Bordering on Insanity

I went into Borderlands (2024) with no more knowledge than that Cate Blanchett was in it. I sort of expected it to be about urban fairies (I guess that's a different borderland). I also knew that it was universally hated, but that didn't deter me.

After an infodump about a planet and MacGuffin, we find soldier Kevin Hart on a space station, rescuing/kidnapping cute little girl Ariana Greenblatt. On the way out of the station, they pick up Florian Munteanu, a "psycho" - violent nutcases endemic to the planet below.

Across the galaxy, bounty hunter Cate Blanchett is in a nice bar with her living captive, getting a celebratory drink. When a man with a couple of gunmen approach her, she kills them quickly, not interested in their pitch. But galactic zillionaire Atlas (Edgar Ramirez) finally gets through to her. He wants her to go and rescue his little girl, Greenblatt, and will pay a lot. Since Blanchett was born on that particular shithole, it will take a lot to get her to go back.

On planet, she meets up with a small robot with a tough shell, and a dumb demeanor. This is Claptrap, played by Jack Black, but sounding exactly like Patton Oswald. Oh well, a lot of people sound like Patton Oswald these days.

When they find Greenblatt, it turns out that she was not kidnapped, but ran away, because her father had nefarious plans for her. So Blanchett, robot, Hart and Munteau now must battle their way to the MacGuffin. They also pick up a scientist, Jamie Lee Curtis, who was Blanchett's mother. They did not part on good terms. 

Oh, and Greenblatt is no maiden in distress. She loves blowing things up, and has a bunch of explosive teddy bears for people she doesn't like.

It's important to realize that this is an action comedy - even though Kevin Hart actually plays it straight. In the first scene, Hart appears in a storm-trooper helmet, breathing like Darth Vader -then taking it off and complaining about the lack of airholes. We get trope after trope: the planet's landscape is mostly modeled after Vasquez Rocks from the original Star Trek series. There are even sci-fi vans in some of the scenes. You've probably seen a lot of these in 1980s cheapo sci-fi: ordinary vans with some doodads and paint to look futuristic. For some people, this is tired and cliched. For me, this is fun.

In the end, it was just watching Blanchett being a gunslinging badass. I kind of expected her to be a side character, but she was front and center the whole time. She does really well - sort of like Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft. OK, Blanchett is a much better actor, and Jolie's act hasn't aged well. But remember the thrill when it first came out?

One note - I'm not sure how much of the body acting was actually Blanchett and how much was stunt motion capture/CGI. Not just the action either: There's a scene where she stands hipshot with a hand on the hip that is so extreme, so comicbooky, that it must be faked. If not, kudos to Ms. Blanchett. 

Mask of the Devil

We start the New Year off right with a couple of noir or noir adjacent movies that I ordered last year from Movies Unlimited: Alias Nick Beal (1949) and Mask of Dimitrios (1944). I've had my eye out for these on streaming platforms, etc, but finally decided to get the physical media into my life.

Alias Nick Beal features Ray Milland as a gangster/fixer/tempter, who is literally the devil. Full name is probably Nicodemus Bealzebub. It stars Thomas Mitchell (Uncle Billy) as an honest DA who'd sell his soul to convict mob boss Fred Clark. As soon as he says this, out of nowhere, Ray Milland. He invites Mitchell to a low waterfront bar, where he hands him the books to Clark's criminal enterprise - the books that the bookkeeper was sure that he had burned.

Mitchell's coup leads his friends and other civic leaders to run him for governor. Milland picks up a tramp played by Audrey Totter and sets her up as a campaign donor and volunteer. She wants to play it like a sexpot (but classy), but Milland coaches her to be a prim society type - all the more alluring when she "falls" for Mitchell.

When Mitchell wins, Milland expects him to appoint some crooks to government positions - or to go to the Isle of Lost Souls if he forfeits. I won't tell how it comes out, but George MacReady is involved - and he's not a crook this time.

Mask of Dimitrios is based on a novel by Eric Ambler. It features Peter Lorre as a Dutch (?) detective novelists. At a party in Istanbul, be meets a Turkish policeman who tells him about this criminal, Dimitrios Makropoulos. He has been trying to catch him for years, but now he has been found, dead, washed up in a beach. Of course, no one knew what he looked like, but this corpse had his jacket and ID papers, so the case was closed. 

Lorre was interested in the man's story, and started tracing him back. We see much of this in flashbacks, with Zachary Scott as Dimitrios, In Smyrna, Dimitrios was a poor fig packer (or a fig packer's mate) who killed a money lender and let a friend take the rap. Next we hear the story of Faye Emerson, who took him in when he was starving and fleeing the police. When she sees him next, he's dressed in flashy clothes, and pays her back for the meal. In the end, he steals from her and takes off again.

As Lorre follows Dimitrios' trail across Europe, he meets up with Sydney Greenstreet, a shady character with an interest in Dimitrios. He doesn't believe in Dimitrios' death, and tries to rope Lorre into a scheme to somehow make half a million francs. 

Of course, they do eventually find Dimitrios.

Alias had a great premise - skip the metaphor, go right to horror/fantasy - and a great villain in Ray Milland. He was handsome, slick and cold as ice. The main character, Mitchell, was a bit cliched maybe, a bit to naive. I also could have done with more of Audrey Totter. She didn't really have much effect on the plot, and sort of disappeared in the last act. When she was onscreen, she was great, playing multiple roles. 

The best part of Mask might have been the simple pairing of Lorre and Greenstreet. Scott made a good villain as well, although Ms. Spenser thought he should have been played by Lee van Kleef. Like Milland, he had a way of suddenly appearing when you least wanted him to. A good double bill.

I'll let you in on the rest of our Movies Unlimited haul when we've finished them.

Happy (?) 2025!

Happy New Year - plus a few days. We took our time getting going this year.

I considered skipping this year. I was never planning to do Year End pieces; I think they are lame. But then I did one, and it took on a life of its own. Or at least I didn't stop. But I'm still missing the old reliable Netflix DVDs in the mail system, and it shows. I posted about 95 movies in 2024, down from a normal 100-150. Of course, I might have skipped a few because they were not notable, but it's mostly down to lack of a system. We're just not watching quite as much as we used to.

As far as new movies go, we watched 18 movies made in 2024. That may even be a few more than some years. That included the latest sequel/series entries, like Dune 2 and Furiosa, and lesser entries like Ghost Busters: Frozen Empire. I'm going to rate Deadpool & Wolverine as our favorite of the batch. It wasn't exactly fresh and new, but it was diverting and funny as hell.

There were also plenty of oddball indie and otherwise new pics on our screen. I'll give Abigail the prize as our fave one-off. But I want to note Jonah Ray Rodrigues' Destroy All Neighbors - a low budget, gross-out horror movie about the dangers of prog-rock.

The oddest of the oddballs was probably This is Me ... Now, J-Lo's surrealistic auto-biopic. I kind of liked it. 

We also watched our share of new action movies. I'm going to nominate two Ryan Gosling movies as worst and best. Worst was The Gray Man (watched late in 2023, I guess - oh well), a very bland and stale movie. Best was Fall Guy, also not especially fresh, but it just hit the spot. Maybe it was the drugged fight sequences, maybe it was just my mood. 

We didn't watch as much horror as usual this year. For one thing, Ms. Spenser, our household's horror hound, was busy in Oct, so we didn't have the Halloween month we usually do. But we did make our own double bill of Ghostwatch and Late Night with the Devil. These are two movies with roughly the same theme - a TV show investigates a haunting, and things get too, too real. Late Night made us solid fans of David Dastmalchian. 

For number one watch of the year, I'm going with another double bill: White Noise and Asteroid City. I liked Asteroid best, but seeing both in succession really worked for me. 

On the cocktail front, I've been trying to drink down my collection. It's tricky, because some ingredients go together - you need to drink Singapore Slings to get rid of Benedictine and cherry brandy, so you need to buy gin... So I'm also trying out odd combinations. On returning home after seeing the family over New Year's, I made an odd drink. I call it the Forest Fizz:

1/2 oz Zerbenz stone pine liqueur
1/2 oz St. Germaine elder flower liqueur
Flute of prosecco

The Zerbenz is really good with the fizz. I've had the bottle since at least 2007, and there's still enough left for a few drinks. 

The first movie of our year was the Marx Brothers' Cocoanuts. It's out of copyright this year! And as always, the best movie of the year, nay, all time, is Bringing Up Baby. 

She is Barbarian

I've had my eye on She Is Conann (2023) for a while. Love those woman barbarian movies, and this was a French art film as well. Maybe that was the problem. 

It starts in black and white (and mostly stays there). An old woman is sitting in a sort of dream beauty salon, being menaced and caresses by dog-faced man with a woman's voice and a jean jacket with the his name on it, Rainer. She is being taken to meet Queen Conann.

From her throne in a sort of dystopian grotto, she tells her story. She was a young girl who came to close the barbarian women, and their queen, Sanja, kills her mother and takes her as a slave. Conann vows revenge. Rainer introduces her to herself, 10 years older and played by a different actress. He explains that the older Conann is ready to kill Sanja right now, if younger Conann doesn't want to wait to grow up. When she agrees, older Conann kills her, and now she is the only Conann.

Her attempt at revenge on Sanja goes wrong when she starts kissing her instead. And they become a killing team, ruling the barbarian women, glorying in the gore. And every now and them, Conann meets her older self and gets killed.

For a while, Conann and Sanja live as lesbian lovers in the Bronx, 1980s, with Conann becoming a celebrity stunt woman. It's all about the style. 

Towards the end, she has become very rich, and invites a bunch of the artistic glitterati for a feast with a deal. They inherit all of her wealth if they devour all of her corpse - or almost corpse. She will be heavily anesthetized and cooked while still alive. Now, this is a bit of a spoiler, but mainly a warning. This scene goes on FOREVER. There's lots of gore previously, but in flashes. This just goes on and on. 

All of this is done in a retro-cheapo style, mostly black and white, with color sections, mainly when there's blood being shed. It's full of attitude, sexiness, and punk rock cool. Unfortunately, like in Spine of Night, there wasn't a cool punk score to enhance this. 

If this hadn't been so gore-obsessed, it might have been fun. Or maybe if any of the characters had been interesting or at least less repellent. Oh, well, you pays your money (none, got from library) and takes your chances. Won't be searching out other movies directed by Bertrand Mandico. 

Do You Tube?

This blog started out as a tribute to my Netflix queue. I wanted to feature movies I enjoyed from a particular source, available to everyone with a red-envelope subscription. That time is over. Now a lot of what I write about it the videos I get from the library, with some streaming thrown in. The sources of entertainment are now many and splintered. One thing I've been watching are YouTube concerts. 

For example, we watched Shadows and Light (1980), a video release of a Joni Mitchell concert from 1979. I saw her on this tour, at Tanglewood in Western MA. She had an incredible band, with Jaco Pastorius, Pat Metheny, Lyle Mays, Michael Brecker, Don Alias on drums, and the Persuasions singing backup. This is a super jazzy and funky band, and so is her show. Her songs here have a lot of soul, and sleaze too, with Edith and the Kingpin and Raised on Robbery. The video includes some odd inserts, like some Rebel Without a Cause, ice dancing, and some stock footage of a coyote on Coyote. I think it's the same footage Scorsese uses in The Last Waltz. Note: Jaco gets a solo where he loops himself into a frenzy. We saw him do this in a small club in the 80s.

We also watched some Little Feat, like a RockPalast show. Then we checked out this Midnight Special TV show - the whole hour hosted by Little Feat. No link because it isn't on Letterboxd and it probably won't last on YouTube. But go look for it - it includes Emmylou Harris and Bonnie Raitt (what backup singers, as well as solo acts!), Jesse Winchester (just pardoned by Carter for draft dodging), and Weather Report. It went really well with Shadows and Light. We had some soulful, funky women singing, we had some a cappella (Jesse, Emmylou and Bonnie, singing You Can't Stand Up), and some hot Jaco action.

I suppose everyone knows that there are a ton of these concerts that come and go on YouTube. We never got around to watching them, but I think we're going to be watching more now.

Hard Reign

 When it came time to watch something Ms. Spenser could ignore, I just searched JustWatch for Michelle Yeoh movies and found Reign of Assassins (2010). Good choice.

After a little exposition about a magic McGuffin (mummified body of ancient Buddhist monk - ugh), and a secret league of assassins, we find a woman assassin entering a village and killing everyone there, starting with a little kid. Pretty brutal.

She has a mentor who is about to become a monk, and he is worried about her form. It looks unbeatable, but he says there are four weaknesses, and he's afraid she will be killed if she meets a master. He trains her to overcome them, so well that she kills him in training. His last words to her are, that if this convinces her to give up killing, he would be honored to be the last one she kills.

Wracked by guilt, she tries to reform. She gets cosmetic surgery (performed by under-the-skin parasites - ugh), and now she is Michelle Yeoh. She moves to a village, meets a nice guy and marries him. But the assassins are still looking for the McGuffin, and her old enemies are still looking for her.

This movie is a nice mix of old school and a more modern style. For one thing, it's more intense, violent and gory. For another, the fight scenes are very stylish and accomplished. But it still has the good old scheming eunuchs, mysterious assassins, and old feuds. It also has a touch of Buddhism underneath that makes all the violence go down a little smoother. 

I don't think this broke new ground, but was a nice updating of the old. It was directed by Su Chiao-pin, with help from John Woo. The cast came from all over the Asian sphere, Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, and Korea. I hope they all go on to make more movies like this. 

Deadwolf? Poolverine?

As mentioned previously, Ms. Spenser was asking why I wasn't getting the good DVDs from the library. Does Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) count?

It starts with Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) begging Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) for membership in the Avengerss. He wants to prove to his girl that he has made something of himself. It does't go well.

He winds up as a badly scarred used car salesman, working for Peter (Rob Delaney), from X-Force. He's pretty bummed about how his life has turned out, although a surprise birthday party his friends throw him helps - friends including Peter, Blind Al, Colossus, Negasonic Teenage Warhead and her kawaii girlfriend, etc. But a sparkly circle appears and he is whisked off to the Temporal Variance Agency.

Fortunately, we watched the Loki show, and we understood this bit. 

Agent Matthew MacFadyen wants to enlist Deadpool into the sacred timeline - although not as "Marvel Jesus" as he assumes. He explains that Deadpool's timeline is going to evaporate, because the anchor, Logan, is dead. There's a bit more exposition, but Deadpool figures he can just bring Wolverine back to the timeline, so he steals a timeline switcher gizmo, and takes off.

First, he finds out that Logan really is dead, and has a massive fight against a TVA squad using his unobtainium bones. Then he goes hunting timelines for a living Wolverine. He finds the comics accurate short Logan and a bunch more, and finally a drunk Logan (Hugh Jackman) in bar. This Logan is in disgrace because he failed to save tbe X-Men of this world. 

When he gets this Wolverine back to the TVA, MacFadyen explains that you can't just replace an anchor like that. And Wolverine figures out that MacFadyen is up to something shady, so MacFadyen sends them to the Void, a timeline outside time.

There they meet a number of "orphaned" superheroes, starting with Chris Evans as, of course, Johnny Storm. They also meet the evil ruler of the Void, Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin), a nice looking bald lady who is Charles Xavier's twin sister. She can manipulate reality, and likes to run her fingers through your brain. And she has a whole bunch of evil mutants to hang with.

Our heroes find some other helpers: X-32 (Dafne Keene, grown up a bit), Blade (Wesley Snipes, still cool as hell), Elektra (Jennifer Garner), and Tatum Channing as Gambit - at last. Too bad no one can understand his accent. 

Strangely, this is all very reminiscent of Quantumania. Strangely not because it would mean Marvel is plagiarizing itself - it does that all the time. Strangely because that movie bombed, and because it sets up the now-cancelled Kang story arc. In fact, that was a lot of what Loki was about. I'm guessing mid-stream rewrites.

This isn't my favorite Deadpool movie - Reynolds' schtick is getting a little old. Also, I think we can all agree that Marvel is leaning too hard on the multiverse. But I did like the whole "Island of Misfit Superheroes" thing. Like in Multiverse of Madness and the Illuminati, we get to see some beloved or at least dimly remembered characters, played by the actors that fans have been longing for (like Gambit) or not (Johnny Storm). I suppose that means this is the last we'll see of them.