We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
Action and the end of the world.
The ‘80s were a rough ride for Burt Reynolds, whose reign as a major box office draw came to an end early in the decade. But he still made some good movies in the second half of the decade, and I would count the 1987 action flick Malone as one of them.
Based on a William P. Wingate novel called Shotgun (why didn’t they just keep that title for the movie?), Malone finds Reynolds taking on the role of a CIA assassin named Richard Malone. After leaving the killing business behind, Malone hits the road – but then his Ford Mustang breaks down in a small Oregon town. He seeks help at a body shop run by Paul Barlow (Scott Wilson), who also offers to let him stay in the guest room in his house, which is right beside the body shop, while his car is out of commission. And oddly, Paul’s teenage daughter Jo (Cynthia Gibb) becomes instantly smitten with this mustachioed stranger. So much that she even goes searching through all of Malone’s possessions while he’s out of his room. Including the case that holds his gun.
Thankfully, Malone handles the teen admirer situation similar to the way Roger Moore's James Bond handled that sort of situation in For Your Eyes Only. No laws are broken... except the laws against murder, trespassing, and property destruction.
As it turns out, Paul and Jo are two of the very few people who are still living in this town. A wealthy and mysterious person named Charles Delaney (Cliff Robertson) has been buying up all the land their town sits on, and Paul is one of the last hold-outs. The Barlows don’t know why Delaney wants all this land, but the viewer will find out why, and he doesn’t have good intentions. So of course Malone has found himself dropped into this situation right when Delaney has decided to start using violent methods to drive Paul off his property.
Tracey Walter and Dennis Burkley play two of the henchmen Delaney sends to deal with the hold-outs... and when Malone easily gets rid of them, the violence continues escalating. This standoff becomes such a big deal, one of Malone’s CIA co-workers – Lauren Hutton as an agent named Jamie – is even sent to assassinate him. But she loves him too much to do that.
No one who’s familiar with ‘80s action movies will be surprised to see that Malone builds up to a climactic sequence where our hero raids the villain’s compound, a one man army against multiple enemies. Malone is no Dalton, but if you’re in the mood for an ‘80s action double feature this movie and Road House would be a fun pairing. Malone is an entertaining watch and Reynolds has some badass moments in it, so it’s surprising that this one doesn’t get mentioned very often. I had never even heard of it before stumbling across it this year, thirty-five years after it was released.
THE WALKING DEAD: SEASON TEN (2019 - 2020)
Fans of The Walking Dead went into season 9 aware that the characters of Rick and Maggie were only going to be around for a handful of episodes. Similarly, we knew going into season 10 that Michonne (Dania Gurira) would also be making an exit from the show. So that added a level of intrigue to watching the season play out. How could Michonne follow her significant other, the missing and presumed dead Rick, off the show when she had their two children to take care of? To kill her off would be too tragic. Not that The Walking Dead doesn't deal in tragedy quite often... it just feels like Rick and Michonne need to be reunited someday. We know Rick is alive, and they've announced that he's going to star in a movie, possibly a trilogy of movies. So Michonne needs to be alive as well. To orphan Rick's children in his absence would be going too far. (Considering you didn't already think something like the death of Glenn or Rick's older son Carl was already going too far.) Ultimately, they did manage to write Michonne off in a way that made enough sense. It doesn't seem completely likely that she would leave her kids behind in the midst of the continuing conflict with the group known as the Whisperers, but they gave her the best possible reason to head off on a solo journey, and she does so with the permission of her kids. That said, I didn't like Michonne's final episode all that much, because it's one of those where a character trips out and spends a portion of the episode having nightmares and/or hallucinations. I hate when they do that.
Michonne doesn't leave until the end of episode 13 in 16* episode season, so she doesn't miss much. The season actually starts off with it looking like the communities of Alexandria, the Hilltop, and Oceanside (the Kingdom is no more) are living in an uneasy peace with the Whisperers, the group of filthy weirdos who walk among the zombies with zombie skin masks on, doing the bidding of the woman known as Alpha (Samantha Morton). Alpha has explained to the communities that there is territory they're not to tread in, and they do their best not to cross the line. But when things happen like a satellite dropping out of orbit and catching the forest on fire, it's difficult to strictly obey the rules. Ad there's at least one person who has no interest in following the rules: Carol (Melissa McBride), who wants to kill Alpha for murdering her adopted son.
The Walking Dead has been referred to as a soap opera with zombies, and there's certainly enough drama going on in this season to fill a soap opera. Michonne and her kids are still dealing with the loss of Rick. Carol is fueled by anger and grief. Daryl (Norman Reedus) seems to have a nice thing going on, hanging out with his Dog and with Connie (Lauren Ridloff) - who is deaf, and Daryl is even learning some sign language to communicate with her. I "ship" Daryl and Connie in a big way... but then Connie goes missing for a large chunk of the season, due to an accident caused by an overzealous Carol. Connie's sister Kelly (Angel Theory) is going deaf as well. Carol's ex Ezekiel (Khary Payton) has cancer. Alpha's daughter Lydia (Cassady McClincy) is struggling to fit in with the people of the civilized communities, and befriends fellow outcast Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). Of course, Negan doesn't fit in because he was the villain of some previous seasons. And killed fan favorite Glenn. Rosita (Christian Serratos) has a daughter with Siddiq (Avi Nash), is dating Gabriel (Seth Gilliam), and is still lusted over by Eugene (Josh McDermott). For a while. Eugene finally decides he needs to move on from Rosita - and does so by boosting a radio signal and managing to contact a female survivor in a community they've never heard of before. The relationship between Yumiko (Eleanor Matsuura) and Magna (Nadia Hilker) is crumbling. Siddiq is suffering from PTSD after seeing the Whisperers murder several of his friends in front of him. And that's not all. Yeah, there's plenty of drama going on.
The Siddiq storyline is one of the saddest elements of the season, and it doesn't end well. Siddiq doesn't make it out of this season alive. He doesn't even make it to the halfway point. It felt way too early to kill him off, especially since Carl gave his life in season 8 to make sure Siddiq would survive... But while Siddiq was only around for a couple seasons for viewers, he was part of the Alexandria community for more than six years in the timeline of the show.
I really liked how the Whisperers story was handled in season 9, and I continue to like that story throughout season 10. With her daughter staying at Alexandria, Alpha has reason to want to take these people down. And with Carol wanting to take down Alpha, there's a mother vs. mother story at the center of this season. We see more of the inner workings of the Whisperers, we see the flashbacks to the beginning of the bond between Alpha and Beta (Ryan Hurst), finding out how he became devoted to her. We also meet a new character called Gamma (Thora Birch), who starts out so devoted to Alpha that she even kills her own sister to keep their group safe. But her dedication wanes as the season goes on. It also starts to look like Alpha is going to get a new lackey: Negan, who escapes from Alexandria and joins up with the Whisperers. Negan and Alpha even have sex... which is pretty disgusting. Imagine how dirty and stinky Alpha must be.
There are some awesome action sequences in this season, and great moments that come out of the Whisperer war. This situation is handled in a much better and more interesting way than the war with Negan's group the Saviors was handled a couple seasons ago. One of the best episodes of the season is called Stalker and plays like a slasher movie: using a series of underground tunnels, Beta is able to infiltrate Alexandria by crawling out of an Alexandrian's grave. Wielding two knives, he then goes house-to-house and starts slashing the residents. Beta is a hulking beast, like many slashers before him, and there's even a moment where he appears to be killed... and then rises for more. The following episode is pretty great as well, with the Whisperers carrying out an assault on the Hilltop community, launching flammable tree sap into the place and all over our heroes. As one of my favorite characters, Jerry (Cooper Andrews), says when they're first mysteriously hit by splashes of sap: "Smells like a Christmas tree." The next episode after that ranks highly as well - and serves as a terrific example of the fact that The Walking Dead learned its lesson and no longer waits to have all major events happen in premieres or finales.
The Whisperer war reaches a very satisfactory end in the season finale, episode 16. *But wait, there's more! Season 10 actually consists of 22 episodes.
The season was supposed to end at 16, but then the pandemic hit and the airing of the season finale had to be delayed several months. The start of production on season 11 was also delayed, but AMC and the show's producers took the opportunity to knock six smaller scale "bonus episodes", which they described as deep dives into characters. Some of these episodes used ideas that were intended for season 11, while others are clearly just filler.
After leaving the show in the middle of season 9, Lauren Cohan signed up to star in a series for a different network. That series didn't last long, so she returns to The Walking Dead and the role of Maggie at the end of the Whisperer conflict, just in time to get her own bonus episode. In this episode, she has to deal with the fact that Negan, the man who killed her husband Glenn, is now moving about freely in her old community. We also find out that Maggie has been with a community that was attacked by a villainous group called the Reapers. Which is frustrating; immediately after the Whisperers have been wiped out, now we find out there are Reapers around as well. These human group battles are getting tired - and the Reapers seem especially unnecessary when other characters are off discovering a community we'll come to know as the Commonwealth.
Eugene went off on a journey to meet his radio friend, accompanied by Ezekiel and Yumiko, and along the way they met a very lively new character called Princess (Paola Lazaro). Then they were captured by the Commonwealth, and Princess gets her own bonus episode while in captivity.
Another bonus episode shows us the back story of how Daryl got his Dog, revealing that he had a romance with a woman named Leah (Lynn Collins) during the season 9 time jump. This was totally unexpected to me, because I've been rooting for Daryl and Connie to get together. Now we've got Leah in the mix. Daryl and Carol have words at the end of his episode, and Carol gets a bonus episode that feels the most like unneeded filler.
The bonus episode where Gabriel and Aaron (Ross Marquand) run into a douchebag played by Robert Patrick wasn't the greatest thing, either.
But the very last episode of this 22 episode super-sized season is quite good. It's called Here's Negan, and goes back to the beginning of the zombie apocalypse to show us the last days Negan had with his late wife Lucille (Morgan's real life wife Hilarie Burton). Some viewers will never like Negan, despite the fact that the show is doing its best to redeem him in some way, and it's understandable why some would reject that, given what Negan did. But I thought his bonus episode was by far the best of the bunch.
The Walking Dead doesn't have the viewership it once did, but I think season 10 was a really strong season overall... and a better season than some that got more viewers.
CHILDREN OF MEN (2006)
Director Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men doesn’t have a very interesting or appealing title as far as I’m concerned (and that’s not the fault of Cuarón or his co-writers on the script, as the film is based on a novel by P.D. James), but the film itself is great. I would even go so far as to call it an underseen classic. A hidden gem waiting to be unearthed by more movie fans who aren’t yet part of its cult following.
The story is set in 2027, by which time eighteen years have passed since the last time a human baby was born into the world. Human females suddenly became infertile, and science still hasn’t been able to figure out why. But humanity isn’t facing its extinction with peace. Crime and terrorism are out of control. Governments are still acting fascistic. And the way this is all depicted, it's very believable. In the midst of the mess, we meet a depressed man named Theo Faron (Clive Owen), who life has understandably been in the dumps ever since his young son died in the flu pandemic of 2008. That was an event that also led to end of Theo’s marriage to his son’s mother, Julian (Julianne Moore). When we meet him, Theo is – as Owen described him – an alcoholic, out-of-shape mess. But then he gets the chance to be an unlikely hero when Julian comes back into his life.
Julian is part of a group of dissidents who fight back against the British government, which rounds up illegal immigrants, puts them in camps, then deports them. The dissident group has come into contact with an illegal immigrant from Africa named Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey), and since Theo has a cousin with government contacts they ask him to help them get transit papers so they can get Kee safely from London to the coast. They don’t say why it’s so important that Kee travel, and it doesn’t mean much to Theo. It isn’t after he has secured joint transit papers for himself and Kee that he realizes why Julian wants to protect the girl. Kee is pregnant. The first human female to get pregnant in nearly twenty years.
Everything falls apart, Julian is murdered, and it comes down to Theo – along with midwife Miriam (Pam Ferris) – to keep Kee safe on her journey. She’s going to the coast in hopes of meeting with a group called the Human Project, which might be able to give her safe haven. Away from England and the fascist government. Getting Kee to the coast turns out to be a hellish ordeal, and Cuarón did an incredible job of bringing the harrowing journey to the screen. The most popular moments in the film are action sequences that Cuarón, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, and their collaborators were able to make appear to take place in long takes. They’re actually multiple takes that were seamlessly put together, but they were impressive technical achievements nonetheless. And the sequence that follows Theo through a refugee camp city that has turned into a war zone, dodging bullets while trying to rescue Kee (who has fallen into the clutches of the film’s villains, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor and Charlie Hunnam), is very intense.
Theo comes into contact with a variety of interesting characters over the course of the story, but no write-up of this movie can go by without mention of Michael Caine’s long-haired pot dealer Jasper. He’s a longtime friend of Theo’s, and Caine’s chose to play the character like an older version of a late friend of his: the legendary John Lennon.
Children of Men is a great movie. Topical, intelligent, gripping. It deserves to have a lot more fans than it does, because it’s up there as one of the best movies to be released in the last twenty years.
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