Sim City

 I'm not sure if this one counts, since it isn't available from Netflix as a DVD or pretty much anywhere streaming. But we recently bought An Inspector Calls (1954) from Kino Lorber, along with some other stuff, so here it is.

It starts with an interesting title sequence: A sumptuous table where the guests are eating the nuts course (as in "from soup to"). But while the table setting is quite genteel, we see the hands grabbing walnuts and fruit voraciously. Then we meet the guests:

• The father: A rich portly industrialist who expects to be recognized on the Honor's List
• His wife: A stuffy conventional old bird
• Their daughter: A pretty thing, although she's said to have a temper
• Her fiancé: A rich young man, eager for her father's approval
• The son: A somewhat inebriated young man who looks a little like Eric Idle. Since his character's name is Eric, we called him Eric the Half-a-Drunk

Then, an inspector calls - Alastair Sim. This is not Inspector Cockrill from Green for Danger or the lodger from Cottage to Let. He is somewhat more mysterious. He isn't announced at the door, he climbs through a window. He explains that a woman has died from drinking cleaning fluid, a horrible death, perhaps suicide. And one by one, he explains how each of them knew her under various aliases, and each of them wronged her.

Each one's story is illustrated by a flashback, and in each case the person feels guilty but insists that they can't be blamed for her death. I'll spoil the end a little, because I liked the twist - the fiancé notes that they all knew this woman by a different name - maybe they aren't even the same person! Maybe there is no dead woman at all! Maybe the inspector isn't really... But I won't spoil any more.

This movie was directed by Guy Hamilton (Goldfinger) from a play by J.B. Priestly (who I thought discovered oxygen, but that was Joseph). The play was a strong indictment of capitalist society, and premiered in Moscow. I was afraid in a few places that some leniency would be shown to the rich and powerful, but it was only a feint. Still solid today.

Fire on the Mountain

I actually kind of liked Those Who Wish Me Dead (2021) - partly because I wasn't sure if it was supposed to be a comedy.

It starts out as two threads: a pair of cold assassins (Aiden Gillen and Nicholas Hoult) wiping out a judge in Miami, then heading for Jacksonville. These guys are so hard, so unemotional, that I suspected them of being some sort of comic relief: "You've got a spot of blood on your shirt there." 

In Jacksonville, dad Jake Weber sees the news on TV and takes off with his son Finn Little. They are headed to Montana.

Meanwhile, in Montana, smoke jumper Angelina Jolie is kidding around with her crew, but inside she's in bad shape. She saw some kids and a fellow firefighter die in a forest fire, and it haunts her. She gets stationed in a firetower, because being alone in the woods is the best way to get your head straight. We also meet her ex-boyfriend, Sheriff Jon Bernthal, and his pregnant wife Medina Senghore. It seems that Weber went to their survival school, and that's where he's headed.

But the bad guys have figured this out too, and manage to kill the dad, but the kid gets away. The assassins (who may not be as good at their jobs as you were lead to believe) have to get the kid to make sure that he doesn't have the McGuffin. So they set a forest fire to keep things stirred up.

They also go after Senghore, who gets away with some improvised weapons and a shotgun. Well, she runs a survival school. 

We're now about an hour in, and finally the kid meets up with Angelina Joli. They start walking to town through a lightning storm, but it still takes forever for them to see the fire. They turn around, but the assassins find them at the firetower - so they run, back into the fire.

From the promos, I had the idea that the whole movie took place in the fire - but it was only a bit at the end. It was very well done, and I guess a lot of it was really burning, not CGI (unlike the firetower, which was). So the best part wasn't actually very long. But all in all, not bad. The story was a little overstuffed, and the set up could have been brisker. Also, the dialog was pretty predictable. We had a game where we tried to predict it, and if we got it wrong, tried to decide if our line was better. 

This was written and directed by Taylor Sheridan (Wind River). It isn't as intense as that was, partly because the Montana setting was much more chill than the Wind River Rez. But there was at least one scene with Jolie getting beat up. Seeing her skinny beauty getting pummeled seems to get some people off.

And about that McGuffin: A few pieces of paper with some handwritten notes that could bring down some powerful men in politics and organized crime. Several commenters on IMDB and elsewhere were upset that we never find out what it is all about. I don't think they understand the concept of a McGuffin. What I was upset about is that it was in Jolie's pocket when she dived underwater. It might have even been in her coat pocket before she threw off her coat into the forest fire. I don't see how it survived. But the kid was getting ready for a press conference as the movie ended, so I guess it must have.

Slackers

 Speaking of very dark comedies, we watched Slack Bay (2017). It's a French period piece set between the wars (?) in the picturesque seaside town of Mont St. Michel. With cannibals.

It starts with a family of rustic mussel picker coming home from the beach. A roadster filled with vacationers drives by, commenting on their picturesque-ness. while the pickers grumble about tourists. The tourists consist of an artistic man with a hunchback and odd, spastic gestures, his wife and two daughters and their cousin. Also along are his flamboyant aunt (Juliette Binoche) and his wife's clueless brother.

Down by in the dunes, an extremely fat detective is looking for clues about the recent disappearances in the area. He has a tendency to lie or fall down on the ground and get stuck there, requiring his assistants to prop him back up.

And the family of mussel pickers? The patriarch is known as the Eternal, because he operates the lifeboat that has saved hundreds. Their older son is a somewhat goofy guy named Ma Loute, and the younger three sons are hellions. Oh, and the mother seems to spend most of her time cooking and serving up the corpses of the tourists that they kill.

The Eternal and his son help tourists cross the Bay to the island (I think?). We meet them resting on a boat, but when it comes time to cross, they scoop the tourists up in their arms and wade across. Cousin Billy seems to enjoy getting carried across by Ma Loute - he or she claims to be a girl in boy's disguise. She even crosses over dressed as a girl. It seems that Ma Loute is falling in love with her, until he puts his hand under her one crossing and discovers that she or he has balls, and gets disgusted. Looks like he's for the cooking pot.

This isn't a hilarious comedy (although knowing French might have helped), but it's very silly - except for the cannibalism. Absent that, it's more or less a simple comedy of manners, with some absurdist touches. SPOILER - the detective gets gas, inflates even more, and sails away like a balloon. Or maybe it's a tragic love story of a big eared cannibal and an upper-class teen transvestite. Or maybe it just is what it is. 

High School Confidential

I think it was Brandi Brown who I first heard about The Kid Detective (2020) from. The premise sounds great: an Encyclopedia Brown style kid detective grows up, but can't move on from kid-detectiving. Then he has a real case. It was supposed to be funny, then get dark. All true.

Adam Brody plays the grown-up kid. We meet him hungover, getting woken up by a call from work - he thought it was Sunday, but it isn't. We get a flashback of his childhood cases, solving the case of who robbed a locker (the bully who is allergic to peanuts, because he didn't steal the Reeses) and so forth. He even finds a hit and run driver. That prompts the town to give him an office to work out of. He charged two quarters a case. Then a girl, a close friend, vanishes. He tries to track her down, but can't. Even though he's only 12 he feels responsible. He never does solve that case. Maybe that's where it all went wrong.

But when he gets to his office, his no-fucks-given secretary. tells him he has a customer. It's high-school student Sophie Nellise, who wants him to find out who killed her boyfriend. He was a top-of-his-class boy scout, with no known enemies, but Brodie warns her that she might not like what he finds out. But she asks him to go ahead. Even though she can't pay (and he is desperately broke), he feels like he has to go ahead.

So begins the investigation. This is similar to Brick - high school noir, but without the snappy patter. They find a picture of a nude girl in a tiger mask in one of his books and find out that he was having an affair with a slightly older high-school semi-hooker ("His girlfriend is cute, but I'm complicated"). He was also dealing drugs - a confidence-building ego enhancer - which Brodie tests, giving him a enough courage to interrogate the local teen bad kids, and almost enough to talk to the local biker gang, including the one with the peanut allergy. who has a grudge against him. He also breaks into a kids house and gets trapped in the closet of his 9 year old sister - then getting discovered. It's mostly very humiliating. 

In fact, he spends most of the movie bowed down under the weight of failure and self-loathing. His parents are still supporting him, but just barely. The local merchants look at him with disgust. The police and high-school principal tolerate him for his past glories, but just barely.

And then he solves the case. I won't give it away, but it is probably a lot worse than you guess. He even manages to solve the case of the missing girl. He is once more beloved. His parents now respect him. He cleans up his apartment. And in the final shot, he breaks down, sobbing uncontrollably. 

I'm not sure I can explain that last shot. But I imagine that it has something to do with the choice between being a drunken loser, and seeing the world for all its naked depravity. Some comedy, huh?

Body Rock

As I have mentioned more than once. Ms. Spenser likes horror movies. Particularly, horror without a lot of gore (no slashers), preferably with a supernatural element. Since I am the queue curator, it is my duty to pick something like this every week or so. Since this is not really my element, I make a lot of blind choices (I almost said, stabs in the dark). Body Cam (2020) is one example.

It starts on a rainy night in a deserted industrial part of town. A police car has stopped a van without license plates. The driver, a shadowy figure wearing a coat with a hood. The dash cam shows the cop trying to get it to show a license or just talk, but all it does is gesture, and the cop goes flying up out of the frame.

Then there's that dreaded "X hours/days earlier..." card. We seepolice officer Mary J. Blige coming back to work after a long suspension for punching a civilian. She is paired with a rookie, Nat Wolff. One of their first call is to find out what happened to the cop in the first scene. The car is there, but not the cop. Blige checks the dash cam, and finds it full of interference. But she does see the office go flying, and land on the hood of the car, before flying off again. They find him high up on a fence, impaled. When backup arrives, the dash cam footage is unusable, and nobody really believes her when Blige tells them what she has seen. In fact, they tell her she shouldn't have messed with the evidence.

But Blige got a clue about the person in the van - she's wearing hospital scrubs, and there's a nurse who left suddenly a little while ago, Anika Noni Rose.

We see the van stop at a convenience store, where some gangbangers are harassing the owner and filming themselves. The police see the van and head in, causing the gangbangers to freak and grab Rose. Then a hulking shadow grabs him from behind, causing him to start shooting. By the time Blige and Wolff show up, everyone is dead and Rose has slipped away. But she surreptitiously grabs one of the phones. She goes to the morgue and uses the dead guys thumb to unlock it. Once again, the footage has a lot of interference, but it shows the shadow monster.

When this started, I was afraid it was going to be about honest cops who body cams showed them doing horrible things, because demons or ghosts or something. That would have been pretty tasteless. Instead, the body cam footage was almost always unusable, except that Blige gets to see it. I don't know why she never waited to watch this stuff with a witness who could corroborate, but it's just as well. You can't really trust anyone, especially in the police. 

This was really only fair - a decent plot, some good scares and action, but nothing too exciting. M.J. Blige had some real charisma, and was very believable as a working cop, not corrupt or too idealistic. Any way, Ms. Spenser was satisfied.  

Tomorrow Never Thinks

Like a dope, I had to go and watch The Tomorrow War (2021). I'd heard some off-the-cuff comments about it ("It wasn't as bad as Tomorrow War, was it?"), but I figured, what the heck, how bad could it be?

Chris Pratt is an ex-Green Beret, high-school science teacher, husband and father. His ordinary life is interrupted when visitors from the future appear all over the world. The message: In the future, the earth will be invaded by monsters from outer space. Humanity is being creamed. They need soldiers to help prevent the extinction of humanity. The world comes together and sends a thousand soldiers into the future for a one-week tour. Not many come back. The world institutes a universal draft.

Of course, Pratt gets drafted. His wife, Betty Gilpin, convinces him to try to run, and get his estranged father's help. His father is J.K. Simmons, with a buffed bod and bushy beard, an underground conspiracy nut. He could get Pratt out of the draft, but antagonizes Pratt so much that he just leaves to go to the future.

There's a basic training section, where Pratt meets Sam Richardson, a soft genius type. Between them they realize that everyone drafted has a death date (known to the futurians) before their target date, and all the futurians are young enough so that they weren't born here in the present/past. This is the first and last intelligent point in the movie. They also note that they aren't being told anything about the monsters or how to fight them. It seems nobody really cares. 

They get sent to the future and it's an immediate cluster. The monsters are everywhere and can take a lot of machine gun fire. Which made me wonder right off - why are they sending soldiers with machine guns against them? They barely work, and soldiers are not expendable in this world. Human population is rapidly approaching zero. Have they considered different weapons and tactics? Here's an idea - they have a time machine! Could they use that in any way?

Anyhow, Pratt meets up with his superior officer, who turns out to be his grown-up daughter, Yvonne Strahovski. They have a bunch of bang-bang adventures together, trying to get a toxin that will kill the female monsters. They achieve this goal, but Strahovski dies sending Pratt back to the present with the toxin.

He is one of the last ones to return. The time machine is fried. The world is ready to give up. They have the toxin, but nobody knows where the aliens come from or how to get at them when they arrive. Then Gilpin does the incredible: She thinks things over for a minute. Something no one else seems to have done. 

So they realize that the aliens are here now, they just haven't come out. They need to get to Siberia to kill them in their cradles. Fortunately, Simmons is a pilot. Oh, you thought they would go to the  governments of the world with this? Why would they do that, when they can attack this world-ending menace with 5 or 6 randos and an old guy?

They find the alien ship and surprise, it looks like a Giger knock-off. Also, the monsters, like the xenomorphs, are weapons for clearing out populated planets. Or maybe pets, who knows? The monsters are in embryo sacs (not eggs, so it isn't a total Alien rip off) so they start administering the toxin. They get one or two, but they start waking up. So they just blow them all up. I guess they didn't need that toxin after all. And we all live happily ever after, including in the future, where Strahovski presumably doesn't die. Oh, but Simmons does, but he was old.

I understand that time rravel is hard, but I've rarely seem it done so stupidly. The idea that the world wouldn't exploit future knowledge but just throw cannon fodder at the enemy is - ok, pretty believable. But not at all satisfying. 

All that aside, we enjoyed it when things were asploding and Pratt was yelling, "Move move!" But even there, while Pratt was clearly a super competent soldier, he never figures out that spray-and-pray was not working. Oh well, he can't think if the writers won't.

This seems like a perfect example of a streaming blockbuster. Big, loud, stupid and released without a thought to whether it's good or not. People will stream it when it comes out and forget it immediately I guess I should too.

High Plains Driftless

The Driftless Area (2016) is on of those Anton-Yelchin-has-a-dead-girlfriend movies, like Odd Thomas and Burying the Ex. It was sort of a thing with him. 

It starts with Yelchin hitchhiking carrying a small rosebush. A creepy looking drifter (John Hawke) picks him up. He demands $20 for gas money, then kicks him out of the truck outside of town, and steals his rosebush. Yelchin chucks a rock at him, causing the truck to crash. Then Yelchin wakes up. That was a dream.

He is a small-town bartender in the Drifless Area, an area of the midwest that the glaciers missed, and therefore has no good soil. Hi parents died when he was young, and he's kind of drifting himself. 

Going back a while. we see an arsonist set a house on fire (it's John Hawke). Then we see a naked Zooey Deschanel walking through the smoldering ashes. She finds something to wear and wanders over to Frank Langella's house - he has been waiting for her. To spoil this whole thing - she's a ghost, and Langella helps ghosts find peace. She will need someone to get revenge for her. Guess who it's going to be.

Yelchin falls in a well, and after a night in the water, is finally rescued by Deschanel, who takes in to a place Langella has set up for her. They start falling in love, and somewhere in here, Yelchin realizes that she is a ghost (although material enough to get him out of a well), and he wants to get her killer.

He figures that the dream was a premonition, buys a rosebush and starts hitchhiking. He gets picked up by Hawke, etc, and this time pulls a bag of money out of the truck. But Hawke isn't dead. We have been following him and some of his criminal cronies, and now he's coming for Yelchin.

This was an interesting mood piece. It was director/co-writer Zachary Sluser's first feature, and the presence of Deschanel hints at twee mumblecore. I don't think it was quite that. It was more like a quirky Coen Bros. movie - Fargo with the small midwest towns and hapless but scary criminals. The ideas of destiny and the hereafter were interesting, but I'd say the actors carried it. Yelchin's numbed by sorrow affect was maybe a little over-the-top. At some point i realized that he never lifted his head. Deschanel's ghost was only somewhat fetching, but she's not some Manic Pixie Ghost Girl. She is as solemn as he is, being dead and all.

Yelchin's death colored my feelings about his performance, I guess. It wasn't his best role, not the greatest movie, but sweet and entertaining nonetheless.