To The Franchisemobile!

Brought to you by Really Large Chicken (TM).  Why have turkey for Thanksgiving when you can have Really Large Chicken (TM)?  And so, we have three debuts this week.  Clint Eastwood's The Mule is the only thing that smacks of originality... unless you count The Old Man & The Gun specifically and "Breaking Bad" in general.  Of course, there's a little bit of age-ism at work in the plot description of The Mule.  I mean... a 90-year old horticulturist?  Clint himself is 88!  He'll be 90 on May 31st, 2020.  Don't jump to such conclusions, IMDb!  But it's an intriguing battle it is, the battle of free speech.  Free speech ain't free, after all.  But it seems to me that a drug dealer doesn't believe in free speech.  I mean, sure, he'll listen to your opinion on life and all that... and I admit it, I'm being a little sexist here, assuming that a drug dealer is a "he" and not a "she."  But your dealer might do a little chit-chat, as long as you come up with the money and move on.  I still remember the drug deal I saw a long time ago in the U-district: there was a low exchange of hands, and the guy who brought the drug quickly put it up to his nose and sniffed it up... I'm assuming it was drugs.  Maybe it was an early form of the Cinnamon Challenge (TM), who knows.
As for the rest, well... sorry, my cat needs to adjust.  She's sitting on my lap, you know.  Well, she's getting on in years.  She's about 12 now and needs to sleep about 20 hours a day, mostly on my bed.  Anyway, the big winner this week was a more comic book-like version of that old Spider-Man (C) (R) (TM) tale, and it's called Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.  This one reminds me of 2001's The One (see attached pic) where reality consists of 125 different, but strangely similar universes... a multi-verse, if you will.  Mostly, the people have different hair-dos in the different universes.  What would Liebniz make of all this?  In The One, it's arguably the opposite plot: a serial killer travels to the various parallel universes to kill the other versions of himself, thereby giving himself greater powers.  In the new Spider-Man pic, the various Spider-Men and -Women from the various parallel universes must unite to fight a threat to all reality.  If that threat to all reality isn't Rupert Murdoch, well... I don't know what is.
And finally, every once in a while, a movie comes along that unites the public and the critic-razzi against it.  In this case, it's the latest installment of the Mortal Instruments series... I'm sorry, it's actually called Mortal Engines.  Debuting at the dreaded Number Five, it's the latest production of Peter Jackson's WingNut Films.  Well, it's a long time between epic trilogies, I guess.  Hope he's got something beloved and profitable lined up for 2021!  I mean, the next Tintin?  Meh.  Can he maybe get a trilogy out of the Silmarillion or something?