a chance to redeem himself, he is sent to escort a Yakuza prisoner back to Japan. Coincidentally, Mo's new boyfriend has taken her on a promotional tour of Tokyo. When they get to Japan,  a series of distractions allows the prisoner to get away. So Donnie Yen with the help of even fatter Jing Won (the scriptwriter) and a translator (Jessica Jann), and with the police and Yakuza as obstacles, has to get back the prisoner. In the end, he also has to rescue his ex-fiancee. And he also needs to lose a few pounds when he gets back.

The fights are as fast and exciting as ever, but with a comic touch. During the final fight on the Tokyo Tower, in particular, Yen does quite a bit of mugging and clowning around - striking a martial arts pose, then throwing a peace sign with a goofy grin. But even when it's played for laughs, Yen's plump physique isn't seen as pitiful or a hindrance. He just says, "I need to lose some weight when I get back" and carries on. 

Another sweet thing about the movie is Yen's devotion to Mo. Nobody but Yen thinks her acting is any good, and the head of the Yakuza laughs his head off watching her shows. But Yen just thinks no one else gets her genius. He always supports her, and never complains when she berates him. Likewise, Jing Won has been staying in Tokyo for ten years, waiting for restaurant owner Niki Chow to return his affection. So, exciting, funny, and romantic - just what I wanted. 

Fast and Farcical

About a year after listening to the How Did This Get Made podcast ep, we watched F9: The Fast Saga (2021). That meant we had heard all the spoilers, but it didn't matter because they were just as shockingly batshit whether you knew in advance or not. 

It starts with a flashback of Dad Toretto getting killed in a race. Baby Dom blamed Baby Jakob - his until-now unknown brother - for his death. Note that the actor playing baby Jacob is about a head shorter than the actor playing baby Dom. 

Back in the present, Dom and Lettie are raising Dom's son on a remote farm, when Roman, Tej and Ramsey show up to let Dom know that (something complicated happened involving Charlize Theron). I could look it up, but let it stand. Dom says "Tough. I'm retired to look after my kid," but changes his mind when (detail emerges). He wants to go on this mission alone, but Lettie insists on coming. We assume the kid is packed up in a box or something.

So they all run around to various cool locations, meeting almost everyone who was ever in this franchise. For ex, we meet Helen Mirren in the middle of a jewel heist, just so she can tell us that (something something) is going down in Edinburgh.

Everywhere they go, Jakob is there to thwart them. Grown-up Jakob is played by John Cena, and when we say grown-up, we mean it. He's now a head taller than Vin Diesel, so Jakob must have hit a growth spurt in his thirties. Jakob has a super-magnet that he uses to jam comms, but our guys steal it and use it for "magnets don't work like that" stuff. 

Jakob plans to launch the McGuffin into space to take over all terrestrial and satellite communications, which leads to the most famous part - Tej and Roman in space. It's not as crazy as the rope bridge scene in the first part.

As far as absurdities go, the best on was... Han is back! Sung Kang makes a triumphant return as the guy who was conclusively killed in F6. Still a favorite of ours and so many others, so he had to be revived. Hope to see Gal Gadot as Giselle back in the next one. 

It's no secret this series has become completely ridiculous. Roman even notes that they've risked their lives hundreds of times and never got a scratch. He almost figures it out. It's a good thing they are wrapping it up in another movie or two, because they've already done amnesia, dead come back to life and about all the fan service they could squeeze in. As long as they don't try to bring back Brian (he was babysitting the kid, it turns out.)

Chandu Can Do

I wanted to see Chandu the Magician (1932) for two reasons. First, I used to listen to a lot of old radio shows, and Chandu was one. I only heard one episode, but it was intriguing: Chandu was a stage magician who solved crimes, using his secret powers - he could really do actual magic. The movie is a little different. But the second reason is that the villain in the movie is played by Bela Lugosi.

It stars Edmund Lowe as Frank Chandler, who studied mystical arts and became a yogi named Chandu. He could astral project, read and control minds, and wear a jewelled turban and a fine moustache. The council of yogis sends him to stop Bela Lugosi, playing an Egyptian named Roxor (!), who wants to control the world. He plans to use the death ray invented by Chandu's brother-in-law. He kidnaps Chandu's sister and her children to coerce him. He also kidnaps Chandu's girlfriend, the Egyptian princess Nadji (Irene Ware).

This has a very kid's matinee feel: Roxor claims that he will destroy civilization and all it's works. But Lowe's Chandu has a nice light quippy style of hero. And of course, it's great to see Lugosi being Eeevil. 

Also, I'm watching more old movies again - black-and-whites were my specialty back in the day. I still love recent action, SF, comedy and crime, but sometimes get tired of the made-for-streaming stuff. So this scratches that old-timey itch. 

Hey, Joe

I was actually kind of psyched to see Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins (2021). I honestly didn't hate the first G.I. Joe movie - saw it on a plane, kind of enjoyed the action. So, the same with a focus on Asian action? With a half-decent cast? I'm in.

It starts with the traditional hero's parent killed when he's a kid scene. In this case, his dad gets his remote cabin invaded by ninjas, and is forced to roll dice to see if he will live. The kid sees him roll snake eyes and die. But the kid gets away.

Years later, that kid has grown up to become Henry Golding (Crazy Rich Asians) - Snake Eyes, champion of the underground cage fighting scene. Takehiro Hira as Kenta recruits him to join his yakuza gang. But when Hira wants Snake Eyes to kill traitor Andrew Koji, he doesn't do it, and instead fights his way out with Koji.

Now Koji owes Snake Eyes his life. He takes him to his ninja family compound and offers him membership in the Arashikage clan. This will involve three tests, administered by Iko Uwais as Hard Master - a real standout in the fight scenes, showing incredible solidity and immovability.

But as he's on his way to acceptance, we find out (as if we didn't guess) that the whole thing was a putup job - Hira planned it so that Snake Eyes could infiltrate the Arashikage. He and Koji are brothers, and when Koji was chosen to lead the clan, Hira went rogue. Now he wants the magic McGuffin that the clan guards, and plans to use Snake Eyes to get it.

About the only surprising thing in this plot is that Snake Eyes actually goes through with the betrayal - then once the damage is done, defects to Arashikage. Maybe that's not the surprising thing, but it is surprising that they have him. In the final fights, we find out that Hira is Cobra related, Arashikage is Joe related, how Snake Eyes' dad got killed etc. you probably don't care, except that Scarlett (Samara Weaving) shows up on the Joe side, and the Baroness (Ursula Corbero) is a very stylish Cobra op. 

All in all, the action was about par for modern action movies. A lot was swiped, although I couldn't always tell from where. Who started the tradition that all heroes start out doing illegal cage fights? Batman Begins, Angel in one of the X-Man movies, I think Charlie's Angels even pulled this. The plot was silly, although maybe for a G.I. Joe movie it was actually sophisticated. The face-heel turns were so undermotivated, though - it kind of made us mad. 

Still, there were a lot of no-worse than average action scenes, and Iko Uwais had a role, so it wasn't a total loss.

I Got Movies!

Readers who have been reading may remember that we've cut down on DVDs - a 2-DVD subscription down from 3. We've been filling in a little with streaming, but actually we're still mainly using streaming for TV shows. Recently that's been The Great British Baking Show. But what else have we been using to fill the holes in the schedule?

Glad you asked! I went to Critic's Choice and Movies Unlimited to get a whole pile of DVDs! Among other one-offs, we got:

• The Three Stooges 1934-1959: That's right, the complete Three Stooges on 17 discs. We're trying to watch little by little, but have already gone throuh 2 discs.
• Torchy Blane Collection: Seven movies about that peerless fast-talking girl reporter, starring Glenda Farrell (mostly). We've watched the first two, and are in love with Tom Kennedy as Gahagen, the carefree policeman. Also, in Fly, Baby, Fly, Torchy joins a round-the-world race, which gives us great stock footage of the China Clipper taking off from Alameda and flying over the under-construction Golden Gate Bridge, a Hawaiian luau, etc.
• Boston Blackie Trio: Good stuff from the Chester Morris era. Fun watch, but miss the "pencil-thin moustache" that Jimmy Buffet sang about.
  

There are bunch of others, mostly all old black and white (I can't call them "classics", since some are trash. But great, old trash). I might mention them now and them. For now, I just wanted to brag. And I'm not sponsored by Movies Unlimited, unlike the Movies That Made Me podcast.

Baby Ghostbusters!

Did I mention that Netflix is being good about sending all of our Wait list movies? Well, they sent Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021). Maybe everyone is watching these on streaming services.

Single mom Carrie Coon and her two kids, Finn Wolfhard and Mckenna Grace, are evicted from their home, but Coon's estranged father died recently. So they pack up everything and head to his farm in Nebraska. It's a rundown place that looks haunted. The folks in town refer to him as the Dirt Farmer. When Coon says she's sure the townspeople will miss him, a waitress says, "Doubt it."

Wolfhard is an awkward young teen. He sees Celeste O'Connor at the local drive-in restaurant and gets a job there to try to get close to her. The kids haze him, but O'Connor doesn't reject him completely. Grace is a little genius, possibly on the spectrum. Her mom begs her to try to fit in, make a friend. "Just don't be yourself" is her half-joking advice. Grace has some jokes for ice-breakers - "Why can't you trust atoms? Because they make up everything."

Surprisingly, she does make a friend. Logan Kim, who calls himself Podcast, interviews her for his podcast. Because she's interesting (living at the Dirt Farmer's) and he's sort of an outcast, he starts hanging out with her. Also, their science class is taught by Paul Rudd, who just shows the students horror movies on VHS while he works on his seismology experiments. As a scientist, Grace gets interested. And when he stops by the Dirt Farm, it looks like he is interested in Coon as well.

Skipping ahead, the kids find ECTO-1, the Ghostmobile, in the garage. Podcast shows them some Youtubes of old Ghostbusters commercials, and they figure it out: The Dirt Farmer was Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis, now also deceased). Soon, they find Muncher (Josh Gad) terrorizing the town and take off after him with the Ghostmobile, the Proton Packs, the gunner chair, everything. 

I have to mention a spoiler, but I don't suppose anyone will be surprised that eventually the old Ghostbusters all come back to save them. Spengler shows up as a ghost. In fact, it's pretty clear that the whole movie is really about the loss of Harold Ramis and the desire to let him live on in movies, even if it requires Ivan Reitman to wear CGI makeup.

And Mckenna Grace, with her big glasses and shock of black hair, was clearly Spengler's grand-daughter. It's even more clear in her serious scientific mind. As Spengler's avatar, she is the heart of the movie. Although Wolfhard is an appealling actor, he plays the ordinary kid, more or less. 

It's interesting how this compares to Ghostbusters (2017). This movie is probably better written and directed - with perhaps a bigger budget, but it was also less true to the original spirit. In fact, it was pretty sentimental and sappy - more of a eulogy than a sequel. But I think, oddly, that's why it worked better. It may be sappy, but it's heartfelt and sincere. Of course, it's also funny and exciting. But the whole Gozer/Zuul/Keymaster/Shandor/Munch/Marshmallow thing wasn't as as good as the stories of a single mom whose father shut her our of his life, and her two odd kids. Except maybe the Marshmallow thing - like the Stay-Pufft monster, but regular marshmallow sized. Very cute and dangerous.

Shadows and Light Entertainment

I had Shadow in the Cloud (2021) on the queue, but once the How Did This Get Made podcast did an episode, I wanted to see it immediately. Annoyingly, Netflix kept sending DVDs off of the Wait list instead. But they got around to it. It's a good thing I waited, because the spoilers would have spoiled it. By the way: SPOILERS!

It starts very promisingly. It's WWII, and we get to watch a Sad Sack style animation about "gremlins", the little monsters that airmen blame for things going wrong. The movie in the movie explains that this is a cheap excuse. There are no gremlins! Hm.

A woman (Chloe Grace Moretz), dressed in a uniform with a few bandages and carrying a large leather radio bag, gets on a bomber. Although the crew jeers and insults her, she keeps military, hands over her orders and lets them know that the radio bag is confidential, and must not be opened. To get her out of the way, and as a hazing, they stuff her into the "sperry", the ball turret for the belly gunner. She leaves the package with one of the men, as there is no room.

For the next 20 minutes or so, I thought I had figured out what the movie was going to be. Moretz is stuck in the sperry, talking to the crew over comms. When she talks, she gets their identities and the movie shows them against a dark background. So we figure the rest of the movie will sort of be Moretz solo, in a tight space, acting against just voices.

Then she starts to see "shadows in the clouds" - and soon actual gremlins: human-sized rat/bats who are disassembling the engines. She tries to tell the crew without seeming to be crazy. She's terrified, but doesn't seem to be too surprised. So I figure that her secret mission is about these creatures, and the radio bag is  proof of their existence, or maybe an anti-gremlin weapon. 

But no! I'll skip to the act II spoiler reveal. The radio bag contains her baby. She is married to an abusive soldier, and she join the Women's Air Corps to get away. In the meantime, she had a baby with another man, and then her husband found her. Hence the bandages. She just needed to get out of New Zealand and grabbed the first plane that came along on forged orders. Oh yes, and the father of the baby is one of the (kind of anonymous) crew.

By now, the gremlins (remember the gremlins?) have made themselves known to the crew. In fact, one has stolen the baby bag and is playing with it out on the wing. So Moretz leaves the gun turrent, and makes her way across the underside to the plane (the one that's flying, right?) to hook the kid with a piece of busted tubing. They can't be flying very fast, because her hair is barely ruffled. 

So now there are four movies going on: the story of a woman in a man's war, the adultery and baby story, the wartime aviation adventure, with Japanese Zeros and mechanical problems. And then there's the gremlins. Personally, I liked the movie I thought I was watching at the start, before the baby showed up. I also wouldn't have minded if the action hadn't been quite so absurd. 

This was directed by New Zealander Roseanne Liang, who co-wrote the script with disgraced-but-still-working-I-guess Max Landis. I'd like to assign the ridiculous stuff to him, and the more sensitive early work to her, but who knows? 

The ending is suitably ridiculous and triumphant - so we left on a high note that didn't quite erase the overwhelming WTF feeling the movie inspired. The How Did This Get Made crew were equally gobsmacked. The intern who chose it says it is both the worst and her favorite movie of 2021.

Soho - a Land of Contrasts

 Another one that I've been looking forward to, and also going in with little or no info: Edgar Wright's Last Night in Soho (2021).

It opens with Thomasin McKenzie, an ordinary young woman in Cornwall, getting ready to go to London College of Fashion. McKenzie is a big fan of the Sixties, who was raised by her gran, because her mother went to London, became a model, and killed herself. But Gran (Rita Tushingham!) told her stories about swinging London, and gave her all her mom's pop vinyl. She lives a happy, secluded life, but she has had visions of her mother, and her mental health may be a little questionable.

She finds London a little scary. Her school in in seedy Soho, her roommate is a snobby bitch, and the only guy who seems nice is Michael Ajao, a black student who she just doesn't trust. 

When living in the dorm becomes too much of a drag, she moves to a rooming house run by the stern Diana Rigg. Rigg implies that the house has an unsavory past. and that she used to work there, cleaning up (or did she do more?). The room seems to have been last redecorated in the Sixties, so McKenzie fits right in. 

That night, she has a dream, that she has become Anya Taylor-Joy, a glamorous woman looking to become a nightclub singer in the Sixties. She doesn't get an audition, but she meets Matt Smith, talking with Cilla Black. Smith is a dangerous but connected sharpie, and he likes the look of Taylor-Joy.

McKenzie has more dreams about this earlier era, sometimes appearing as AT-J, sometimes as herself. Sometimes, it will be Taylor-Joy with McKenzie for her reflection. Sometimes it will be Taylor-Joy dancing with Smith, then after a turn, it's McKenzie. In the waking world, McKenzie starts to design dresses based on Taylor-Joy's outfits, and even cuts and dyes her hair to match Taylor-Joy. She gets a job at the local pub to pay for this new lifestyle. But she starts noticing a menacing figure around town - Terence Stamp.

Her dreams begin to get darker, as Smith starts pimping out Taylor-Joy, at first for her career, then just for the money. In the daytime, McKenzie is haunted by grey men, possibly the men who went with Taylor-Joy. Then, in her dream, she sees Smith kill Taylor-Joy, possibly in the same room McKenzie is renting.

She tries to get the police interested. Even though it's a very old case, McKenzie suspects that Terence Stamp is old Matt Smith, and he could still be punished for Taylor-Joy's corruption and murder. If she can prove anything.

The movie does act as a decent ghost story, but that's not key. Mainly, it is a super-stylish ode to Soho, the seedy nightlife district. Strangely, although everyone is pretty rough, they are also surprisingly kind. Although McKenzie isn't much of a barmaid, the pub owner treats her kindly. Of course, she also treats Terence Stamp kindly, even if he's pretty sleazy. 

The music is another important element - all Sixties classics, with a lot of big ballads sung by Cilla Black or Dusty Springfield. For her audition, Taylor-Joy sings a great acapella version of "Downtown".

The message is something like, Soho is sleazy, dangerous, warm, accepting, and haunted. The Sixties were an exciting time, but not altogether happy. And, as several characters say, "London can be a lot."

Lots of People Who Died

 Netflix is being kind, and sending us all of the movies that have been on Wait status. Or maybe no one else wanted to see James Gunn's The Suicide Squad (2021).

It starts in prison, with long-haired, sour Michael Rooker as Savant bouncing a ball in the solitary exercise yard - bouncing it off a birdies skull! Then Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) comes to get him to let him know he's going on a suicide squad mission. The team includes Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) and Rick Flagg (Joel Kinnaman), along with a bunch of redshirts, including a Bill-the-Cat lookalike, a javelin-bearing German, Pete Davidson, and Jai Courtney as Captain Boomerang. They are to invade the Caribbean island of Corto Maltese and take the citadel called Jotunheim. 

When they hit the beach, they are almost all immediately killed. Savant, who we thought was our point-of-view character, tries to retreat, so Waller sets off the bomb in his head. Survivors Flagg and Harley are captured. All to the tune of Jim Carroll's "People Who Died". 

Back at mission control,when they find out about the carnage, Waller just wants to know how the real task force is doing, now that the decoys are all dead. That team is lead by Bloodsport (Idris Elba) and includes Peacemaker (John Cena), who will kill anyone to make peace. He's a very goofy character, and he now has his own show on Disney+. There's also King Shark (voice of Sylvester Stallone), Polka-Dot Man (David DastMalchian), who's the crazy one, and Ratcatcher 2 (Daniela Mechior), daughter of Ratcatcher (Taika Waititi), who can control rats. She's a teenaged girl who just wants to sleep and play with her CGI rat Sylvester. 

Note that Bloodsport is exactly the Deadshot role, and King Shark is Killer Croc. 

Their adventures are somewhat absurd and very bloody. Since I've already spoilered the gag about the decoy team, I'll mention another. In a very exciting infiltration and massacre of a jungle camp, Bloodsport and Peacemaker expertly kill everyone, before discovering that they were the good guys. 

In another scene, Harley is seduced by the leader of the opposition, before he reminds her a little too much of her unmentioned ex. So she kills him, and fights her way out, with everyone she kills spouting gouts of cartoon flowers and birdies instead of blood. To the tune of Louis Prima's "Just a Gigolo/I Ain't Got Nobody".

Overall, the tone is nihilistically comic. Bloodsport is pretty straight, like Deadshot was, and Ratcatcher has a lot of heart. Polka-Dot Man is a joke character who develops some real depth, then some real insanity. But mostly, people die, nobly or for no reason. It is a Suicide Squad. 

Jotunheim turns out to be the lab of the Thinker - Peter Capaldi with a bunch of vacuum tubes sticking out of his head. He has been working on Project Starfish - an alien starfish 100-feet tall, who controls minds. His name, of course, is Starro, and is an actual DC villain - the first foe of the Justice League. He is defeated in a ghastly and beautiful way, with Harley floating serenely in a ... pool, surrounded by Ratcatcher's rats. 

I liked the anarchic humor of this - it was like Guardians of the Galaxy dialed up to 11, or the goofy parts of the original without the boring plot. I think there was a message about the value of life in the face of absurdity, the amorality of violence as entertainment and so firth. But I mostly missed that part. 

Tally Rally

Remember, a while ago I said that we got a broken disc? Well, we eventually got the replacement: Ghost Story (1981). 

It starts in a quaint old Vermont town with four old men telling ghost stories. The men are John Houseman, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Melvyn Douglas, and Fred Astaire - the Chowder Society. In New York, meanwhile, a young man gets out of the shower, finds that the girl in his bed has turned into a corpse, and falls through a window to his death. Next we meet his brother (both are played by Craig Wasson) on a bus, going home to the his hometown, and his father Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

Wasson is a bit scruffy for his stuffy father and their friends. He has been teaching at a small college in Florida, where he met woman, Alice Krige. Their whirlwind affair is shown in extended flashback. It lasted until she left him - for his more successful but now deceased brother. But Wasson is beginning to suspect his brother did not commit suicide, and that Krige was involved. And evidence is pointing to something supernatural in the past.

There are a few more deaths and we are introduced to a pair of scruffy escapees from a mental institution who prophesize and act vaguely threatening. And eventually we get another extended flashback about the Chowder Society in their youth, and the woman they courted, also Alice Krige.

I thought the atmosphere was good, the ghost story was good, but the structure wasn't great. The flashbacks were a bit distracting, and also a bit too pat. It was great to see the four old classic actors, but I can't say they were outstanding. Only Astaire stood out. He played the frivolous one, the fellow who wasn't all that sharp, who got ahead in life based on social position, and never had the talent or nerve to try anything else.

But my favorite part was probably the end of the bus trip - Wasson got off in White River Junction, near where I went to school. The bus stops at the Tally House, an all-night diner where students could go while studying all night. I never went on a "Tally rally" myself, but remember them fondly.