Watching Movies So You Don't Have To

 I tend to stick to television series--even the mini-series shows so popular on the streaming services--because my schedule is such that I don't want to spend 2+ hours watching a film, but the shorter length of a television series episode works fine. Plus, some of the mini-series are so much better than what the major studios are releasing in theaters, with Reacher and The Expanse immediately coming to mind as examples.

    But my family and I took the opportunity over the past couple of weeks to try some films: Older Dads, Leave The World Behind, and Rebel Moon which I thought I would review. WARNING: There are significant spoilers. So, going from the worst to the (relatively best) of these:

    Older Dads stars Bill Burr, Bobby Cannavale, and Bookeem Woodbine as middle-aged Gen-Xers in different stages of their fatherhood. Burr's character had been a bachelor who had only married a few years earlier to "the perfect woman" and begins the movie with a young boy just starting into kindergarten and another in the oven. Cannavale's character is in an emotionally abusive marriage to a domineering and controlling shrew with a couple children of varying ages; his friendships to the other two men being the only joy and outlet in his life. And Woodbine's character is divorced with two adult children and a young girlfriend that doesn't want marriage or children, but just sex and fun. The three men are good friends that had started a successful sports apparel company, which they had just sold while negotiating a deal that left them essentially in charge of the company ... kind of, that is.

    The film starts out well enough with Burr making sarcastic and angry comments to various wokesters that we would all like to make (although he never resorts to physical violence) with a particular animosity springing up between him and his son's kindergarten principal who apparently is the key to his son continuing on to every more prestigious schools and, presumably, a spot at Harvard or some other Ivy League. This is pretty much the only funny part of the film.

    But the casting of the film should have been a warning because Burr is white, Cannavale's character is racially ambiguous but probably Hispanic, and Woodbine's character is black. That is, the racial balancing should have been a warning because the movie was a bate and switch, with our manly man starting out as a champion against wokism and being fully neutered by the end of the film.

    Basically, everything falls apart when the men find that a young "disruptor" had been put in overall management of their company and planning on taking it into a completely different direction, fires all the older staff, and eventually fires the three main characters.

    Worse, Burr's character is repeatedly forced to apologize to the kindergarten principal and finally causes a ruckus at a fundraising party that embarrasses his wife and ensures that their son will never get the recommendation he will need to advance to some prestigious private school. The wife then kicks Burr's character out forcing him to go to a motel. While there, he gets into an argument with the motel manager over whether he is allowed to smoke on the premises, gets some support from a gross and disgusting woman also staying there, but then the woman goes into a rant about illegal aliens. Of course, the take away is that if you oppose illegal immigration, you must be gross and disgusting like the woman in the film.

    In the meantime, Cannavale's character has been forbidden to communicate or have anything to do with Burr's character, even resorting to trying to write a note while sitting on a toilet in a dark bathroom in the middle of the night before his wife catches him. And Woodbine's girlfriend announces that she is pregnant (although Woodbine's character had a vasectomy years earlier). At first he tells her she needs to take a test to see if it is his, but she slaps him and walks away in tears and that is the end of that.

    So while the three wives meet to drink wine and decide how to best improve their husbands, the three men make one last ditch attempt at freedom by going to a casino/strip club. Of course, no longer being under the wise guidance of their wives, everything goes wrong; and, when Burr's character learns that his wife has gone into labor, they race back to Los Angeles to grovel at the feet of their women.

    So, in the end, Burr's character promises to go to counseling, his wife accepts him back, and he just grins and bears it when some woke person criticizes him for some trivial matter. Cannavale's character works up the courage to tell his wife that she scares him and even asks if it would kill her to give him a BJ once in a while; but when she confronts him about whether this means he is leaving her, he immediately grovels and goes into beaten puppy mode so everything apparently stays the same. And Woodbine's character embraces being cuckolded and agrees to marry his girlfriend and raise some other guy's kid. 

    And that is what passes for a comedy.

    Next up is Leave The World Behind, which is billed as an end of the world, apocalypse type film. It stars Julia Roberts as "Amanda", Ethan Hawke as Amanda's husband, "Clay", Mahershala Ali as "George", and Myha'la Herrold as George's daughter, "Ruth". Other characters are "Danny" played by Kevin Bacon, and Amanda and Clay's children "Rose" and "Archie". 

    The film very much has the feeling of an M. Night Shyamalan film--lots of use of symbolic color palettes, ominous conversations with long pauses, strange behavior and encounters, and so on. But where in a Shyamalan film, these would have added tension and all had some meaning that would have all come together in some way by the end of the film, in this film they just add boredom and never amount to anything. And that is really a good description of the film: the writer and director get right up to the edge of something that should add tension, create a conflict, or have something dramatic happen, and then back away from it. Like the director was too afraid to tell the story or present a climatic scene.  If I were to sum this film up in one sentence, it is the episode of Twilight Zone called "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" but without the tension or conflict and dragged out over 2 hours instead of 25 minutes.

    The basic story is that Amanda and Clay, who live in New York City, decide to rent a house just outside New York--not too far because there are scenes where they can see the City off in the distance--but nevertheless isolated with apparently the only access to the limited area where most of the film takes place being an expressway. An expressway that is blocked off for most of the film by Tesla cars that have been hacked so they self-drive and crash into one another causing a miles long roadblocks in either direction: the characters aren't getting out, but no potential threats are getting in.

    Anyway, the family shows up to their house, a modern house that is pretty much sterile and spotless as though no one had ever lived there. They go to the beach when the first thing happens which is an oil tanker drives onto shore. A police officer hints that it was because of an issue with its navigation system, but there is no explanation why the crew couldn't steer it away from the shore. 

    They go back to the house where gradually they lose all telephone, television and internet access to the outside world. Yet strangely, all through the film up to the very end when credits start scrolling, they still have electricity.

    That evening, George and his daughter pull up in their car reporting that they were forced to return early because there was a blackout in New York. Amanda and Clay have never met George or talked to him--the rental was arranged and paid for online--and there are no photographs in the house showing George of his family. So, there is an issue of whether it really is George's house--something even raised by Amanda--but Amanda and Clay let them in and eventually this fades as a potential plot issue or conflict. 

    George meanwhile drops some hints that he might have more knowledge about what is going on, but doesn't say anything. He goes to a beach and discovers bodies and wreckage from a plane crash washed up on shore. Suddenly another airliner crashes and he barely escapes, but he doesn't tell anyone and apparently no one else heard the crash.

    Anyway, there are various attempts to leave. Amanda's whole family tries to leave in a car only to discover the expressway blocked as I already mention ed, and narrowly avoid being struck by Teslas that are still someone coming from somewhere. But they make no attempt to backtrack to see where the Teslas are coming from even though the road must obviously be open in that direction. At another time, Clay tries to drive to the nearby town and encounters a Mexican woman at the side of the road. She is hysterical and speaking in Spanish, which he doesn't understand, so he leaves here there. Rose and Archie do so exploring and find an old shed. George's daughter mostly just shows off her resting bitch face and darkly hints that her father and her would be better off without the white family.

    And then there are a few mysterious events. Deer congregating near the house in extraordinary and unnatural numbers. Leaflets in Arabic dropped from a drone. A mysterious high pitched sound that shatters glass and causes Amanda's son to start loosing his teeth. George sneaking over to a neighbor's house (who conveniently is not there) and trying a satellite phone but unable to get a signal. Rose taking off into the woods by herself for no explained reason.

    George and Clay take the son (Archie) to Danny's place because George knows he is a prepper and might have medicine to help Archie. Danny and George start pointing guns at each other after Danny initially refuses to help, but finally gives them some pills (antibiotics I presume) after Clay offers him $1,000 in cash (but only moments after Clay had said that the cash was useless). From Clay, they learn that there is another neighbor that had built an underground survival bunker. They also learn that he'd heard from a friend on the West Coast that similar pamphlets had been dropped there had been in Chinese or Korean. Finally, he tells George and Clay that Archie was probably hit with a sonic weapon like that which caused the Havana syndrome. When George and Clay leave, George pieces this together with information he learned as a defense analyst to conclude that the U.S. was being subject to a type of attack that is designed to take advantage of a nation's inherent instability by causing confusion and fear that would lead to internal violence and civil war (although he also suggests it might be a coup by the military). 

    In the meantime, Amanda and Ruth are following bicycle tracks left by Rose when she rode into the woods. They reach the cabin that Rose and Archie had discovered earlier, get surrounded by hundreds of deer, scare the deer off after screaming at them, and then look through a clearing in the trees where they can see smoke clouds rising from New York City and hear the distant sound of explosions.

    Finally, Rose has made it to another house--again conveniently empty--and discovers the fully stocked bunker--conveniently unlocked--and pulls out an DVD from a library of DVDs/BlueRays and starts to watch the last episode of Friends. And that was the end of the movie. Every potential conflict was approached and then avoided. It built to ... nothing. With no effort or sacrifice, the group is in a fertile, isolated area with a survival bunker full of food and movies and a computer system that somehow is still receiving information about outside conditions and the electricity is still running, the cars have not run out of gas, and Archie will be okay.

    Finally, there is Rebel Moon. This is actually the best of the three, which isn't saying much, I know. This is a Zack Snyder film. I haven't watched his other films, but my kids have and that is how they described it, so I must assume that it makes use of tropes and elements common to his other films. If I were to describe the film I would have to say that it is The Magnificent Seven set in a universe that is a poor copy of the Warhammer 40K setting and somewhat reminiscent of the empire in The Chronicles of Riddick. I would note that this is the first part of what I understand to be a multipart series, although I don't know if it is just the first of two parts or a trilogy. 

    The story begins with the main character, Kora (not to be confused with Korra), who is like Gamora from the Guardians of the Galaxy series: starting life as a young girl saved from death by a warmongering tyrant and raised as his own daughter to become one of the galaxy's greatest warriors. In any event, at some point and for reasons not explained, Kora has fled to a small, primitive farming village on a remote colony world where she, of course, refuses to assimilate. Well, the baddies--the Empire--show up and kill the headman of the village and state they will return in 10 months to collect the village's crops. They leave a small contingent of troops, but after a couple of the soldiers attempt to rape one of the village girls, Kora intervenes and kills most of them. A man from the village (named Gunnar) decides that the village needs more people like Kora to protect them from the Empire when it returns. Since he has a contact with a resistance army, he and Kora travel to meet his contact and recruit additional people to fight. They arrive just in time to see his contact being hauled off by a bounty hunter. They then hire a ship (piloted by a white guy, but not Han Solo) and travel from planet to planet to collect various people of color to help them including a famous swordswoman/assassin and a great general. But betrayed by the white pilot, they are captured by the Empire. But because he is viewed as weak and helpless and so not confined like the others, Gunnar is able to free the others. In the subsequent fight, the Empire's cruiser is destroyed and the enemy commander mostly killed (mostly, but not completely--it took a miracle). Unfortunately a number of the POC were killed leaving only 6 of the group to return to the village to prepare for the inevitable attack from the Imperial forces (although there is an old battle robot that will probably become number 7 of the group).

    The biggest problem with this film was just that it was unnecessarily dragged out. It is basically the first half of the Magnificent Seven stretched to over two hours. Because of that, the character development--what little there is--was slow. But even with that, we actually know very little of some of the characters and, like with most poor writing, what we do know was through exposition by the bad guy after the group had been captured as he went down the list of captives and told us about each.

    I will probably watch the second half of this when it finally comes out because I suspect that the pace will pick up once we have the Magnificent Seven finally all together.