Pun Salad

Ah, Clint's still got it, as an actor and director.

He actually plays someone older in this movie. Specifically, Earl Stone, once a successful breeder and grower of daylilies. An opening scene sets up his character: he's a charming curmudgeon, beloved in the commercial flower-growing community (yes, that apparently exists). But at the price of neglecting his family, who are understandably pissed.

Jump forward about twelve years; Earl is still around, but he's neglected to adapt his business to modern ways, and it's in foreclosure. By a fortuitous coincidence, an attendee at his granddaughter's wedding hooks him up with local drug dealers, and before you know it, Earl's transporting cocaine around the USA for the cartel.

This relieves his monetary woes. And he helps various worthy causes after that. Being a mule is lucrative. But also (as you might guess) dangerous. His interactions with his superiors are initially fractious. But he charms most of them. Still, his cantankerous ways make him sort of a loose cannon, which a successful criminal organization cannot abide.

Also, his growing reputation within the cartel brings him to the attention of the DEA. Through informants, wiretaps, and surveillance, their net draws tighter.

It seems being in a Clint Eastwood movie appeals to a lot of people. Bradley Cooper (a seven-time Oscar nominee) plays a supporting role as a hotshot DEA agent. Also Michael Peña, Laurence Fishburne, Andy Garcia, Dianne Wiest, ….

Turns out (spoiler) the man who kills Don Quixote is also the guy who killed Han Solo. Did not see that coming.

On occasion, I have to say: the Netflix prediction algorithm thought I would like this a lot better than I did. IMDB deems the genres to be "Adventure, Comedy, Drama". Fine, I guess, but I have a genre of my own: "Apparently Made Under the Influence of Substances, Probably Most of Them Illicit".

Adam Driver plays Toby, a once-renowned movie director, recently relegated to doing commercial hackwork. But (somehow) he's gotten a green light to shoot his epic flick about Don Quixote, a project he had to abandon a decade previous.

Alas, things are not going well. Toby needs to recruit a wizened local shoemaker (hey, underneath the grime and scruffiness, that's Jonathan Pryce) to appear as his star. Who rapidly gets into his role by imagining Toby to be Sancho Panza. And they proceed to leave the moviemaking behind ("or do they?) as they traipse into rural Spanish hinterlands where they still remember the old movie… Things become surreal and nightmarish (sometimes disgustingly so) for poor Toby.

A consumer-note downside: the DVD has subtitles available only in Spanish. That's a real downer for a movie where people talk fast in various heavy accents.

You might like it better than I did. Because it's Terry Gilliam; Adam Driver and Jonathan Pryce are great actors; and a lot of stuff may have gone (insert high-pitched whizzing noise here) right over my head.

Well, this got decent reviews. (Unlike, say, Justice League.) And it's not bad, and actually good in spots.

An opening scene develops in an unexpected way: a car accident leads a kid to be transported to a mystical cavern where he meets a mystical wizard, who spouts mystical mumbo-jumbo at him, … and then, disappointed, transports him back to the scene of the car wreck, where his father is in bad shape, and blaming him for the crash.

Hey, that's not the way I remember the comic books going…

Ah, but then we leap a number of years into the future, where young Billy Batson gets separated from his mom at a carnival, turns into a very rebellious foster child, takes a mystical subway ride to that wizard's lair we saw before, where the wizard (apparently very desperate to transfer his mystical powers) bestows the magic word…

OK, that's pretty complicated. But the bottom line is that young Billy can transform himself into a (nameless, due to copyright hassles) superhero. But his adult heavily-muscled superhero bod is still operated by his adolescent boy brain. The movie turns into a laff riot, as he discovers exactly which superpowers he has.

But that kid from the opening scene has matured into everyone's favorite Bad Guy, Mark Strong. And he wangles his way back to the wizard's lair himself, and gains powers too. Conflict ahead!

The movie is wonderfully funny in spots. But it has a split personality, because there's considerable darkness too. For one thing: remember that I said Billy got lost at the carnival? Well, the details revealed later about that are a little disturbing…

Something a bit different today. One of the folks in the "NRPLUS" National Review group put out the following query:

For those of you who are not religious, what is the “genealogy” of your morals and what is your argument they should be universal?

My thumbnail response, at a length appropriate for Facebook:

As I type, it has a few likes. So, win.

Note that there's nothing in there about "universal". My guess is that human morality wouldn't apply to Klingons.

And if I had it to do over again, I'd add in "environment" to the "basic facts" that constrain and determine human survival and flourishing.

I'm also pretty sure that this approach isn't unique to me, it's just my distillation of arguments I've found compelling from other (deeper) thinkers.