Last of the Old Year

 Since it’s coming up on New Year’s, I’d better wrap up our recent viewing. I could quit now, since I’ve done all the discs, but I guess I’ll throw in a couple of streaming movies we’ve seen.

We loved Bullet Train. It stars Brad Pitt as a scruffy, sensitive international criminal in Tokyo code named Ladybug. His handler calls to give him a job - grab a suitcase of money on the bullet train. AaronTaylor-Johnson and Brian Tyree Henry are “twins” on the train, bringing the kidnapped son (Logan Lehman) of a Russian mobster home - and it’s their bag of money. Then there is a cute little schoolgirl, Joey King, who has her own mission. And many more.

Pitt has been trying to cut down on violence because he keeps killing people, mostly by accident. But not everybody feels that way. So this movie has a lot of violence. But it’s mostly an action-comedy, with lots of silly banter. Like the twins being arguing over their codenames, and Henry being obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine. Setups, like a water bottle full of knockout drops, pay off nicely, and not always the way you expect (someone gets hit over the head with it). There are absurd stunts and wild fights. Ok, not John Wick level, but still good.

In fact, unlike John Wick, this doesn’t really break new ground, or raise the bar. But it is a goofy joyride. Of course, it misrepresents the actual Shinkansen in many ways, but I think we can forgive that.

Glass Onion: a Knives Out Mystery Featuring Benoit Blanc doesn’t break new ground either. But it does help to reviving the old genre of a star-studded, glamorous mystery, like the old Poirot movies, as well as The Last of Sheila. We start by meeting the suspects… that is, cast. Each one receives an elaborate puzzle box, and they all join a Zoom call to solve it. They are:

• Katherine Hahn, a soccer mom and political candidate
• Leslie Odom, Jr, head of an engineering co. 
• Kate Hudson, a washed up model turned sweatpants designer and party girl
• Jessica Henwick, Hudson’s put-upon gopher
• Dave Bautista, a muscle-head, misogynistic social media influencer 
• Madelyn Cline, as Whiskey, his girlfriend 
• Janelle Monae, a mysterious woman who opens the box with a hammer
• Finally, Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc

The box reveals an invitation to a party on a Greek island, hosted by these people’s mutual friend. Billionaire disrupter Ed Norton. When they arrive, we discover that Craig had not been invited - how he got the invite is a mystery. But  Orrin accepts him, because he has planned a murder mystery weekend.

So the games and puzzles show the influence of Sheila, while the setting reminds you of Evil Under the Sun. The planned play murder is quickly dispatched, but someone is shortly murdered in actuality, followed by chaos. There is a big twist in the second act, but I felt like there should have been a few more.  The solution is a bit unsatisfying - intentionally, because the culprit is an idiot. In fact, they all ate, except Craig and Monae. This is a bit on-the-nose - everyone is some kind of obnoxious internet type, easy targets for the online crowd. But it is fun and funny. And Monae handles her role with a lot of style and dignity. She’s my favorite part, except for a few cameos, like Serena Williams.

I should also mention that we also saw Amsterdam as well. This is a historical romance set between the world wars. Christian Bale is a badly wounded veteran and doctor, and John David Washington is his brother-in-arms. After the war, they meet nurse Margot Robbie, and she is added to their bond. Back in the states, they are confronted by a murder and a mystery, which involves an plot against America, and they enlist general Robert Deniro to help out. The cast is great, but the script seems somehow unfocused and the pacing odd. The ending, for instance, is given almost entirely in voice over. So it’s sort of too quick, but also seems to go on forever. The political message is also a bit clunky, as in Onion. We didn’t find it bad, but can’t really recommend.

We saw all these on streaming, as well as a few more. Since this blog is technically about our DVD queue, consider this a bonus. 

See you in the new year!

Are You Elvis Tonight?

We’re not big Elvis fans, but I did want to see what Baz Luhrman did with Elvis (2022). But it was really Tom Hanks’ movie. 

Hanks plays Col. Tom Parker, a huckster and a showman. We meet him as an old man in a hospital in Las Vegas, then go into flashback.  He was running a carnival down South when he hears about this guy who sings like a black man - but he’s white! He goes to check him out at a show and sees the way he drives the girls wild. This is a great scene -  Austin Butler plays Elvis as if he’s trying in vain to suppress his sexiness, and the women in the audience can’t hold back either. So Parker signs him up, although the other act he’s managing, Hank Snow, isn’t impressed. 

From here we get what I would guess is a highly fictionalized account of Presley’s career. There’s quite a bit about Presley’s love of the black culture of Memphis’ Beale Street, including his friendship with B.B. King, because they frequented the same tailor. It skims over his movies, goes into his big comeback concert and his Vegas residency. Basically, Parker wanted him in Vegas because 1) he was a gambler, and 2) he was a stateless person who didn’t couldn’t leave the country. That meant he had to keep Presley from attempting a world tour. 

All this is filmed with Luhrman’s signature swirling, manic camera and surrealistic effects. It is supported by Butler’s strong Elvis impression, both as a young man and, with makeup and prosthetics, fat Elvis. But this is largely Hanks’ movie. His Parker has a weird Southern/Dutch accent which only makes sense when you learn his true background. Also, his prostheses are even more extreme than Butler’s. Maybe it’s too much. It’s an interesting role, but not very sympathetic. 

In the end, I found this fun, but not very moving. I didn’t feel like we really got inside Elvis, or even Parker. I’m not sure the songs were great, although we don’t particularly love Elvis, so that might be it. Weirdly, I think Kevin Spacey did a better job on Bobby Darin.  

House Arrest

I'm always trying to find good supernatural horror movies for Ms. Spenser. I had one pretty far down in the queue, a left-over from Spooktober: Housebound (2014). Somehow it bubbled up and we're glad it did, even though it turned out to be a horror comedy.

It starts with Morgana O'Reilly and some knucklehead trying to rob an ATM and getting busted. Since O'Reilly had been sent to various rehabs over the years, she is given house arrest with her mother, Rima Te Waita (Hunt for the Wilderpeople) and silent stepfather. Mum is cheery and dim, and O'Reilly is sullen and bratty, also messy and obnoxious.

She hears a radio psychic call-in show where a woman who sounds like Te Waita describing her house as haunted. O'Reilly figures that her mom set that up to scare her out of the house. But her mother insists that it's true. When O'Reilly explores the basement, a figure covered in a ragged sheet attacks her - turns out to be a 3/4 scale statue of Jesus that just fell over. Cute scare. Then a creepy hand reaches out from under a workbenh to grab her. 

Since one edge of the basement seems to be out-of-bounds for her monitoring anklet, the private security guy in charge keeping her home shows up. When Te Waita mentions the haunting, he immediately gets out his ghosthunting gear. O'Reilly still insists there's an intruder, but they can't find one.

It turns out that the house used to be a halfway house for troubled teens and the site of the horrific murder of one of them. O'Reilly finds a dental bridge in the furnace and begins to suspect their gross neighbor, a scuzzy, possum-skinning, NZ hillbilly. But when he catches her and the security guy trying to break in to get evidence, he catches them. He tells them it was probably Eugene, a weird kid at the house who disappeared before the murder.

So our friends are now trying to solve the murder to lay the ghost. Mum Te Waita is sort of blase about the whole thing - it's just a haunting. Security guy (Glen-Paul Waru, who has a kind of a Dave Bautista look and vibe) takes it seriously and logically. And O'Reilly is still a rude brat, alternately scathing and sarcastic and frightened out of her wits. She even panics and stabs her stepdad, thinking he's the intruder.

We were a little worried about the lack of likable characters for a while, but got into the humor of it all. This has more than a little resemblance to Wilderpeople and even What We Do in the Shadows. The same mix of the mundane and the horrible, the same dry style. I guess that's New Zealand for you.

For an added bonus, look for Cameron Rhodes from Deathgasm.

Murder, He Films

As I mentioned, I've been watching random movies that Mrs. Spenser isn't interested in while she works. A lot of what I'm watching is random old mysteries, comedies and mystery/comedies on Amazon Prime (best selection of random old movies without a special subscription). Turns out this has been good training for Alfred Hitchcock's Murder! (1930).

It starts with screams on a small London street. Everyone comes to the window to see what's happening. We finally find out - an actress in a touring troupe has been murdered in a room alone with another actress, her bitter rival. The survivor, Norah Baring, has no memory of what happened.

We'd really like to hear more about what Baring has to say for herself, but this story is mostly told through other people, gossiping or guessing about the case. When it goes to trial, Baring sort of sums up her defense by giggling, "Me, a murderer? Why, it's absurd!" The jury inclines toward a guilty verdict, especially the Misses,  three old spinsters including Una O'Conner. But one juror. Sir John (Herbert Marshall) can't believe she did it. She's so good looking and well spoken. He is a theatrical producer and his dramatic sense of character won't allow it. But he is convinced to make it unanimous - Guilty.

But he soon has regrets, and decides to use his theater powers to find the real killer. There are backstage interviews, a female impersonator, and a final "the play's the thing" from Hamlet. It's full of silly bits, like commenting heads floating around Marshall's head while he's deliberating. There aren't really jokes as such, but Hitchcock has a lot of fun. Since this is only his third sound movie, it's great to see. 

Going to Hell Tonight

I originally queued Gate of Hell (1953) for Spooktober as a horror movie. I reconsidered when I looked at the description closer. But it wasn't far off.

It takes place in Japan in the 12th century during the Heiji rebellion, a struggle between the Taira and Minamoto clans for control of the emperor. When the rebellion is closing in on the palace, a samurai warrior, Hasegawa Kazuo-san, volunteers to take a decoy of the daimyo's sister out of the palace. Lady-in-waiting Kyo Machiko-san volunteers to be that lady.

When the rebellion has been put down, a lord offers Hasegawa-san any reward, and he asks to be allowed to marry Kyo-san. It turns out that she is already married, but he still wants her. He becomes obsessed with her, causing lots of gossip in the palace. So much so that Kyo-san tells her husband, Yamagata Isao-san, about it. He is a decent man, and tries to calm her fears.

As part of the victory celebration, there is a horse race, and Yamagata-san loses to Hasegawa-san. There is a party afterwards, a "race-forgetting party". (It is traditional in Japan to have drinking parties to erase the memory of bad feelings - year-end parties are called "year-forgetting parties", for example.) The guests do a little teasing that Yamagata-san ignores, but it infuriates Hasegawa-san, who wants to start a fight. 

In the end he feels he can force himself on Kyo-san, threatening the lives of her husband and family. She feels she must submit, but switches beds with her husband so that Yamagata-san kills her instead of her husband. Shocked and dismayed, he finds Yamagata-san and begs him to kill him. But Yamagata-san knows that that won't bring back Kyo-san. So Hasegawa-san cuts off his topknot and vows to become a monk. 

Right off. this film is gorgeous. It was one of the first Japanese costume dramas to be filmed in color, and the first to be shown outside Japan. It is full of beautiful Japanese brocade costumes in brilliant colors. It is also full of Japanese traditional music - a monk playing spooky biwa, classical gagaku at court, Kyo-san's beautiful koto playing, and a shrill shichiriki when Hasegawa-san is in the grips of madness. The movie is full of little touches, like silk curtains billowing in the wind and ripples spreading in water - to show perhaps, how easily things can be affected by chance and change. 

The Gate of Hell is one of the gates to the palace where the heads of a previous rebellion were hung. It sports a fiery mural of Hell. But it isn't only rebellion that leads to Hell, it is also lust and violence. I had assumed that Hasegawa-san, the forthright noble warrior would win the damsel from her noble, foppish husband. But actually, he couldn't control his desires, while the husband was mild and trusting. 

However, it must be said (and Yamagata-san says as much) that Kyo-san could have avoided a tragic end if she had leveled with her husband instead of martyring herself. That part I just can't work out.

House Party

Although Ms. Spenser specializes in horror, she has been reading some le Carre lately, so I thought I'd queue up The Russia House (1990). Starring Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer, with a script by Tom Stoppard from the le Carre novel, how could it lose?

It starts in a nice round about way: Russian Michelle Pfeiffer walks into a Russian-European publishers' book fair looking for Barley Blair (Connery), while a discussion in voiceover talks about him. He isn't there, so she reluctantly gives the Englishman in the next booth a manuscript for him. Back at the hotel, he looks inside, and realizes that the English government needs to see it. It is a set of notebooks showing that the perestroika Soviet military is a paper tiger. It is revealed that the voiceover discussion is the "Russia House", English intelligence Russian operation, as well as CIA, etc, looking for Connery.

They find him in Lisbon, getting drunk, and bring him in for a talk. He denies knowing Pfeiffer or anyone similar. But there was this time at a Russian writers' retreat and booze-up at a country dacha. Connery was spouting off about the importance of betraying any warlike government - English, American, Russian, whatever. A quiet drunk who went by Dante (Klaus Maria Brandauer) approaches him and asks for a promise: If Dante ever decides to be a hero, will Connery be a decent human being? So, presumably, the manuscript comes from Dante (whoever that is).

So they send him to Moscow to find out more. He meets Pfeiffer and is immediately smitten. But he needs to find out if the manuscript can be trusted, if she can be trusted, and if being a spy is really what he wants to do.

Connery is great in this role. He's a lazy, hard-drinking blowhard, with ideals that he doesn't really try to live up to. He goes along with the spy games out of inertia more than patriotism, and because it may improve the chances of world peace and Russian freedom. Then, he does it because he is falling in love with Pfeiffer. Pfeiffer's role is a little easier - a creditable Russian accent and that old Soviet sense of resignation covering rebellion. The spy masters are a fun little group of character actors, including Roy Scheider, Charles John Mahoney, and Kurt Russell (!) as a red-faced, white-haired, foul-mouthed Brit.

The script is clever, especially in the first act, where we get discussions and surveillance recordings in the spy world mixed with the actual happenings. This goes on throughout, although we settle into Connery's viewpoint more and more. In the end, the Brit running Connery has an intuition, and Scheider has the opposite. This is what we love about le Carre - with no reliable information, from another country, spy masters must decide who to trust and figure out the lay of the land. Those who do it well succeed, and most don't. For the spy in the field, it's a little different. 

Going Postal

I wanted to watch The Postman (1997) because I'd read the David Brin novel. I didn't even particularly love the novel, although I do love Brin. On the other hand, it's three-hours long, and stars and is directed by Kevin Costner, who I consider to be a handsome non-entity. On the third hand, it was a long weekend, and Ms. Spenser was working, so I queued it up.

It is set in the American West after a series of apocalypses. Costner and his mule are wandering around trying to avoid the remnants of civilization, or visiting these small outposts and performing half-forgotten scraps of Shakespeare for the yokels. 

While he's in one town, a militia shows up - the Holnist Army. It's been awhile since I read the book, so I heard this as Wholeness Army or something. Don't know why they didn't change the name. Anyway, they took supplies and conscripts in return for not massacring the village, and one of the conscripts is Costner.

The Army is lead by Will Patton and run on fascist, racist principles in a huge open-pit mine. They brand Costner, eat his mule, and make sure he doesn't escape. When he finally does, he hides out in an old mail truck, burning letters to stay warm. Then he steals the dead postman's outfit, takes a few letters and heads for the nearest town.

This town in fortified and they don't want to let him in, until he tells them he has a letter for a resident. That gets everyone teary-eyed over the way things used to be. So he makes up a story about the Restored United States, headed by by President Richard Starkey. His slogan: "It's getting better all the time."

He is celebrated with a party, and Olivia Williams even asks him to get her pregnant, since her husband can't. Costner may be a drifter and con-man, but he's also an aw-shucks cornball, so he lets her down easy.

Later, he meets a young black man who named himself Ford Lincoln Mercury, Larenz Tate. Tate wants to be a postman, so Costner swears him in. Then he takes a bag of mail and heads to the next town. He thinks this postman thing might be an easy gig.

But after he leaves, the Holnists show up. They don't like the idea of a Restore United States, since it could take their power, or even just make the locals hopeful and restless. They burn the post office, kidnap Williams, kill her husband and a bunch of other folk, and head off hunting the postman.

They catch him, but Williams manages to get a weapon and break him free - so they head for the hills. Costner has been trying to get to the idyllic town of Saint Rose on the Oregon coast, so that's where they will head, as soon as the passes are clear of snow. But the Holnists are still coming.

The tone of this movie is interesting: it's a combination of cornball sincerity and knowing irony. The idea is, we know Costner is a coward, a conman and a clown, and his stories about the revival of civilization are imaginary, but they give people hope and something to strive for, and that's what we humans need. I'm not a Costner expert, but it seems very much his thing. Add to that, it's an exciting adventure movie with beautiful Northwest scenery. It reminded me a lot of Dances with Wolves, the only other Costner movie I've seen.

Unfortunately, it is quite long and maybe not as exciting as it could be. Costner's character is interesting - I see a lot of Harrison Ford there. He is goofy and generally non-violent - he even threatens Williams with a spoon when she holds a knife to his throat. He seems to have a good heart. But he's just a little too bland, too slick. So in the end, I'm glad I saw it, but can't say I loved it. Maybe if I'd seen it back in the day.

In conclusion, Tom Petty has a small role, playing himself. He wound up the leader of a prosperous town attached to a hydroelectric damn. Good for him.