The Librarian: Return to King Solomon's Mines (2006)

  This movie is basically a shameless made-for-TV rip-off of all three Indiana Jones movies (four if you count Crystal Skull, which we all know doesn't exist) as well as Casablanca and Romancing the Stone, but you know what?  That's okay.  It doesn't have to be high art.  It's totally fine to be fun and silly and take liberties with source material.  

Flynn Carson (Noah Wyle) is living the life of a Librarian, running around the globe, keeping magical artifacts from falling into the wrong hands.  A scroll sent to him from Egypt kicks off an adventure a little closer to home as Flynn discovers that his father was somehow involved in keeping the secret of the lost mines of King Solomon, a fabled vault of treasures including a book of spells with the power to affect space and time.  With the help of archeologist Emily Davenport (Gabrielle Anwar), Flynn must decipher clues to the location of the mines left by his father before a ruthless group of mercenaries.  

If you liked the TV show, this is more of the same.  It's currently streaming on Tubi.

Wonder Woman 1984 (2020)

 Happy day after Christmas!  Hope everyone who celebrated did so safely within their bubble or used the appropriate technology to visit.  I video chatted with my family and I have to say it felt exactly the same as being there except better because I could drink my coffee and play with my cats at the same time.

One of my family's holiday traditions is to go to the movies and this year, I went to my couch.  There has been a lot of controversy over Warner Bros. decision to release their 2020 and 2021 movies digitally at the same time as in theaters.  I won't presume to know the ins-and-outs of the business decisions behind it or speculate on how this will affect theaters in the future.  Personally, I really appreciated not having to deal with other people, closed captions, and the ability to pause.

Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) has settled into the decades following WWI with skill if not enthusiasm.  She works as an anthropologist at the Smithsonian and moonlights as Wonder Woman, stopping crime in the streets of D.C.  One of those crimes was a robbery of black market antiquities fronting as a mall jewelry store.  One of the artifacts, a rather unremarkable citrine, ends up at the museum in the hands of the resident gemologist, Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig).  Between the two, Barbara and Diana translate the stone's band to reveal that it is capable of granting wishes.  Neither initially believes it's the real deal but failing pyramid schemer Max Lord (Pedro Pascal) is convinced it can turn his life around and he will stop at nothing to use the power of the stone.

Is this the best Wonder Woman movie?  Not by a long shot.  Is this even a good sequel?  Not really.  It is exceptionally saccharine, none of the physics makes sense, and it feels overly long.  Do you know what was great about it, though?  I managed to sit through the entire thing in one shot.  In a year where I have really struggled to watch movies and have DNF'd more than any year since I've been doing this blog, I watched all two and a half hours of WW84 without being bored, frustrated, or stressed.  Merry Christmas to me.

Also, Chris Pine.  In a fannypack.  Worth the subscription to HBO Max right there.  

Wonder Woman 1984 is currently streaming on HBO Max until 24 Jan and in theaters.

The Naked City (1948)

  I blew off last week entirely because I was doing Christmas shit.  I kept trying to watch Sunshine on Hulu but "And Then There Were None" set in space was too stressful.  This weekend is going a little better.  95% of all my preparations are done.  Okay, maybe 90%.  Fuck, 85%.  We're going to stop thinking about this!

A woman has been murdered in New York City.  Lieutenant Muldoon (Barry Fitzgerald) and his rookie Halloran (Don Taylor) are assigned the case.  They pound the pavement, question suspects, follow leads no matter how thin.  They won't rest until a killer (or two) is brought to justice.

This is the granddaddy of police movies.  You can see the echoes of it in a thousand later films and TV shows.  "There's eight million stories in the naked city.  And this is one of them."  Even J. P. McGillicuddy, a thing I thought my dad made up, is from this movie.  Shot on location (mostly), the film is deeply indebted to the idea of New York City as a character.  It goes to lengths that seem a little transparent now to convince the viewer that everyone in the film is a real citizen, not an actor, even though it's probably the same number of extras as any other NYC film.

Even without the gimmicks, this is a great whodunit that never loses its airy feel.  Fitzgerald is wonderful as the twinkly-eyed, pipe-smoking lieutenant, alternating between Old Irish charm and steel.  Not all of the jokes still land because times have changed in seventy years but the ones that do are great.  It is an excellent, easy-day kind of movie.  Maybe it's raining and you need something fresh but still comforting.  Maybe you've baked eight dozen cookies and you need something that doesn't beep at you every ten minutes.  No judgment.  

It's currently streaming on the Criterion Channel and on HBO Max.

Samson and Delilah (1949)

  For our last entry this week we move from China slightly further west to the Middle East via Cecil B. DeMille.  So, Burbank.

Samson (Victor Mature) is young, carefree, and blessed by God with incredible strength.  He is also a leader of an oppressed people but is more interested in wooing one of the ruling Philistines.  He has his eye on Semadar (Angela Lansbury) but she is promised to the Lord Governor Ahtur (Henry Wilcoxon).  Semadar's younger, and smarter, sister Delilah (Hedy Lamarr) wants Samson for herself but he will not be dissuaded.  She sets herself to destroying Samson, moving up to the right hand of the Saran of Gaza (George Sanders) to do so.

The actual Bible verses are pretty short and straight to the point.  There isn't a lot about Delilah's motivations so novelist Victor Jabotinsky, and by extension, screenwriters Jesse Lasky, Jr. and Fredric Frank did a lot of ad libbing.  The result is a completely toxic relationship with two people who love but can't trust each other.  It makes Delilah much more of a complex character (and you have to wonder how much Lamarr had to do with that behind the scenes) and imminently more watchable than the sermonizing parable it could have been.  DeMille knows epics and his biblical epics are especially biblical.  This has camp classic written all over it.

It's currently streaming for free with ads on Crackle.  It has longer ad breaks more often than Tubi, so it's not my favorite free site but it does have stuff other streamers lack.  You do what you can out here in the streaming wilds.

Mulan (2020)

  If you were interested in this but not interested in paying $30 for what was supposed to be a theatrical release, it dropped as regular content on Disney+ on the 4th.

Mulan (Yifei Liu) was born to be a warrior in a time where doing so marked her as a witch, as unnatural.  Her father (Tzi Ma) cautions her to hide her gifts, but when he is conscripted into the Imperial Army to fight the incursions of Böri Khan (Jason Scott Lee) and his shapeshifting witch (Gong Li), Mulan secretly takes his place.  Disguised as a man, she can finally shine as the martial artist she is meant to be and wins the acclaim of her commanders and fellow soldiers.  But as the invaders threaten the Empire, Mulan's secret is a much more immediate threat to her life.

I will try and focus on the positive aspects first.  The cinematography and set design are beautiful.  The costumes are gorgeous.  The whole cast is Asian and it was directed by a woman, so hooray for representation.  They got her name right, Hua Mulan, not Fa.  The Rouran Khaganate is also more historically accurate than the Huns.  The wuxia is top-notch.  The horse stuntwork is great.  

Yay, positive things!  Now we're going to divide the criticism into two parts:  what I didn't like about the movie itself and its comparison to the 1998 animated film.

Let's start with the latter.  It's not a musical, which is actually okay.  I don't mind that.  

No Mushu.  Instead, her family totem is a phoenix.  Disappointing, but only the Emperor and his family were allowed to have dragons, so that at least makes sense.  

No Li Shang.  That was more of a bummer for me, but it does remove the fraternization and any possibility of a power imbalance between Mulan and a love interest, replaced here by just a fellow soldier (Yoson An).  

Lucky Cricket is a dude now (Jun Yu).  Okay? I guess?  

No sassy Grandma.  No comedic relief at all.  

They clearly tried to shoehorn as many scenes from the animated film into the live-action as they could but they don't work as well.  The avalanche scene was fucking perfect in the animated but kind of a head-scratcher in the live action.  *MINOR SPOILERS*  Like, she had time to gather helmets, ride ten miles behind the enemy, set up dummy soldiers, and get into position close enough to shoot arrows at the Rourans, betting they would turn their whole-asss trebuchet around and set off an avalanche, before they destroyed all the remaining Imperial soldiers?  Also, they could hit turtleshell shield groups of soldiers but completely fucking overshot the foothills?  *END SPOILERS*

The movie itself honestly feels dumbed down.  The dialogue is over-explained and interactions between characters seem very wooden.  My biggest pet peeve here is how Chi is used.  It's the goddamn midicholorians all over again.  She can't just have a passion and natural talent honed by endless practice, no she has Magic in her Blood.  It's reductive and insulting.  Which brings us to the other Magical Girl in the film.  Now, Chinese folklore is absolutely rife with magic so I don't mind that it was included.  My issue is how the writers (four white people) chose to portray this character as ridiculously overpowered yet submissive, bitter but yearning, and frankly misused in the third act.  We as viewers are meant to think this is dark mirror of Mulan, all unchecked power and ostracized for displaying it openly and maybe if they were more similar, if "the witch" was just really, really good at combat and not able to turn into a flock of birds or shapeshift into other people (which also makes no sense for her character because why doesn't she just...turn into Böri Khan and take over the whole damn thing?), her "we're the same, you and I" speech would be more resonant.  Instead, it just falls flat.

And that's really the problem with the whole film.  It's not trying to be a new, more representative, more accurate version of the Chinese hero.  It's trying to be a grownup version of the animated film and there's no reason for that to be a thing.  That just makes it sad.

Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons (2013)

  Did you like Kung Fu Hustle?  You will like Journey to the West!

Xuan Zang (Zhang Wen) is an aspiring demon hunter and Buddhist priest but he's not very good at the former which is preventing him from achieving the latter.  To make matters worse, a beautiful and very accomplished demon hunter named Miss Duan (Qi Shu) has set her sights on marrying him.  To become a better hunter, he quests to find the Monkey King (Bo Huang), who has been imprisoned under a mountain for 500 years.

This is a classic Chinese tale and there are dozens, if not hundreds, of adaptations.  Stephen Chow has a Looney Tunes approach to action in his films generally, but there's real reverence and heart in each one as well.  This is no exception.  The humor is a little broad for my personal tastes but the actors are totally game for it.  It's fun and silly and pretty family-friendly.  There is some gore and if you have really little children, some of the demons may be a little much, but I'd say 10 and up.  It's currently streaming for free on Tubi.

(Side note:  if you've noticed there have been a lot of Tubi and Criterion picks lately, it's because all my other streamers are absolutely awash with TV shows that I keep skipping because I don't have time.  If you were wondering, Queen's Gambit:  good!  Transparent:  unlikeable characters!  Battlestar Galactica season 2:  too much filler in the second half!  Great British Bake Off:  worst season I've seen!  WTF was that?  Dave??  You put fucking Dave in and not Lottie?  Or Hermine?  Or Mark L.?  Fucking Dave, the embodiment of white male mediocrity???  I'm fine.  Shut up.  I'm fine.  The Mandalorian season 2:  perfect!  So that's what I'm watching on TV.)