Month: July 2020

This isn’t going to be a traditional review of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai.  If I’m being perfectly honest here, there’s really not a whole that I can say about this film that hasn’t been said before and said better.  I don’t think I would actually be able to bring anything new to the table.  Seven Samurai is one of, if not the greatest film of all time.  You see in a lot of interviews these days about film-makers whose inspiration goes all the way back to George Lucas with Star Wars.  The truth of the matter is, is that Mr. Lucas himself was inspired heavily by the likes of Akira Kurosawa.  In fact, the movie that helped inspire Star Wars was Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress.  That doesn’t mean that elements weren’t borrowed from Seven Samurai, however.  If you look at the scene transitions in Star Wars in the way that it wipes to left, that comes directly from Seven Samurai.  If you look at all the big action epics, fantasy, and science films, you’re going to find that most of them owe their existence to Akira Kurosawa.  In fact, a lot of Westerns from the 60s onward are heavily inspired by Kurosawa’s films.  For example, The Magnificent Seven with Yul Brynner is a Western remake of Seven Samurai.  It’s the same basic story, but set in a Western.  A lot of dialogue in many of these films is also lifted from Samurai.

The story in Seven Samurai involves a village in Japan that is constantly under attack from bandits, so they hire a group of samurai warriors to help them defend their land.  That’s the story in a nutshell.  What makes it so special, however, is the depth and richness of the characters.  Each samurai in the film is fully fleshed out and feels like a real person.  Even Kikuchiyo, an outcast with a very large sword, who isn’t a samurai, is given enough screen time to let the audience know why he is the way he is, and why he resents samurai in general.  The peasants are also given proper attention.  The idea was to get the audience to learn about these characters so when they are in danger, we fear for them.  That’s good writing.  There’s a good amount of time devoted to trying to get enough samurai together to help the villagers.  We see some samurai training, but what the film also shows us is that like in real life history, not all samurai acted honorably.  In fact, there was one samurai who was a great swordsman, but he refused to join up because he was only going to get paid with food.  The film shows us how flawed these people are and that makes them more human.   A story can be as simple as Seven Samurai, but when you pay attention to the characters, it adds so much more to the experience.

While the acting is actually really good across the board, the real showstopper here is Toshiro Mifune as Kikuchiyo.  He was given free reign to improvise on the spot by Kurosawa, who normally doesn’t normally allow that in his movies, but for Mifune, it works.  For a good chunk of the film, we see this guy with a huge sword acting drunk and being all sorts of goofy, but over the course of the film, the layers are peeled away and we begin to see why he is the way he is.  One of my favorite moments in the film is when he shows the other samurai the armor and weapons that he and the villagers found.  After being denounced for that, he confronts the samurai about how their social class treated villager and farmers.  Historically, it’s true:  The samurai didn’t necessarily treat the lower classes with a whole lot of respect, despite the necessity of these “lower” classes.  This moment in the film is an extremely emotional moment and highlights the range that Toshiro Mifune had as an actor.  Not only that, there were moments where he displayed absolute fearlessness, such running down a steep hill, which was crazy.

The cinematography here is absolutely wonderful.  It’s not just the camerawork that’s incredible, it’s how Kurosawa captures certain elements.  There isn’t an element or shot in the film that isn’t significant.  From the way wind blows to the rain fall, there’s a beautiful visual poetry that is on display.  The way Kurosawa moves the camera is also extraordinary.  When a camera is moving, he doesn’t cut away until the camera stops.  In essence, that camera movement is telling its own story in that space of time, it has a beginning, middle and an end.  Look at this shot of a funeral here.  There’s no dialogue, but you know what’s going on.  The details are also important.  Look at the way wind is blowing by observing the dust on the hill.  In a Kurosawa film, it’s often the smaller details that are most important.  The same goes for the action that’s happening on screen.  The way the camera moves when it’s following the bandits or the samurai.  It’s all handled extremely well, and you can see what’s going on.  It does get hectic after a while, but again, that’s on purpose.  Kurosawa wants to show us the ugliness of war, even during the time of the samurai.  The craftsmanship on display here is beyond exceptional.  Seven Samurai is the work of a true master.  For a movie that’s three and a half hours long, it doesn’t feel like it.  The pacing is PERFECT.

The impact that Akira Kurosawa and his films have had on modern day cinema and pop culture can’t be overstated.  Without Kurosawa, we wouldn’t have superhero movies.  We wouldn’t have films like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Dirty Harry, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, or even modern samurai films like The Last Samurai.  His influence reaches beyond Western cinema.  It’s felt all over the world.  If it’s from China, Russia, or the United Kingdom, it’s been impacted by Akira Kurosawa in some fashion.  Famous film-makers like Martin Scorsese have stated that they’ve learned about real film-making from Kurosawa’s films, and it’s evident in nearly everything that they have made.  There’s not a film-maker out there today that doesn’t use a technique pioneered by Akira Kurosawa.  I don’t think I’d be writing about movies if it wasn’t for Kurosawa.  It’s really hard to imagine a world and film industry that wasn’t impacted by his movies.  I can’t really give Seven Samurai a score of any kind, because the film is transcendent in nearly every way.  It is a landmark film that has not only stood the test of time, but people are continuing to discover it to this day.  That, my friends, is the power of film and the power of Akira Kurosawa.  If you have any passing interest in movies, Seven Samurai is REQUIRED viewing.

Released: November 1994

Director: James Yukich

Rated PG-13

Run Time: 96 Minutes

Distributor: MVD Rewind Collection(2018, USA)

Genre: Action/Adventure

Cast:
Robert Patrick: Koga Shuko
Mark Dacascos: Jimmy Lee
Scott Wolf: Billy Lee
Julia Nickson: Satori Imada
Kristina Wagner: Linda Lash
Alyssa Milano: Marian Delario

When the Super Mario Bros. movie was released back in 1993, it was the first movie to be based on a video-game.  Nintendo and the studio behind the film wanted to give audiences something a little different, but also tried to placate the die-hard Super Mario fans.  However, because of some serious problems behind the scenes with pretty much everything including the overblown ego of the directors, Super Mario Bros. ended up becoming one of the worst movies of the year because of how far it strayed from the source material.  There was very little in there that matched up with game, not that there was all that much to work with in the first place, but instead of a bright and colorful film that you would have expected from a Mario Bros. movie, you ended up with what looked like a Mad Max reject of a film.  It was dark, grimy, and gooey.  It was NOT what audiences wanted or what fans of the game were expecting.  Nintendo opted to get out of the film-making business when their film flopped.  Studios would continue to try and make movies based on video-games in the following years, with the best one being Mortal Kombat.  In 1994, there were two movies released that were based on video-games.  The first one was Street Fighter with Jean-Claude Van Damme and Raul Julia(in his last performance).  The other one was a film that based on a lesser known franchise called Double Dragon.

Double Dragon follows two brothers, Jimmy and Billy Lee as they struggle to survive in the post-apocalyptic wasteland of New Angeles in the year 2007…….I’ll let that one sink in for a while.  At the same time, a warlord by the name of Koga Shuko is on the hunt for a mysterious and powerful medallion called the Double Dragon, which was split into two pieces centuries ago.  Having obtained one half of the medallion, Shuko discovers that the other one is in the possession of the Lee brothers and their caretaker, Satori.  The funny thing about those old games on the original NES system is that story-telling was the furthest from game-makers’ minds.  Those games were distractions and entertainment.  Games like Double Dragon and Super Mario Bros. never had much of a story to begin with.  Because of that the writers behind Double Dragon had to come up with something that could help explain the world of Double Dragon.  What’s funnier is that the story in this film isn’t that terrible, really.  It’s bonkers, but it kind of works in a bizarre sort of way.

I’m not going to sugar-coat it.  Double Dragon is a bad movie.  There are a lot of interesting ideas in this movie, but none of them really gel.  Let’s talk about what I did like about the film.  First of all, Robert Patrick’s hairdo in this film is bonkers.  It’s like he’s channeling Vanilla Ice.  Robert Patrick alone is reason enough to watch this movie.  He chews the scenery like it’s nobody’s business.  He puts everything into it and he’s clearly having fun with the role.  If you don’t know who Robert Patrick is, let me point you to a little role that he did for Terminator 2: Judgment Day.  He played the T-1000.  So, he can be a scary individual when he wants to be.  But here, he’s just a guy that wants total domination of one major American city.  Is that too much to ask for?  IS IT?!  Secondly, Mark Dacascos is one of a handful of actual martial artists in this movie, and he can act.  He has some good moments especially during a chase through a junkyard.  The river chase sequence is legitimately exciting with some pretty big explosions.  Funny anecdote, and you’ll find this on the MVD Blu-Ray:  The movie was filmed on location in Cleveland, Ohio, even though it’s supposed to be set on the West Coast.  Apparently, somebody forgot to tell the residents and authorities in Cleveland that they were going to set a river on fire.  You can imagine the chaos.  I also really liked the concept of the Double Dragon medallion amplifying the spiritual power in somebody.  One half of the medallion allows the wearer to be able to possess others while  the other half gives the person that wears it invulnerability and strength.  When you put the two halves together it gives a single person unlimited power, which is why Shuko is looking for the medallion.

So….what didn’t work?  Pretty much everything else.  Outside of Robert Patrick, Mark Dacascos, and MAYBE Julia Nickson, everybody else was seriously miscast.  For one, Scott Wolf is supposed to be playing Jimmy’s younger brother, Billy, but he’s not Asian and Scott is not a martial artist.  The same goes for Alyssa Milano as Marian.  She’s not a martial artist in a movie that’s kind supposed to be centered around that sort of thing.  That costume that they designed for Ms. Milano certainly didn’t do her any favors.  It was clearly designed so that our leads could ogle her at various points in the film.  Let’s talk about Abobo.  The character design here is hilariously terrible.  The character was supposed to start out as a punk but got mutated because of Shuko’s experiments.  Yeah, this doesn’t really work.  I don’t know what they were trying to go for, since he doesn’t stay a villain throughout the entire film.  Outside of some action sequences, the action is pretty tame.  In fact, very few people even get killed in this movie, outside of two, maybe three.  Slapping this film with a PG-13 rating was really stupid, considering that this film was supposed to be aimed at everybody.  Even for the early 90’s, Double Dragon felt like a PG movie.  There’s nothing really in here to offend anybody, except those who have good taste in writing and high-quality film-making.  Don’t mock me.  Not only that, the tone is all over the place.  There are times when it wants to taken seriously, but in the next scene, you’ve got Jimmy and Billy screaming and running.  That happens more than three times in the movie.  It’s kind of like watching a live-action cartoon.  If you do buy the MVD Blu-Ray of this film, stay away from the animated pilot of the cartoon.  It’s worse than this movie.

Double Dragon, like Super Mario Bros. before it, fascinates me with how badly things went wrong.  Where Mario went bad because of really stupid decisions by the directors, Double Dragon suffered because there were too many cooks in the kitchen, and each one had their own vision for what the movie was supposed to be, which is why the tone is all over the place.  It also explains why a lot of the more interesting ideas weren’t executed properly.  Writers Peter Gould and Michael Davis had to come in and try and salvage what was left of the screenplay, but it was too late.  As one of them pointed out, there’s a good movie in here somewhere that’s struggling to free itself.  I guess maybe that’s why I’ve got a soft spot for films like this, because they had potential, but ended up falling way short for one reason or another.  To be fair, most of the people involved in this movie ended up going on to have decent careers.  The movie is currently available through MVD’s Rewind Collection and has some pretty decent special features including a brand-new Making-of feature that has stars Scott Wolf and Mark Dacascos, writers Michael Davis and Peter Gould, and producer Don Murphy.  They discuss what worked, what didn’t, and what went wrong.  The writers didn’t really hold back, so that was pretty interesting.  The disc also includes the animated series’ pilot episode(avoid it), original theatrical, VHS, and TV trailers as well as archival EPK(electronic press kit)footage and interviews.  Does a movie like Double Dragon deserve such an extensive disc?  Not really, but it’s really cool that MVD put some real effort into this release.  If you have a soft spot for this movie like I do, it’s worth taking a look.  Good movie?  Not a chance in hell, but it is absolutely insane.  The Blu-Ray?  Highly recommended.  You can find it on Amazon or MVD’s website.

My Final Recommendation: Total domination of one major American city is NOT too much to ask for.
Robert Patrick’s hair: 100/10
Insanity Factor: 500/10
Quality Film-Making: 1/10
Entertainment Value: 8/10
Robert Patrick: 10/10
Overall: 7/10.  Seems fair.

I consider myself to be a man of fairly simple taste.  I love video games.  I love reading.  I also love movies, but I also love history.  Whether it’s military history, ancient world history, or US history, there is a lot to be learned from the past.  It helps us(or at least is supposed to)learn from mistakes that were made, so that we don’t make them again.  There is something really neat about opening up a history book from medieval Europe or ancient Greece, and imagining yourself in that time period.  This is where historical movies come into the picture, at least for me.  Historical films give us a window into a bygone era.  When handled right, historical movies are not only entertaining, but they can be educational and inspire people to research that particular part of history.  That being said, historians have a tendency to be pretty persnickety when it comes to these kinds of films.  I can certainly understand where some of these folks are coming from, because some of these movies are horrifically inaccurate.  Here’s the rub, film-making is obviously not an easy process, as I have explained so many times before.  When it comes to historical pictures, film-makers have to pick and choose certain elements that could work in a movie.  Not everything in history needs to be on screen, and I believe that a good number of historians get that.  What they don’t understand is that the responsibility of a film-maker is to make the best movie possible, first and foremost.  At the same time, the onus is on the film-makers to at least try and get some historical elements correct.  An historical film doesn’t need to be a hundred percent accurate, it simply can’t be.  There are too many holes and varying opinions throughout history to show us exactly how things used to be, so some liberties must be taken to try and craft a cohesive narrative.  There are movies out there that are not only entertaining, but incredibly accurate as well.  Apollo 13 and Hacksaw Ridge come to mind.  It’s doable and I think film-makers should at least make an effort to shape their narrative according to an historical event.  You don’t change history to fit your narrative.  You change your narrative to fit history.  The following movies are some examples of movies that historians absolutely hate.  Some of them I agree with, others I don’t.

Braveheart

Here’s one that I absolutely understand.  On one hand, Mel Gibson directed an incredibly engaging film about a man’s fight against tyranny.  The battle sequences are epic and Mel Gibson is fantastic as William Wallace.  All the elements are there for an excellent movie, and if you approach the film from an entertainment angle, it’s fantastic.  However, if you have the slightest interest in Scotland’s history and do a little bit of research, the movie falls apart.  This movie has been eviscerated by historians world-wide and there are reasons for that.  It gets nothing right in terms of historical accuracy, and what’s worse, is that Randall Wallace, the film’s writer, admits this.  Not only does he get the dates wrong, he gets Wallace’s motivations wrong.  He even manages to get one of the biggest battles in William Wallace’s campaign wrong: The Battle of Sterling, which is actually The Battle of Sterling BRIDGE.  The creepiest part of it all is that he hooks up with Princess Isabelle, who at the actual time of Wallace would have been only 8 or 9 years old.  I could go on and on, but from an historian’s perspective, Braveheart is a mess.

Pearl Harbor

This one’s an obvious one, I grant you, but it still has to be mentioned.  Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor is one of the worst war movies ever made.  Even from a story-telling perspective, this movie is wrong on so many levels.  It spends nearly two hours on a bloated and cheesy love story that NOBODY cared about.  When the film gets to the actual attack on Pearl Harbor, that’s when it gets interesting, but after that, it goes back to the same sappy melodrama involving Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett and Kate Beckinsale’s characters.  It was not necessary.  From an historical perspective, this movie is riddled with issues.  For one, an American pilot would not have been allowed to fly for a foreign government.  Neither the American or British military would have allowed it.  On top of all that, there is a lot of blatant and in-your-face flag-waving patriotism.  Look, I’m usually a fan of Michael Bay’s work as a director, but Pearl Harbor is awful on nearly every level.  If you want a good movie about the attack on Pearl Harbor, I recommend Tora! Tora! Tora!.

The Last Samurai

This one’s a bit of an odd-ball.  The Last Samurai was fairly well-received in Japan, but not so much here in the United States.  A lot of critics saw it as another Dances With Wolves film about a white man saving a foreign culture.  A lot of historians have shredded the film to pieces because of its many inaccuracies.  For one, the motivations for the samurai rebellion were completely glossed over in the film.  In the midst of a Japan that was becoming modernized, the samurai were becoming more and more obsolete.  In the film, the samurai were fighting to preserve their way of life and their traditions.  The reality was that the samurai class had become corrupt and were losing their positions of power and wealth due to a modernizing Japan, which led to a rebellion during the Meiji Restoration.  While historians certainly are right to have certain issues with the film, the movie itself does not claim to be based on a true story.  In fact, the character of Nathan Algren, while based on a French soldier, was completely made-up.  Katsumodo was loosely based on Saigo Takamori, who led the rebellion.  The Last Samurai is one of my favorite movies because while it is a romanticized depiction of what happened during the Restoration, it still managed to show the world that Japan still had a place in a globalized economy.  Not only that, the film the ideas and the way of life of the samurai and their code of conduct: Bushido.  The film does get some stuff correct.  The samurai armor is accurate and the final battle played out almost exactly the way it did in real life.  For me, the fact that The Last Samurai actually made an effort to get some stuff right is admirable.

Kingdom of Heaven

Here’s another film that a large number of historians take issue with, especially those whose specialize in the Crusades and that time period.  As with all things dealing with the ancient world, things are going to get missed in an historical film.  It’s the nature of the beast.  While a lot of reviews and some historians have praised the film’s look and battle sequences, a lot of historians take a lot of issues with the Heaven’s apparent political correctness when it comes to portraying Christians and Muslims during the Crusades.  Others have pointed to certain characters that behave NOTHING like the figures that they portray.  I happen to like the film, because it IS epic and the battles are amazing.  The performances are also mostly fantastic.  To be fair to some of those historians, there are things here that don’t make a lot of sense.  The Knights Templar, for example, are portrayed as a group of thugs, when the reality was that they really weren’t.  They were sworn to serve the Pope at the time.  It does get a number of elements right, and it’s a more honest attempt at making an historical picture than Braveheart.  Besides, everybody knows that the director’s cut of Kingdom of Heaven is the better version.

47 Ronin

Can somebody explain something to me?  What is it with Hollywood and the whole “white-savior” trope that seems to permeate every historical and science fiction film?  I don’t get it.  47 Ronin tells the story of 47 master-less samurai who seek to avenge the death of their lord in the early 18th century.  On it’s own, the premise of the Ako Incident of 1702 should make for a fantastic samurai film.  Leave it to Hollywood to take such an incredible story and muck it up with cheesy fantasy elements and lousy CGI monsters.  While The Last Samurai may not have been the most historically accurate film, it did have an element of realism to it and it respected the Japanese culture.  47 Ronin doesn’t even do that.  You don’t have to be an historian to know that this movie isn’t accurate at all.  They don’t even get the mythology right.  Dragons in Japan and China were considered to be lucky and wise.  Here, a witch changes into a fire-breathing dragon.  Any historian would tell you that this film is dogshit.  Even if you managed to ignore the historical inaccuracies, the film fails even on a fantasy level.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film so disrespectful of the story that it was trying to tell.  Carl Rinsch, who directed this film, really hasn’t done anything since.  I wonder why.  A fantasy film set in feudal Japan could be really good, considering the rich mythology of the Far East, but this film isn’t it.

King Arthur(2004)

I’ve a confession to make(among many thus far):  I love Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur.  I really do.  It’s epic and it’s got some incredible landscapes with some really fantastic battle sequences.  The musical score by Hans Zimmer is absolutely powerful.  However, the film’s claim of historical truth is nothing more than hogwash.  The historians have it right on this one.  While some of the characters like Artorius Castus may have existed, it wasn’t in the time-line that the film claimed they did.  Artorius 100-200 years before when the film is set, presumably.  There are elements of truth here, but they’re taken from different periods in history and thrown together into one.  If Arthur existed at this point in history, Lancelot sure as hell didn’t as he was a fictional character invented in the 12th century.  Honestly, it just boggles my mind that film-makers were trying to craft a King Arthur film based on some historical fact, when the historical fact really didn’t exist.  You know what that’s called?  False advertising.  Again, I really enjoy the film.  It’s a grittier form of fantasy, but it is STILL fantasy at the core.

It needs to be said that some of the complaints that historians have with some of these movies are legitimate gripes.  I certainly wouldn’t call an historian some kind elitist libtard, even though some do act that way.  It’s also important that sometimes Hollywood gets it right with movies like Apollo 13, but for the most part, Hollywood is Hollywood, and they’re going to do what they’re going to do.  For me, I think it’s important that a film-maker tries to put some effort into making a historical film accurate as possible, but without sacrificing the greater narrative.  You’re not going to please everybody, especially not some die-hard historians that demand 100% accuracy.  I think if you can use an historical film to inspire an audience to research that particular subject, then you’ve succeeded to a certain degree.  Obviously, not everybody’s going to agree on whether a movie’s good or not.  I certainly have my opinions, but an historian may have a differing opinion, especially if they have expertise in that particular subject matter.  These are some films that were known to be hated by historians.

Normally, I tend to focus on doing my Best lists and reviews on this site, I do talk about the occasional news tidbits.  As everybody well knows, 2020 has been a very difficult year with the COVID-19 pandemic raging around the world with over 600,000 dead and counting, with millions more being infected.  Unfortunately, I happen to be one of those infected.  Thankfully, it’s a relatively minor case, but it still hit like a sledgehammer.  I’m doing much better, so y’all can rest easy.  Just make sure to take the necessary precautions when you go out.  What I wanted to discuss today is Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, an upcoming action/thriller that was supposed to be released on July 17th.  Unfortunately, because of the pandemic, the film got pushed back to August 12.  Well, accord to Variety, Tenet has been removed from the release schedule “indefinitely.”  There’s possibly a huge reason why this happened:  China.  Recently, China allowed movie theaters to re-open with the stipulation that they could show movies that were 2 hours long or shorter.  Their reason being that while entering the theater isn’t necessarily that risky with the virus, the longer you are in the theater, the more likely you are to contract the disease.  China is the second largest market for movies in the world, so having this kind of restriction is going to be problematic for a lot of films that make a lot of money in China.  Christopher Nolan’s films like Batman Begins and Interstellar have had strong showings in China, so it is important for his movies to be released over there.  Some people would argue that Nolan should edit his film down to a 2-hour runtime to get it into theaters over there.  Here’s the problem with that:  Christopher Nolan has a lot of direct control over how his movies are made and he has a specific vision for how his movies should be, regardless of length.  For him to edit down Tenet to make to the Chinese market right now is unthinkable and pointless.  He doesn’t want to compromise the film’s story-telling because of some country’s restrictions.  I think because of that, Tenet was pulled.

Now, “indefinitely” doesn’t necessarily mean “permanently.”  What that means is that the film gets pulled until the film-makers and theater owners find a reasonable time-line in which to release the film.  Make no mistake about it, COVID-19 has proven catastrophic for the film industry, forcing theaters to close down for months.  Some of these theaters are not going to survive, that much is clear.  In fact, it’s been predicted that 40 percent of China’s theaters are going to close down permanently.  AMC, one of the world’s largest theater chains, has expressed doubts about their own survival.  There have been rumors that movie theaters might be closed until mid-2021.  I have doubts about that, but it is a distinct possibility.  If it is true, then it will truly cataclysmic for the film industry.  These movie studios need movie theaters to operate, because that’s where they make their money.  If there are no theaters operating, these studios are not only not making money, they’re losing it.  The good news is that we are starting to see some movie theaters opening up with restrictions about how many people can be in a theater with social distancing and mask-wearing measures in place.  These theaters have opted to start playing older movies in a way to get people back into theaters.  It’s not without its risks, but something needs to happen.  The film industry is extremely important to the overall economy and as long as theaters remain closed, the damage to the economy, both national and global, is going to be severe.  Movie studios will end up closing as well as some large theater chains.  So what about VOD or video-on-demand?  It’s not a good option, because like I said, the money that the studios make comes from the movie theaters.  They don’t see that kind of money on VOD, when you rent one movie for a single price and invite friends and family over to watch it.  Movie studios lose a lot of money because of that.  That is why you won’t see movies like Tenet or Wonder Woman ’84 on VOD until well after their theatrical release.

Tenet is not the only film to be affected by this pandemic.  Wonder Woman, Mulan, and No Time To Die have all been delayed.  No Time To Die has been pushed back a full year.  I haven’t been to the theaters since Underwater came out in January.  Do I want to go back to the theaters?  Hell, yeah, I do.  I miss it.  But the reality is that as long as people are refusing to do any social distancing or wearing masks, especially here in the United States, the less likely we’re able to get back into theaters.  Understand this:  Things have changed.  Permanently.  We will NEVER go back to the way things were before the pandemic, and we shouldn’t.  Things are going to be very different moving forward.  It is up to us as citizens of the world to be responsible in how we deal with this situation.  We all need to our part to prevent this thing from spreading and that means making sacrifices.  I know people don’t want to wear masks.  I certainly don’t, but it’s one of the best ways, along with social distancing to keep the coronavirus from becoming more of a problem than it currently is.  People don’t seem to think that it’s a huge problem.  600,000 dead bodies and millions of sick people would like to have a word with you.  It is also up to us to be responsible, because it is clear that certain government entities are either unable or unwilling to take this thing seriously.  It falls on us to keep this thing from spreading, and if you refuse to do so, then you are part of the problem.  Don’t be a part of the problem.  Be a part of the solution.  It’s going to take ALL of us to be responsible in order to get back to some kind of normalcy.  You want movies to come back to theaters?  Wear masks and socially distance yourselves from others.  It’s that simple.  I know I’ve repeated myself quite a bit in this post, but I don’t think I can emphasize how important it is to be smart and responsible now.  Am I asking too much of people?  I personally don’t think so, as I know there are people out there that ARE being responsible.  But I also know that there are people out there are who don’t believe this thing exists and don’t like being told what to do.  There is only so much that I can do as a person, but I hope that you, my readers, take this pandemic seriously.  I’m looking forward to seeing Tenet in theaters when it is released.  There are a lot of films that I’m looking forward to seeing.  If nothing else, 2021 is going to be an epic year for movies, if we get this situation under control.  So, please do your part so we can get back to our favorite hobby.