"Burn After Reading": or better still, burn before reading

Three days after watching the execrable O Brother, Where Art Thou, the song "I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow" is still in my head.  My friend suggests that we add to my woes with Burn After Reading.

"I saw part of it before," I tell him.  "I walked out of the theater when something inexcusably horrible happened, turning it from a comedy iinto a monstrosity!"

"Give it a try," he says.  "Watch it all the way through before making a decision."

If I watch with him, there will be cuddling.  If I don't, probably not.  So here goes.

If you want to skip there whole thing and go directly to the butts and dicks, here are some links to:

Nude photos of Brad Pitt

Nude photos of Dermot Mulroney

Burn After Reading (2008) is a Coen Brothers "comedy" about a lot of old, bald, ugly guys in suits who have offices in Washington, DC.  Most have  jobs dealing with government secrets, but there's also a divorce lawyer, a plastic surgeon, and a guy who used to be a Greek Orthodox priest but now runs a gym.  I can't tell them apart, but according to the IMDB, they're played by John Malkovich, Richard Jenkins, David Rasche, J. K. Simmons, Olek Krupa, Michael Countryman, J.R. Horne, Hamilton Clancy, and Armand Schultz. 

I'm going to use the actors' names.  It will be easier to keep track of who's who.

State Secrets agent John Malkovich, who resigns from the State Secrets agency  and writes his memoirs.  Will this be like "The Prisoner," where a secret agent resigns and is sent to the Island?  "We want in-formation."

Nope, his memoirs don't actually contain any classified information.  

Meanwhile his wife is having an affair with fellow State Secrets agent George Clooney

In preparation for asking for a divorce, she copies all of Malhovich's financial information, plus his memoirs, onto a computer disk.  She give it to her lawyer, whose secretary loses it at the gym.

Where it is found by two conniving gym employees, Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand, who I always confuse with Frances Sternhagen, Cliff's mother on Cheers.   They think it contains government secrets, and blackmail Malkovich for its safe return.  When he balks, they try to sell it to the Russians.

Aha, finally we get to the protagonists!  At least the two that are pushing the blackmail plot.

Why are they committing this act of treason, the only crime other than aggravated homicide that can get them the death penalty?  Well, Sternhagen wants money for liposuction for her saggy arm and belly fat.  Even though her doctor tells her that those areas will respond to exercise.  

And she works at a gym.

Pitt  is just an idiot.

Did I mention that Sternhagen also happens to be dating  Clooney, the guy having an affair with Malkovich, the man she's blackmailing?  Do all State Secrets agents go to the same gym?

Sneaking around the house looking for more government secrets,for some reason, Pitt accidentally encounters Clooney, who thinks he's the man that's been following him (in another plotline). 

Caution: horrible plot twist ahead::  Clooney kills him!  WTF?  You can't kill the protagonist, ever, and certainly not halfway through the way through the movie.  How can he have his complications, crisis, denoument, and conclusion?  There's nothing left for the movie to do!  

But it goes on. We switch protagonists -- now it's Clooney.   Sternhagen (who he is dating), complains about her missing friend.     Clooney doesn't realize that he killed the friend, so he agrees to help look for him.  Wait -- wasn't Brad Pitt wearing a gym uniform?  And Sternhagen works at the gym.  How hard is it to figure out?

Malkovich, meanwhile, believes that Sternhagen's boss is the blackmailer, and kills him.

We adjourn to some old, ugly guys sitting around talking about what happened next. It's complicated, but it ends up with with Malkovich  in a coma, Clooney in Venezuela, and Sternhagen agreeing to keep quiet if they pay for her liposuction.

Wait -- the first rule of moviemaking -- show, don't tell.  It's like watching The Wizard of Oz, all the way up to where Dorothy and her companions reach the Emerald City, then adjourning to Dorothy telling Aunt Em "So we went to the witch's castle, with lots of adventures on the way, and in the end we defeated her."

Terrible way to end a terrible movie.

Gay content:  

A tiny bit of beefcake, the rather muscular arms and shoulders of one of the guys Sternhagen has sex with.  Clooney and Pitt are fully clothed throughout.  Coming Up Daisy, the romantic comedy that Sternhagen brings her dates to, stars Dermot Mulroney, but he's fully clothed, too.

One homophobic slur.

One racist stereotype.

Brad Pitt's character is probably gay, but nothing is ever said.  He just fails to express any interest in women.

But at least I got some cuddling out of the deal.

"The F***k It List": How Many Times Can You Say WTF? Before Turning It Off?

I started watching The F**k It List because it starred Jerry O'Connell -- sigh -- the epitome of masculine perfection in the 1990s, with a trifecta of face, physique and bulge that made us feel like junior high kids writing his name amid little hearts in our chemistry notebooks

But I turned it off quickly after yelling "WTF!" a dozen times.

1. High schooler Brett Blackmore (Eli Brown)  gets responses from all of the colleges he applied to at the same moment.  WTF?  That can't happen!  The responses trickle in during the spring semester.

2. He gets admitted to seven of the eight, all ultra-exclusive Ivy League, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, Brown -- except he got wait-listed at Harvard.  WTF?  That can't happen!  It's not just a matter of high grades and rich parents.  Admissions committees are highly subjective, so what one likes, another will hate.

3. Brett's rich, driven parents (Jerry O'Connell, Natalie Zen) have been schmoozing, donating, and bribing like crazy.  Dad even tries to bribe the holdout Harvard admissions officer by letting him have sex with his wife -- and the horndog agrees!  WTF?  Hey, morally bankrupt jerk, how about letting a kid who deserves it have Brett's spot?

4. A prank goes wrong and blows up the school, so Brett is expelled, and seven of the eight colleges withdraw their offers.  WTF?  That would never happen.  First, it was an accident, and second, once you're admitted, you're admitted.  It would take a lot more than an accidentally explosion to get an admission revoked.

5. So Brett says "F...k it."  He never liked school anyway, he hates the clarinet, and he hates books. He's going to do what he loikes to do So he burns a pile.  WTF?  Did anyone do any research into book burning?  It symbolizes extreme hatred, Nazis burning books by Jewish writers, that sort of thing.

6. What he likes to do: kiss the Girl of His Dreams,  convincing his gay best friend to come out, and spend his parents' money.  He documents all of this online, making him an internet sensation and social media influencer.  So millions of high school kids are going to say "f...k it," cancel their college plans, burn their books, and start spending their parents' money for a living?  WTF?  90% of the parents in the world can't afford that, and the other 10% won't want to.  

College is starting in about a month, online or on-site or both, and millions of students have to decide whether to go back (or enroll as freshmen) or say "f...k it" and keep their jobs doing curb delivery for Door Dash.  This movie won't help convince them that Learning is Cool.

I almost forgot: Brett's best friend (Marcus Scribner, not pictured) is gay, and apparently learns to say "f**k it," or as we said in a kinder, gentler era, "The adults are lying -- we got to be who we are."  But I didn't stick around for his subplot.

Ahhhh! The Horrible, Heteronormative, Offensive, Disgusting, No-Good End of the Marvel Cinematic Universe

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is a huge series of movies starring Marvel superheroes, who all know each other, interact with each other, and refer to events and situations from previous movies, so you have to watch all of them in order to understand what the heck is going on.  Every origin-story movie involves a superhero meeting, losing, and winning his True Love.

1. Iron-Man, aka Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), head of the giant corporation that provides technological stuff, falls in love with his former assistant Pepper.  They retire, move to a farm, and have a kid.

2. Captain America, aka Steve Rogers (Chris Evans, top photo), a World War II soldier turned into an Axis-fighting machine, falls in love with Peggy, one of the scientists working on him.  He's trapped in an iceberg for 70 years, leaving Peggy to grow old. But when he emerges, he still hangs out with her.  

3. Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) falls in love with Hope, daughter of the scientist who invented his shrinking suit. He has a daughter from another relationship, I think.

4. Hawkeye, aka Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner, left), retired from the superhero business to move to a farm, get married, and have some kids.

5. Peter Quill (Chris Pratt, below), leader of the Guardians of the Galaxy crime-fighting team, falls in love with his coworker Zamora.  

6. The Hulk, aka Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), had a True Love in one move, another in a second, and then fell in love with fellow superhero The Black Widow.

7. Superhero Scarlet Witch, aka Wanda Maximoff, fell in love with  the android Vision (Paul Bettany), but he was killed.

There are lots more, but I'm getting tired. 

After the origin story, the True Loves are barely mentioned, especially in the ensemble movies titled the Avengers.  But apparently they were always there, forming the basic motive for each superhero's life and work, and at the end of the movie series they come roaring back like the Second Coming of Christ.

An ongoing plot arc is an attempt to track down all of the Infinity Stones, like Tolkien's Rings of Power but much more powerful, because an evil demagogue named Thanos wants to use them to wipe out 50% of all sentient life in the universe (that's right, I said the universe).  The team tries to keep him from getting the stones, then tries to stop him, but in Avengers: Infinity War (2018), he succeeds.  Snap!  Half of the sentients in the universe crumble into dust, including a lot of superheroes and their True Loves, but never both.

Imagine the chaos!  We're so interconnected that civilization would definitely collapse.  But here the economies and governments of the world seem fine; survivors are traumatized, but they manage to put up memorials to their lost True Loves and go back to high school classes, museums, pop music, and restaurants. There's actually a scene in a group therapy session, where a guy talks about his first date since the Snap -- with another guy, making him the first and only identifiable gay person in any Marvel Universe movie.

In Avengers: End Game (2020), the surviving superheroes figure out how to go back in time and prevent Thanos from getting the Infinity Stones, thus bringing everyone back.  There are lots of tracking each other down and "we need to work together" scenes, and a long, long, loooo-ng battle.  The Snap is reversed, everyone returns, and the long, long, looo-ng batle continues, involving everyone who has ever appeared in any movie fighting with swords, monsters, and energy blasts. 

I fell asleep.  When I awoke, the battle was over, Thanos was dead, and about 20  superheroes are sitting by a lake, saying "I miss her" about True Loves who died before the Snap or during the battle (a slight exaggeration, but I did count five "I miss her" statements). 

But the movie isn't over: we have another 45 minutes depicting 2,000 other superheroes reuniting with their True Loves and setting up heterosexual nuclear families. Again and again and again!

Just when you think everyone is paired off or missing "her," Captain America has to go back in time to return the Infinity Stones to their proper place, so the whole thing doesn't happen again.  Except he comes back as an old man.  He explains that he decided to stay in 1947, reunite with his True Love, and live the next 80 years with her.  We close to the two in their 1940s Levittown tract house, dancing and gazing into each other's eyes.  

I get it; the sole purpose of being a superhero is to provide men and women with an opportunity to gaze into other's eyes forever.  This is the meaning of life, our sole reason for existing.  Gay people absolutely do not exist. Do you have to rub it in, over and over and over and over and over?

To be fair, Thor doesn't settle down on a farm with his True Love or miss Her.  He joins the Guardians of the Galaxy, fighting intergalactic crime with Peter Quill and Drax the Destroyer (both of whom miss Her).  

The Top 10 Dead Hunks of "The Witcher"

 

Bob liked the first episode of The Witcher, so we've...ugh...continued to watch.  It gets better -- the color palette expands, so we see mountains and forests; there's some comedic relief; there's less bragging about strangling people and puppies.  I still don't like it: jumping back and forth in time between the interlocking stories of three sets of characters, so you're constantly confused ("does this take place years before or just after the previous scene"); naked girls everywhere; not a single gay hint -- even a giant orgy consists entirely of male-female couples; and the annoying habit of introducing cute guys, only to have them garrotted in the next scene.  

Here are the top 10 dead hunks (I could only list the ones named in the episode or on the Witcher wiki; many other nameless hunks bit the dust):

The first plot arc features the Witcher traveling from kingdom to kingdom, where he kills monsters that are "impossible to kill" and has sex wtih ladies.  He eventually encounters the people in the second and third plotlines, at various time periods in their history.  Meanwhile, his comic relief sidekick, the Bard, tries to pick up every lady he sees, and has to constantly flee from the irate husbands and boyfriends of the men he's cuckolded.

Their corpses include:

1. Mikal (Bogdan Iancu, top photo), from the kingdom of Timeria, is killed by a werewolf-type monster.

2. The Witcher Remus (Gudmundur Thorvaldsson, the one with his tongue out) offers to do the killing, but fails.

3. Lord Urcheon (Bart Edwards)a knight cursed with a hedgehog face, dies off-camera immediately after being introduced.

In the second plot, a girl named Yennifer trains to become a mage (a magician who advises kings).  Although she is the most powerful mage in the history of the universe, she is underemployed as a babysitter to kings' neglected wives and boorish sons.  Eventually, after 30 years of this (shown in various scenes that aren't in chronological sequence), she goes rogue, conjures up a lot of orgies, has sex with lots of men, and tries to find her destiny.  And maybe hook up with her first boyfriend, or was that a scene from earlier in her history?  Who knows?

Her corpses include:

4. Prince Eyk (Jordan Renzo) whom she is babysitting and flirting with, gets his throat cut on a dragon-hunting expedition.

5. Atlan Kirk, a fellow mage, is killed during one of the climactic battles.

The third plot features Ciri, the Chosen One, destined to become the most powerful being in the universe, but so far just a princess who goes into hiding when her kingdom is conquered and the entire royal family commits suicide.  Some scenes take place before the kingdom-genocide, some immediately after, and some long after.  She gets a boyfriend at one point, but he dumps her because of all the "death and destruction" that follows her around.  

Her corpses include:

6. Sir Lazlo (Maciej Musial), her bodyguard, dies during the first-episode genocide (see previous article).

7. King Eist (Bjorn Haraldsson), her father, likewise.

8. Adon (Kriztian Czakvari) invites Ciri to stay with his family in a refugee camp, and is promptly skewered to death.

9. Anton (Rob Malone), a friend of her childhood, now blaming her for causing the kingdom to fall, gets blasted by a magical scream.

10. Nadbor (Jack Wolfe) the son of a farm family that has taken Ciri in, gets blasted by a fireball five minutes after meeting her. 

See also: The Witcher: Everyone Dies.

"The Magnificent Seven": Actually Nine, Including a Gay Couple

 Movie night this week was The Magnificent Seven (2016), a remake of the 1960 movie, which was in turn a remake of The Seven Samurai (1954), neither of which I have seen.  Apparently I'm not missing much.  It was 133 minutes of killing people.

In the Old West in 1879, snarling, sneering, moustache-twirling cartoon villain Bogue and his absurdly huge army of miscreants storm into the idyllic frontier town of Rose Creek, demanding that the townsfolk sell their land for a pittance and agree to be worked to death in his mines.  Anyone who refuses will be killed.  To show that he is serious, he kills about 20 of them on the spot, and burns down the church.

Cut to another town, where Emma, who lost her husband, and her friend Teddy (Luke Grimes, top photo) have settled.  When bounty hunter Sam Chisholm (Denzel Washington) rides in and kills everyone in the town tavern, they ask if he would be interested in killing Bogue and liberating the town.  He hates Bogue, so he agrees.  He gathers a diverse group of marksmen to help:

1.-3. Teddy, Chisholm, and Emma

4. Mischievous scamp Josh Faraday (Chris Pratt)

5-6. Former Confederate soldier Goodnight Robichaux (Ethan Hawke) and his boyfriend, an Asian knife-thrower named Billy Rocks (Byung-hun Lee, left)

7. Vasquez (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), a Mexican outlaw.  One of his colleagues doesn't like Mexicans.

8. Jack Horne, a retired Indian-killer who is not all there.

9. Red Harvest (Martin Sensmeier, below), a Comanche who speaks no English, and uses a bow and arrow instead of a gun.  He bonds with Jack Horne, for some reason.

Chisholm is black in 1879, but his race is irrelevant.  It is surprising, therefore, that "learning to overcome racial prejudice" is part of the character development of at least four of the Magnificent Nine.  

And while I'm on the topic of plot inconsistencies, where, exactly, is this town?  Chisholm works out of Wichita, Kansas, but the Comanche territory was west Texas and eastern New Mexico, but the town is three days by horseback from Sacramento, California.  I guess the writers didn't bother to look at a map.  Exteriors were filmed in Louisiana, Colorado, and New Mexico.

After the colorful "gathering the gang" scenes, the Magnificent Nine roll into Rose Creek and kill about 300 of Bogue's men, plus the townsfolk who joined his side.  How are they better than Bogue?  

Bogue owns hundreds of towns throughout the Wild West, so he could just let this one go -- but no, he's snarling and unstable, so he decides to ride out himself with his absurdly huge army and kill everyone.  

It  takes three days to get to Sacramento, and three days to get back, so the Magnificent Nine have just under a week to whip the surviving townsfolk into an army -- a problem because most of them have never touched a gun before (in the Wild West?).  They also rig the town with booby traps and lots of dynomite.  

The Bogue army arrives, and everyone kills everyone.  Body after body, death after death, for about twenty minutes.  All of Bogue's army, most of the surviving townsfolk, and most of the Magnificent Nine die.  I'm wondering why you want to liberate a town full of corpses.  Teddy, Emma, Red Harvest, and Chisholm survive, and Emma voice-overs that the Seven were "magnificent." 

Beefcake:  No. A lot of close-ups of unshaven, sweaty men staring at each other just before they shoot.

Other Sights: Rose Creek is a stereotypic Hollywood one-street town, which nevertheless manages to support a hotel and a restaurant.  How many visitors other than assassins does it get?

Gay Characters: #5-6.  Apparently the writers intended for them to be gay, but the studio insisted on just a subtext, to allow for deniability: "What?  No, you're reading too much into it.  They're just friends. Gay people didn't exist in the Old West."

Heterosexism:  Surprisingly, there are only a few scattered references to heterosexual desire, and no one falls in love. I was very surprised that Emma didn't hook up with Teddy or Chisholm.

Body Count:  Endless.  

My Grade: I have a new rule.  No movies with more than 58 deaths.  How did anyone in the Old West survive?

"Legend": Tom Cruise Grins, Tim Curry Growls, and Everyone Gets Drenched with Pollen

When Legend premiered in April 1986, I was living in West Hollywood, where everyone assumed that 23 year-old Tom Cruise was gay.  But no one I knew saw it.  Last night we watched the director's cut, and I found out why.  

Scene 1: In his brightly-lit lair, the Lord of Darkness (Tim Curry with horns and 9-inch nails) gives plot exposition to his lackey, Blix, who speaks in rhyming couplets:  He was about to make it so the sun wouldn't rise again.  But then two unicorns appeared out of nowhere, so Blix has to get rid of them first.  Also, the only thing that can stop his plan is inn-o-cence.

Scene 2:  Inn-o-cence, aka Lili, is wandering slowly through a forest where bails of pollen, flower petals, and glitter are floating around, obscuring the camera and covering her face (how can she breathe?).  There are several long close-up shots of her face as she grins idiotically.  She is apparently very high.

Eventually she arrives at a peasant's house, where she can't seem to remember her lines.  

Peasant woman:  "Would you like a biscuit?"

Lili:  Grins idiotically.  "Ummm....what?  Oh...um....I love coming here."  

Peasant woman:  "I'll get you a biscuit."

Scene 3:  Back to the forest obscured by bails of pollen.  Lili yells "Jack!" about a hundred times.  Then Jack (Tom Cruise) appears, and she says "Jack!" another hundred times, while he grins idiotically.  Lots of tight close ups of their faces covered with glittery stuff.  Jack has bad teeth.

  Then they stare at each other for a long, long time.  Just when I think that he's feral and doesn't speak, Jack says that he'll finally take her to the place she's been begging to go to for months.  

Scene 4:  Stalked by Blix and his comic-relief lackeys, Jack and Lili go to the place, a nondescript piece of the pollen-drenched forest, and stare for a long, long time, while I wonder what the big deal is.  Then two unicorns appear. "They'll only be here for a short time," Jack says.  Then why was Lili begging to see them for months?

Lili starts to walk over to them.  Jack stops her in a panic. "NO!  You absolutely cannot go near a unicorn!  It is absolutely forbidden!   It is the worst sin of the pollen-drenched forest!"

But Lili ignores him and walks over, while Jack stares in horror.  She touches a unicorn horn.  They go rogue and run around her, neighing angrily, while she kneels and screams.  (No one notices that Blix and his lackeys have used the confusion to blow a poison dart into one of the unicorns.)

Wait -- why were Blix and his lackeys stalking the girl?  How did they know that she would lead them to the unicorns?  Or does the Lord of Darkness want her, too?  Her inn-o-cence is a threat, or something?

Scene 4:  Later, Lili gets horny (she touched a unicorn horn and got horny -- get it?), and tries to seduce Jack, who is not sure if he's ready for sex.  She sweetens the deal by throwing her ring into the lake and offering to marry him if he retrieves it.  So he dives into the water and looks around.

At that moment, Blix and his lackeys approach the dead unicorn and sever its horn, which is the source of all magic in the world.  Huh?

Suddenly the pollen-drenched forest turns into a snow-drenched forest, where snowflakes and for some reason bubbles obscure the camera and collect on people's faces.   The lake is now iced over.  Lili runs away, leaving Jack to drown.  But he breaks through the ice and survives.

Scene 5:   Lili runs to the peasant's house where she got the cookie. Everyone inside is frozen in place.  She hides as Blix and his cronies come in to fool around with magic and do some plot exposition. 

 Then the Lord of Darkness shows up: they have successfully killed one unicorn, but a second is left, so the sun will rise again.  Take care of it!

Meanwhile, Jack is approached by Honeythorn Gump (David Bennett), a pedophile's dream -- a little boy in a loincloth -- who is extremely high.  He stares at Jack for a long time, grinning idiotically.  Then he gets his eyes to bulge and yells "A human touched a unicorn!  The worst sin in the pollen-drenched forest!  Did you think you could perform such a sacrilege without consequences?"  Hey, it was Lili.  Jack tried to stop her.

Honeythorn says that he won't kill and eat Jack if he answers a riddle.  Jack answers, and Honeythorn has a meltdown, screaming and kicking and rolling around on the ground.  Wait -- you agreed to the riddle penalty.  

Then, all nice, Honeythorn says "Let's gather the gang and try to fix this."  His lackeys consist of two comic-relief dwarves and a ball of light that looks identical to the pollen floating around, but turns into a horny fairy when no one is looking.

That's enough scene-by-scene analysis.  Next there's a lot of staring while grinning idiotically, some magical foes, and the Lord of Darkness (who suddenly has a father, the King of Darkness) deciding that he wants to marry Lili. 

 Jack rejects the horny fairy, who then refuses to rescue him from a dungeon (fortunately, she rescues her friends, who are in the same dungeon, so he can kind of tag along)  He saves the day by reflecting sunlight into the castle, which blasts the Lord of Darkness off into space.  

Back in the pollen-drenched forest, Jack says goodbye to Honeythorn and his lackeys, kisses Lili for a long time, makes plans to see her tomorrow, and then returns to Honeythorn and his lackies.  Wait -- he said goodbye, as if he wouldn't see them again, and one five-minute-long kiss later, he's back?  None of this makes any sense.

Beefcake:  Nope.  No one shows any skin except for the prepubscent David Bennet and Kiran Shah, who plays an elf saved from being baked in a pie.  Obviously you take a guy's clothes off before cooking him.

Gay Characters: Maybe Honeythorn is into Jack.  Jack is unwilling to have sex with Lili or the horny fairy, but that may be because he's a forest creature, and sex represents civilization or something.

Heterosexism:  Jack and Lili are in love, of course.  The Lord of Darkness turns out to be hetero-horny.

My Grade: Ugh. Tell your actors to lay off the weed, and cut back on the pollen!

"Godless": A Godforsaken Reduplication of Jigsaw-Puzzle Plotlines About Men in a Town Without Men

Godless, on Netflix, is reputedly about an Old West town occupied entirely by women, with the two major characters a lesbian couple.  Wow, a tv series about a1960s radical lesbian separatist commune!  I shy away from it for several years because of the title -- "godless," keying into the myth that when you are gay, God abandons you.  Plus if it's all !00% women, there won't be any beefcake!  But Bob likes queer representatioon in all of its forms, and we're running out of things to watch, so...

Scene 1: Creede, Colorado 1884.  A stark, foggy landscape.  Howling wind. Ugly Moustache Guy and his posse ride into town.  All of the men have been killed -- some hanged, some shot, and some in a train wreck.  A woman kneels by a body, singing hymns.  

So the town wasn't built as a women-only lesbian feminist commune.  All of the men were killed.

Meanwhile, Young Guy (Jack O'Connell) rides up to an isolated ranch house.  He's been shot in the neck.  A woman and her preteen daughter take care of him.  

Meanwhile, Scary  Old Guy and his possee knock on the door of Elijah Graham, M.D. (Wait -- I thought there were no women in town...  So everyone was killed except the town doctor?).  He's been shot in the arm, and it will have to be amputated.  He introduces himself as Frank Griffin, and says "Don't worry, I won't die.  I've seen my death, and this isn't it."

I'm lost.  Who are these people?  And for a town with no men, there certainly are a lot of men.  

Scene 2: An elderly Paiute woman treats Young Guy by burning his wounds.  Gross!  But at least he has a shirtless shot.

Meanwhile, Yet Another Man in the Town Without Men awakens in an Indian village, with mud or something covering his eyes.  Grosser and grosser!  He walks out of the hut nude -- nice butt and flash of penis -- and complains that the cure isn't working.  

Meanwhile, Elijah has finished amputating the arm of Scary Old Guy (yes, we see the bloody arm).  

And at the Ranch, Young Guy wakes up and tries to dress.

Yet Another Man is wearing a sheriff's badge, so I'll call him Sheriff.  He sees well enough to pick flowers and put them on his wife's grave. 

He's about to die ("my twilight has come"), so he apologizes fro being a screw-up, and for disliking their daughter  Trudy ("but I can't forgive her for what she done to you").  Apparently wife died in childbirth.  

Pan out to the tombstone.  Sheriff's wife died  in 1882, two years before the town lost all its men.  Now we just need to meet Trudy to find out how much time has passed.

I'm actually cheating.  This is the second time I've gone through this episode.  The first time, I had no idea what was going on.  The second time, I'm stopping the streaming and taking notes, and paying attention to seemingly trivial details, and I think I've almost got it figured out.

Scene 3: Sheriff rides into town, where women are working as barbers and carpenters.  They don't seem to like him very much. 

Meanwhile, Young Guy goes outside and gets introduced: Alice Fletcher, her Paiute mother-in-law, and her son Truckee (sorry, they have long hair, so I thought they were a girl -- besides a town with only women)

Sheriff goes home, where Middle Aged Woman berates him for not greeting the Little Girl, who is deaf (I'll bet one of them is his daughter Trudy!) He berates her for wearing Albert's pants and hat -- a woman wearing men's clothes looks ridiculous.  Women do all of the masculine-coded jobs in town, and you're worried about costume?

The cure didn't work -- it just gave him an erection.

Aha!  The woman is Aunt Maggie, so the deaf girl must be Trudy, so it's been about five years since Wife died, or two years since the men were all killed.  

Scene 4: Scary Old Guy and his possee invade a church. (Hey, there are men in the congregation!  I thought....).

 He berates them for committing adultery, fornicating, and not Loving Thy Neighbor.  If they don't change their ways, Roy Goode will come and kill them all.  (I guess Roy Goode is like Krampus)

Scene 5: Night.  Alice from the Ranch is teaching Truckee to read.  Later she goes out to the barn and tells Young Guy that as soon as he's well, he's got to leave.  But he proves that he's good with horses, so she changes her mind.

Meanwhile, Ugly Moustache Guy from Scene 1 and his posse are scouring the hills, looking for Krampus, aka Roy Goode (probably Young Guy).

Back at the Ranch: a young woman shows up with her baby, which has scarlet fever, and there's no doctor in town (What about Elijah? Is the in a different town from the women-only town?).  Alice agrees to use Paiute medicine. 

Young Guy asks how Alice, the Paiute woman, and Truckee ended up on the ranch, and she  tells a long, convoluted story (good, the plot's not complicated enough yet!) about how she came to town to meet her fiancee, but on the way back to the ranch, they were caught in a tidal wave, and he was killed.  That doesn't really answer the question.  And Truckee is obviously from a second marriage, so there's another dead husband, no doubt with another complicated back story.

Scene 6: Ugly Moustache Guy rides into town and stops to flirt with the schoolmarm and stare at a cowboy's bulge.  He introduces himself as the Marshall.   

Next he visits Sheriff McNue (The Blind Sheriff from Scene 2!  If it was another sheriff, I'd be outta here!)

He's looking for Frank Griffin -- the Scary Old Guy who got his arm amputated.  He gives us a plot dump about what happened in Creede  (aha, a different town from the wonen-only town, just to make things confusing!): 

Scary Old Guy and his possee tried to rob a train, but Krampus, aka Roy Goode (aha!) arrived and stole the money.  He also shot Scary Old Guy in the arm (aha!).

Two members of his gang (apparently regulars, played by Matthew and Russel Dennis-Lewis) started to rape a young woman, so the townsfolk grabbed them and tried to lynch them.  Scary Old Guy didn't like this, so he and his posse killed everyone in town.

Ok, so we have three towns:

1. Creede, where everybody was murdered. They made it look like men only in Scene 1 in order to confuse us.

2. Unnamed town with Elijah and the church.

3. Unnamed town with no men except the Sheriff , the Undertaker who plays chess with him, and the unnamed cowboy with the bulge.  What happened to the men?  Maybe the tidal wave that killed Alice's fiancee?  

I went back and searched for the name of  Town #3.  If you freeze frame when Sheriff enters, you see the name on a building in the distance -- LaBelle. Or it could be the name of a store.

Scene 7:  At the taven, the Marshall discovers what happened to almost all of the men in Town #3 (LaBelle, probably) -- mining accident.  Nothing to do with the dead people in Scene 1 or the tidal wave in Alice's story.. Then why did I sit through all of those plotlines twice?

Scene 8: Sheriff rides up to the Ranch to ask about the stranger Alice has living with her. Krampus admits to being Roy Goode, who stole the train money from Scary Old Guy, so his posse would chase him and not kill everyone in the town.  A noble act, but Sheriff arrests him anyway.

If we have a sheriff, why do we need a marshall, too? They have the same job.  

Last scene: Marshall looks down on a town (I think LaBelle)  and says "God help you folks."

God help us for sitting through this twie, plus freeze framing, to figure out what's going on.  Why three towns, and the one you think it is, it isn'?  Why two tragedies -- or three, if Alice's tidal wave is something different.  A marshall and a sheriff/  Two bad guys, of whom one might not be bad? Why reduplicate the complexity?  Thisi isn't entertainment, it's homework.

And where are the lesbians?

"Come Away": Alice Liddel and Peter Pan are Half in Love with Easeful Death

 

I'm a big fan of all things Alice in Wonderland, and while I don't care for the Peter Pan mythos, the premise of Come Away (2020) sounded intriguing.  Alice and Peter as siblings who visit Wonderland and Neverland together?  And by the way, they're black.  Race relations in Victorian society!  So I plopped down my $19.95 to Vudu's Theater at Home service the day it started streaming.

And then I started kicking myself.  

1. Dreary, depressing, obsessed with death -- ok, no problem. -- have you actually read the Alice and Peter Pan books?  Stay a child forever, if you can.  Growing up is terrible.  You have to do icky things like get a job and get married, and then you die. 

Come, hearken then, ere voice of dread, with bitter tidings laden, shall summon to unwelcome bed ⁠a melancholy maiden!

2. Race is irrelevant Victorian society -- ok, no problem.  Maybe the black actors were cast because they aced their auditions. 

3. But it is unforgiveable to make us slosh through the melancholy, dreary, painfully depressing world of adults, where it's always winter but never Christmas (sorry, wrong book) to the bitter end, and Alice and Peter NEVER GO ANYWHERE!  

They're supposed to be exploring Wonderland and Neverland, for chrissakes!

The plot: Alice, Peter, and their older brother David live in dreary Victorian England with their progressive parents, Jack (David Oyelowo, top photo) and Rose (Angelina Jolie), having pretend adventures.  Then one day they are all playing pirates when David falls into the lake and drowns.  

The family falls apart.  Jack descends to a world of gambling, gambling debts, and child neglect.  Rose, delusional and about to die of grief, takes to her bed and drinks.  Snobbish Aunt Eleanor arrives, plotting to send Alice away to boarding school, which strikes me as an excellent idea, but is presented as a fate worse than death.  Well, a fate the same as death.  

Don't let the smiling faces fool you.  After the first five minutes, no one ever smiles again -- for the rest of their lives.

Alice and David try to ease their pain by rumbling through the Victorian underworld, encountering tawdry real-life versions of the characters and situations of Neverland and Wonderland  For instance, a Mad Hatter prototype runs the pawn shop where they are trying to raise some cash to pay Dad's gambling debts.  

But there is no Wonderland.  There is no Neverland.  There is no nothing.   

Peter, who blames himself for David's death and the destruction of the family, never manages to move on.  He "never grows up," vanishing into his father's world of gambling, drinking, and death.   Alice grows up, marries Mr. Darling -- the same thing as death -- has three kids (Michael, Wendy, and John), and writes the books as a form of grief therapy.

So if Peter Pan comes through the window, he will be Wendy's uncle?

The books were actually written by J. M. Barrie and Lewis Carroll, who were living in England during this period and occasionally smiled. Wouldn't it have been cool if Alice and Peter met them?

Or if, like, they actually had the adventures the movie promises?

This lying, deceptive piece of con-artist garbage reminds me of The Bridge to Terabithia, which also lures you in with the promise of an alternate world fantasy, only to punch you in the stomach: "Fooled you! This is a movie about a child dying, but you already paid, so we don't care."

Beefcake: No.

Gay characters: None specified.

Heterosexism: Alice and Peter are siblings, so thankfully no pre-teen falling-in-love.

My grade: F-.

Who the Heck is Kumail Nanjiani, and Is He Gay?

"Kumail Nanjiana is now ripped as hell, and he is refreshingly honest about it!" my twitter feed exclaims.

Three questions:
1. Who the heck is Kumail Nanjiani?
2. Why is having a nice physique such a big deal?
3. Is he gay, posing with his boyfriend?

1. Who the heck is Kumail Nanjiani?

The twitter link goes to Comicsands, which I can't stand because there are two lines of text per page, hidden amid endless popups and slow-loading videos that scroll down with you.  So I checked wikipedia, just in case this obscure bodybuilder had his own page.

One of the 100 most influential people in the world, according to Time magazine!  Why have I never heard of him?

He was born in  Pakistan in 1978, but didn't show up on screen until a Saturday Night Live episode in 2008.  He had a recurring role on the buddy-lawyer series Franklin and Bash (2011-2014), and after that a lot of guest spots and voice roles: Prismo on Adventure Time, Skip Marouch on Bob's Burgers.

Nothing particularly influential so far.

Kumail's only significant role seems to be in The Big Sick (2017), which he also wrote with his then-wife Emily Gordon.  It's a slightly fictionalized memoir about their romance. dealing with cultural differences and Emily's life-threatening illness.  In the end, she recovers, and they break up.

It sounds awful.  Who wants to watch a movie about a life-threatening illness?  But, depressing or not, it was nominated for an Oscar for best screenplay, and pushed Kumail up into the ranks of the 100 most influential people in the world.

I'm pretty sure I could name 100 actors more influential than the star of one depressing movie, but ok, next question.

2. Why is having a nice physique such a big deal?

Apparently he was rather chunky just a few years ago.  Hitting the gym for the first time when you're over 40 is rather daunting, and Kumail deserves praise for sticking with it long enough to see results.













3. Is he gay, and posing with his boyfriend?

An article in Entertainment Weekly called Emily Gordon Kumail's "former wife," implying that they are divorced or she has died.  But Wikipedia just says that they've been married since 2007.  Which to believe?

He appeared in an episode of the Game of Thrones parody Gay of Thrones, but he doesn't play a gay character: one of the Queer Eye guys gives him a haircut.  That's entertaiment?

Also, Kumail and Emily are currently producing Little America, about the lives of immigrants.  Episode #8 features Rafiq (Haaz Sleiman), a gay refugee from Syria.

I'm going to go with "straight."

A straight guy who starred in a depressing movie and has a nice physique.  Big deal.

By the way, the other guy in the photo is Barry Keoghan, Kumail's costar in the upcoming superhero movie The Eternals.  

This is obviously a photo from a gay romance.  I wonder if he's gay in real life.

Google, here I come.