Don't You Roll Your Bloodshot Eyes at Me

We weren't expecting much from Bloodshot (2020), except for Vin Diesel. And we got it.

It starts as a perfectly ordinary action movie - Diesel completes a dangerous mission and goes on a sweet getaway with his beloved. This was hokey enough that it drove Ms. Spenser to quit watching, although she dropped back in later. Then, to compound the corn, bad guys capture them, torture and kill the wife, then kill Diesel.

Wow, over so soon! Oh, no.

Diesel wakes up with no memory. Tech exec Guy Pearce explains that he is the first person brought back to life by their "Bloodshot" nanobot process. Now he can heal from any wound, as long as the nanites have power. He meets some of the other team members, most of them enhanced with a variety of prosthetic devices. Then he starts getting his memory back.

He goes out on his own to get the bad guys who killed him and his wife. Then he heads back to the company to get the nanites fueled up. SPOILER for big twist - there, he has his mind wiped and new memories are implanted. They show the same scenario as last time - mission, vacation, torture and kill wife, but this time with a different bad guy. So when he wakes up, he will go after this guy. 

This seems like a complicated way to get someone to do some killing for you. But it does explain why the first part of the movie was so corny - it was scripted! It wasn't real. Nice out for the scriptwriters.

All of this plot stuff is interesting: We have a hero who doesn't know who he is, and when he finds out, it isn't real. But it's kind of incoherent - we're not getting Inception here. But how is it as a hook to hang a bunch of action scenes on? Actually, not that great either. Since he can be reconstituted by his nanites, Diesel is kind of unstoppable. Also, most of his fighting is just computerized SFX. Makes sense since this is the first feature for Dave Wilson, who previously did mostly special effects work.

Bloodshot is based on a Valiant comic series, and was supposed to be the start of the Valiant Cinematic Universe. Since it was released during COVID quarantine, it might not be possible to judge its success fairly. But I don't think this franchise is going anywhere.

Plain Fantastic

Although I've never watched a minute of the iconic 70s tv show it is based on, I liked Fantasy Island (2020). The premise: What if Fantasy Island were a Blumhouse horror instead of a tv fantasy drama? 

It starts, as always, with the plane, but there is no Tattoo. The plane is met by Parisa Fits-Henley, a young woman who says she just started working there. The guests are:

• Lucy Hale, the type of woman who keeps her nose in her phone and threatens a 1-star Yelp review when she discovers there's no coverage.
• Austin Stowell, a strapping young man with a military air.
• Ryan Hansen and Jimmy O. Yang, a pair of bros who are also brothers, who high-five ALL (high five!) THE (high five!) TIME (high five!)!
• Maggie Q, a sad and slightly withdrawn woman.

We meet Mr. Rourke, and it is Michael Pena - which is fine, I guess. I know he's done a lot of things, but to me, he is Luis from Ant-Man. He explains that everyone will get their fantasy, but they can't change, and they must live the fantasy out to its conclusion. The first one he bestows is on the bros: They get a pool party at a party house full of super models. When Hansen comments that his brother is gay, they reveal that there are plenty of male super models. When Yang says he isn't that shallow, they reveal a fully stocked marijuana dispensary, and now he's happy.

Hale's fantasy isn't quite that innocent. She wants revenge on the girl who bullied her in high school. Rourke leaves her in an underground bunker, where a woman is tied to a chair behind glass. It is her bully, Portia Doubleday. Hale has a whole control board of automatic tortures for her. Now we're getting Blumhouse. But Hale begins to realize that this isn't a hologram or actor, and the tortures aren't special effects. So she freaks out and rescues Hale. Now they are on the run from "Dr. Torture".

Stowell's fantasy is to be in the Army, like his dad was. He couldn't join the Army, so has been in the police. In his fantasy, he is not only in the Army, but in his dad's unit in Viet Nam, on the tour that got him killed.

Q's fantasy is to accept the marriage proposal she rejected once. The day after she accepts the proposal, she wakes up with a husband and daughter - her fantasy is real. When she realizes how her fantasy shaped reality, she demands another fantasy, to save the life of someone she accidentally killed. Even a possible family isn't worth another's life.

While everyone is facing ugly twists in their fantasies, everything is going great for the bros. At least that's what I was hoping - while everyone else dealt with heavy karma, these two bozos would just have some shallow sex and maybe do some dope. Nope. The party house used to belong to a drug lord, who sent a death squad to take it back. It doesn't take them long to kill big brother Hansen. So now there's a body count.

There are a few twists on the plot, what the real fantasies behind the fantasies are. I thought these were pretty original, until I thought about it a little and realised they are old as the hills (see for ex, And Then There Were None).

In general, I enjoyed this a lot. The horror was fairly mild, the humor was handled well, and everything worked out for everyone - except when it didn't. And in the end, Rourke gets his Tattoo!

Always Window Shopping

The Woman in the Window (1944) continues our Edward G. Robinson festival. It's another one that puts Robinson in a kind of professor role, then makes him a killer.

It starts with Prof. Robinson putting his wife and children on a train for their summer vacation (shades of Seven-Year Itch!). He heads to his club to meet some friends for dinner, but stops outside to look in the window of an art gallery. There is a painting of a beautiful woman, and his friends come along and see him admiring it. They've fallen in love with her too. Over drinks after dinner, they talk about being summer bachelors, and talk about going to a night club. Robinson says he has to get up early for a lecture, and they say that the peaceful, contented life is best. But Robinson disagrees: He has a that life and wishes he had more adventure. They leave him in the club reading.

When he leaves, he stops to look at the painting for a bit. But beside it, he sees a a floating face, the face of the beautiful model. It's a spooky shot, director Fritz Lang's best in the picture. He realizes that the face is a reflection in the window, and model Joan Bennett is behind him. All that talk earlier about being more adventurous? It gets him in the mood to chat with her and accept her invitation back to her place to see some more of her art.

That is not a euphemism, by the way.

But a man busts into the apartment, decides that Robinson is horning in, and attacks Robinson. In the scuffle, Robinson kills him. Even though Bennett assures him it was self-defense, he knows that just being found in her apartment will ruin him. So they plan to get rid of the body and pretend it never happened. She doesn't know his name, so she can't blackmail him, and he can't turn her in without compromising himself. As long as he doesn't leave any clues.

Of course, she lifts his monogrammed pencil, and sees his picture in the paper the next day (he won an academic award, of course). Also, one of his buddies from the club, Raymond Massie, is a homicide detective who offers to bring him along to investigate a body that has been found. And there are a ton of clues: tire tracks, foot prints, fibers and blood on the barbed wire fence, and so on. Plus Robinson seems to be making some very accurate guesses about how the victim was killed. Then it turns out that that weasel Dan Duryea was maybe a witness.

Lang puts together a neat little puzzle here, with an ingenious and ingeniously filmed happy ending. 

Quiet, Please

I remember the first time we didn't watch The Quiet Earth (1985). We went to the City to see James Joyce's Women - Fionnula Flanagan's tour de force, ending with Molly Bloom's soliloquy. The other screen in the cinema was playing The Quiet Earth and I said something like, oh, science fiction, we'll have to see that some time. So we finally did.

It starts with a sort of zap, and then a naked Bruno Lawrence wakes up. He groggily goes about his morning, but nobody is around. He finds wrecked cars, trucks, and the wreckage of a plane, but no bodies. He makes it to his job at an experimental physics lab, to find no one but the corpse of a colleague. One of the computer screens reads "Project Flashlight complete". It looks like whatever he was working on caused everyone in the world to disappear except him.

So he goes crazy for a while. He moves to a mansion, dresses in women's clothing, runs around downtown, the usual. Then he discovers there is another survivor, a young woman, Alison Routledge. A beautiful, free-spirited woman. They soon wind up in bed. 

Then, he finds one more. This is a New Zealand movie, and the third survivor is a Maori man, a rough and tough one, although he seems friendly enough. Routledge, in fact, is quite taken with him. So it's the old The World, the Flesh and the Devil situation: a romantic triangle with racial undertones.

But this isn't what's really bothering Lawrence. It's that he knows he is at least partly responsible for this catastrophe, and that he doesn't think it's over.

I kind of wish I'd seen this back in the 80s when it came out. I've seen a few more movies since then, and also heard a few reviews of this movie. That sort of spoiled the twists for me - although some of the twists are expected tropes. Still, I can't say I remember much about the movie we did watch. And I'm sure I would have remembered the iconic last shot, which you can see in every promo poster for This Quiet Earth. 

Who Do You Want on Your Tombstone

Even though we're not to big on Westerns, we do kind of like the Wyatt Earp stories, so we watched Tombstone (1992). Also, we wanted to see Val Kilmer say, "I'm your huckleberry."

This is a big sprawling movie with a distinguished cast, so I'll try to summarize. Kurt Russell as Wyatt Earp comes into Tombstone to meet up with his brothers Virgil (Sam Elliott) and Morgan (Bill Paxton). They settle into working as security for a saloon, but refuse to work as law enforcement. The town is under the thumb of a large gang of cowboys, called the Cowboys. They include such luminaries as Powers Boothe, Jason Priestly, Thomas Haden Church, Billy Bob Thornton, and even Wyatt Earp III, Earp's real-life grandson.

They also meet up with their old friend Doc Holliday - Val Kilmer. He is a tubercular drunk and gambler, and still the fastest gun around, and the most colorful. Whereas Wyatt, it is revealed, has only ever killed one man, using psychology first.

So, comes the gunfight at the OK Corral (or down the street from it). This seems to be as historical as possible, down to Holliday's line "You're a daisy if you do" - reportedly an actual quote. But the movie is only half over.

The rest of the Cowboys come for vengeance, sniping from the shadows, and killing Morgan. Virgil takes the women folk away, and Wyatt starts a war against the Cowboys. But this is done in montage, mostly. The pacing gets odd here, with some momentous stuff thrown away in a few shots or a montage, and some emotional stuff that doesn't really advance the story gets lingered over. I suspect they were having trouble with the length of the last act, but I don't think they got the pacing right at all.

Additionally, Wyatt Earp here is kind of inert. The problem may have been to make him a good guy, where historically he was an outlaw who happened to end up on the right side now and then. As a result, he doesn't seem particularly good or bad. He has a wife who takes opium, but falls in love with a showgirl - but won't do anything but make goo-goo eyes until his wife dies offscreen. In fact, she dies in a voice over (Robert Mitchum! I thought it was Sam Elliott). It explains that she had died a while ago. Meanwhile we get a good death scene for Doc Holliday (although, again, maybe a little long). 

But I didn't mind, because Kilmer's Holliday was the best part of this movie. He was a true bad ass, and they didn't have to compromise his colorful nature to make him sympathetic. He was a daisy, a peach, and a huckleberry, 

Small Change

 Quick Change (1990) has been described as The Out of Towners meets After Hours. After pulling off a brilliant bank robbery, the robbers can't get out of New York. But I saw it as a great transitional Bill Murray role.

It starts with Murray in full clown regalia, including feet and balloons, going to a Manhattan bank. The guard, Bob Elliott, tries to tell him they are closing, so Murray shows him a gun. He quickly takes the bank hostage and starts negotiating with police chief Jason Robards. He starts releasing hostages, first one, then two. These first hostages sort of melt away - yep, it's Murray, out of costume, and his two helpers, Geena Davis and Randy Quaid.

They head to the airport in their nearby getaway car, but get lost in Brooklyn. The signs for the expressway were taken down due to repairs, and the repair guys aren't from Brooklyn. Then they get robbed, get held at gunpoint, have their car towed and destroyed, and so on. Murray's catch-phrase for this movie is "I hate this town". 

They get a cab driver who doesn't speak enough English to understand "airport" (Tony Shaloub). Quaid jumps from the moving taxi to get another one and is almost killed. They have to hide out in a mafia clubhouse and sort of accidentally rob them. And so it goes.

While this is going on, Geena is questioning her relation with Murray, who seems to care more about the Perfect Heist than about her. Quaid is just a dopey man-baby who loves Murray and Davis about equally. And Murray - well, he's Bill Murray. Clever, deadpan, absurd. I feel like this movie is the staret of the Murray we know and love - not the Saturday Night Live Murray, but the Coffee and Cigarettes one. 

This was a fun movie, a hate-filled love letter to New York. The bank scene is so good, I wish it had gone on longer, like Inside Man. The New York as antagonist stuff was fun, because everyone loves to hate New York. The romance between Murray and Davis didn't really hit for me, but Quaid's love for them both did.

Animal Nature

 Nocturnal Animals (2016) is a weird one. It was directed by fashion designer Tom Ford, and is very fashionable, and somewhat repellent.

It starts with several naked fat ladies, dancing in slow motion, waving little American flags and sparklers, wearing nothing bur red, white, and blue party hats and cowboy boots. This goes on for quite a while, as the point of view moves out and you see that this is an art installation, a gallery show. One of the attendees, the host in fact, is Amy Adams.

Amy goes home to her fancy, art-filled house and husband, Armie Hammer. She isn't too happy with her opening, and Armie doesn't cheer her up much. She wants to spend some time with him, he has to leave for a "business trip". Since her daughter is going for away too, it looks like she will be alone for the weekend.

But a manuscript shows up in the mail. It's a novel written by her first husband, titled "Nocturnal Animals". As she reads, we drop into the movie within the movie.

Jake Gyllenhaal, his wife Isla Fisher, and young daughter are driving through west Texas. Just as the daughter loses cell reception, some punks in a couple of cars start hassling them, and run them off the road. They are threatening but mostly reasonable, but they wind up taking the women away from Gyllenhaal and leaving him in the middle of the desert.

He gets out and finally gets some police help from Michael Shannon, but it's too late. They find the women naked and dead. Gyllenhall is crushed by grief and the shame that he couldn't help them.

We drop out of this movie now and then to find Adams very affected - she had divorced the author because she didn't think much of his artistic prospects, a judgment shared by her mother Laura Linney, as we see in flashbacks. But she thinks this book will be a hit. It is affecting her deeply, but maybe not in a healthy way, since she can't sleep. She has to keep reading. 

We see a certain amount of modern art in this movie, and often see Adams contemplating, studying it. However, it seemed to me that it was mostly art famous for being more expensive than good. She has had a Jeff Koons balloon dog installed in her yard recently. Now I don't know what Tom Ford thinks of Koons, but I think the consensus is that he is a bit of a fraud, or at least a showman in the tradition of Andy Warhol. We see Damien Hirst's St. Sebastian - a bull pierced by arrows. Hirst is the guy who covered a human skull with diamonds and sold it for some ridiculous price. More of a stunt than a work of art. So I feel like Adams, though sympathetic, is being set up as a shallow trend follower - an art dealer who works with a corporate board, rather than an art lover.

And, like the women in the novel, she gets hers in the end. Not violently, like them or the bull in Hirst's work. In fact, somewhat ambiguously. But the movie doesn't seem to love, or at least not to wish her well.

Lady in the Lake

 We heard about Lake Mungo (2008) on the Movies That Made Me podcast. Director Issa Lopez mentioned it as a great but super-low budget mockumentary horror. Pretty much sums it up.

It's the story of an Australian family with two teen-aged children. One day, on an outing to a lake (not the titular), the girl disappears. They search but don't find her. The story is all told in photographs, interviews, voice over, and family videos. 

When they find the body, the wife can't stand to look at it, and maybe doesn't get the closure she needs. She starts to wonder if her daughter may have survived somehow. They also have started hearing noises from her empty room. The son, a photographer notices a figure in the shadows in some of his photos - could it be her? Her ghost?

I won't give away any spoilers, but I will give away the "trick" - this movie uses the technique of showing you a scene or photo, then showing you something in the shadows that you didn't notice. Something spooky.

The movie takes the family through twist after twist, as the supernatural is explained, then comes back, is explained again, and so on. The acting is naturalistic, and (I understand from wikipedia) mostly improvised. Director Joel Anderson made it under severe budget constraints, but by using the documentary frame, it doesn't really show. What shows is the intensity of the feelings of the family who had lost a member.

But what also shows is the aimlessness of the script. At least two amazing revelations are just sort of let to lie there, with no real attempt to deal with them. Maybe that's just how life is, but I'm not sure it helps this movie. In the end, this was just OK as a ghost story.

Let Us Prey

 I think I've finally seen all the big dumb movies from 2019 finally, and with Birds Of Prey And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn (2020), I might have seen all the big dumb 2020 movies.

It starts with a cartoon introduction to Harley Quinn, narrated by HQ herself, Margot Robbie. This culminates in her breakup with the Joker, who doesn't actually appear in this movie (which is a good choice). So she has to work through her breakup grief. She cuts her hair, gets a pet hyena, takes up roller derby, that kind of thing. 

She goes to Roman Sionis' (Ewan McGregor) nightclub and insults everyone and breaks McGregor's driver's legs. Since the world hasn't heard about her breakup, everyone thinks she has the Joker's protection. McGregor tells his club's chantoozy, Jurnee Smollett-Bell, that she is his driver now.

Feeling low, HQ decides to make a statement, and blows up the chemical plant where the Joker turned her into Harley Quinn. Police detective Rosie Perez realizes that this means HQ and the Mr. J are on the outs and that it is open season on her. But she's kind of busy worrying about the "crossbow killer," who turns out to be Mary Elizabeth Winstead.

Meanwhile, McGregor has entrusted Victor Szaz (Chris Messina) with a diamond, that immediately gets stolen by pickpocket Cassandra Cain (Ella Jay Basco). Then she gets arrested, and McGregor hires HQ to get the diamond back, but Smollett-Bell tells Perez whats up. 

And that's just the setup.

This is a fun, silly movie - there's a stretch in the middle where everyone is trying to kill HQ - you get a freezeframe with their name and greivance, and in some cases, nobody really knows who they are. She has a lot of enemies. Plus it has four great female leads, although Robbie definitely hogs the spotlight. I do think that Sionis is weak as the bad guy, just a standard mobster, although having psycho Szaz around helps.

I never read any of the Birds of Prey comics or the cartoons and only watched one ep of the 2002 series. So most of what we know about these characters comes from watching Gotham and Arrow. But we did recognize the garret room with the round windows where they meet. That's about it.