You may recall that last week I discussed taking my first flight on which free WiFi was available. I followed that up on Sunday with my second such flight, where I doubled my single movie from the first flight, narrowly fitting in two to what was described as a 3 hour and 45 minute flight. (It took a little bit longer than that, as it turned out, because air traffic control had to slow us down to avoid congestion above Melbourne. Or so I am told that's what the pilot said. I could not hear him over the general white noise of the aircraft, in his typically calm and quiet pilot voice.)
And because it was after all the day's baseball had been completed, I resisted the apparently irresistible pull of in-flight internet and got back to the basics of what I usually do on flights: watch movies.
Here are my thoughts on the two I watched.
How to set up 199 sequels
Will we ever tire of movies about exorcists? I suspect not. There's another Exorcist reboot coming this fall as well.
Julius Avery's The Pope's Exorcist was a fairly traditional example of such a movie, which is not to say it was bad. Actually, I quite enjoyed Russell Crowe's performance, injected as it is with a bit of humor.
But the movie apparently thinks we are ready for as many as 199 more in the Pope's Exorcist series.
Spoiler alert -- Crowe's character, Gabriele Amorth, emerges alive from his tanglings with a demon, or the actual devil, or whatever it may be. So does his colleague, Father Esquibel, played by Daniel Zovatto. It is revealed that the place they do their battle is one of 200 such sites on earth where fallen angels turned to demons are waiting to wreak havoc on the unsuspecting people who happen to live nearby.
In discussing that their may be 199 more places where they are needed, the two characters give each other that knowing glance and say things like "We have been put on this earth for a purpose" and "Okay, but I can't do it without a partner" and "Let me check with my agent to see if I am available to shoot the sequel." Okay maybe not that last one.
When you see this familiar setup occurring at the end of a movie that is hopeful of giving birth to multiple subsequent franchise instalments, it doesn't usually expand the potential field of future engagements so infinitely, and with such a precise number. It felt rather comical.
Also a bit comical: The family whose son gets possessed isn't checked in on before the closing credits, except for one priest telling another "The family returned to America and the boy made a full recovery." Now granted, this is supposed to be Crowe's character's story, not a portrait of the family, but it was almost as brief and hand wavy as "Poochie died on the way back to his home planet," albeit with a happier ending.
One possible limiting factor, at least in terms of the apparent intentions of the filmmakers, is that The Pope's Exorcist ends with a postscript about how Gabriele Amorth (a real person, apparently) continued performing exorcisms in service of the church until his death in 2016. Would you include such a postscript if you wanted to make 199 sequels? Perhaps it was a hedge against the film performing poorly and this being the only one.
However, the internet does confirm that a sequel is already in the works. Plus the story takes place in 1987, 29 years before Amorth's death, so that still indicates the possibility of numerous other demon-exorcising adventures in the years to come -- whether they be real or fanciful. Hey, it's worked for The Conjuring's Ed and Lorraine Warren, hasn't it?
My wife started to watch BlackBerry on my recommendation, as I finally broke down her unfounded objections by telling her it would remind her of Silicon Valley. But she had to stop because she was enjoying it too much yet finding it too hard to hear all the dialogue over the aforementioned ambient white noise. We'll watch it together at home, which is good because I am looking forward to my second viewing.
She had wanted to watch Cocaine Bear, which had been promised to her when she'd looked up online what might be playing on the flight. But either she checked in the wrong place or it had just hit its expiration date for available content.
So I steered her blindly toward the second movie I planned to watch, Colin West's Linoleum, thinking she might get a few laughs from it because it stars comedian Jim Gaffigan, in addition to featuring Rhea Seehorn, recently of Better Call Saul.
Unfortunately, it wasn't that sort of movie.
And the sort of movie it was was, like, almost exactly Donnie Darko.
I won't spoil too much about the plot, but I'll give you the general setup. Gaffigan plays the host of a science TV show like Bill Nye the Science Guy, focused specifically on astronomy, who gets booted from his show in favor of a younger man who looks almost just like him (also played by Gaffigan). So he considers trying to build a rocket to live out his failed astronomer dreams. Seehorn plays his wife and co-star on the show.
The number of allusions to Richard Kelly's 2001 cult film, a personal favorite, were so many that I had to stop counting. I'll do my best to recall them all here, two days later.
1) Both movies feature an object of unknown origin falling from the sky into a suburban neighborhood, displacing the family who lives in the house where it lands. It's part of a plane in Darko, a rocket in Linoleum.
2) Both films climax in a Halloween party at which someone is either run over or almost run over by a car. (Apparently, Linoleum is more hesitant in converting than Darko, as its car accident and rocket are both near misses, while the plane engine and the car are hits in the earlier film.)
4) Both movies present a high school setting in which an oddball boy and an oddball girl connect with one another, one of the two of them being new arrivals at the school.
3) Both movies feature suburbia and high school as mild satirical targets, including the usage of bullies.
5) Both movies feature a mysterious white-haired woman, who they call Grandma Death in Donnie Darko and whose identity is not immediately revealed in Linoleum. (We find out Grandma Death is Roberta Sparrow, who wrote a book about time travel.)
6) Both movies feature a shot set to music where the camera follows several characters through a setting, the excellent "Head Over Heels" high school montage in Darko and an example at the TV station where the science show is produced in Linoleum. Both sequences even feature a character meeting another character and shaking hands.
7) Both films want to fry our noodle with metaphysical and existential quandaries, with astronomy substituting for time travel here. But suffice it to say there are elements of the story that are not presented straightforwardly that imitate the notion of time travel.
8) Both movies try to get you in the end with an emotional denouement, with pretty different levels of success.
I have no doubt Colin West would own up to all these moments as intentional allusions, not just thefts. But their sheer quantity becomes embarrassing, even if you are doing it as a form of flattery to an obvious influence.
Linoleum gets to some semi-interesting places, but falls well short of its predecessor, as well as mildly short of a recommendation from me.
And with one plane flight, order is restored in my movie-centric world.
No comments:
Post a Comment