BEFORE: I was texting with my sister, inquiring about the Comic-Con trinkets I bought for my niece and nephew - I wasn't able to get the right Lego figure in San Diego, so I had to order it on eBay, and it's taking longer than expected to arrive. But she mentioned that she took the kids to see "Inside Out", after some justified trepidation - my nephew did get a little freaked out over the suggestion that little people might be living inside his head, controlling his emotions. I guess as a parent you have to consider these things, how your kid might respond to certain plot elements, and that means learning what's in a movie before you see it. A parent should at least prepare for the fallout if they find out that a character dies at the end of a film, or whatever.
(I go through a similar process, not only reading a lot of movie reviews but by transferring a film to DVD before I watch it, occasionally catching sight of a plot point I'm not supposed to see yet. But sometimes that helps me build a theme week - I'm sort of programming for my inner child, who suffers from OCD. Forget "suffers", sometimes I think he enjoys it.)
And that's how this film ends up at another century mark - well, Steve Martin carries over from "Novocaine", sure, but why does this film end up as big #2,100 and not, say, "The Pink Panther"? (Because I'm still a Peter Sellers fan and I don't agree with Martin's casting as Clouseau, but I digress. I'm probably going to have to watch that film eventually. Next year, maybe, if I do another Big Year.)
THE PLOT: His life was emotionally closed off from the world, until an orphaned baby showed up at his house.
AFTER: This is another film based on a classic novel or play ("Silas Marner"), and there sure have been a lot of those this year. But the simple twist of fate that placed this film at #2,100 now seems justified, because it ties together a lot of the recurring themes I've noticed in the past week or so. First off, we've got a divorced man (as in "Nebraska") who likes to collect things ("The Big Year") and he finds himself as an unexpected father ("Delivery Man") to the daughter of a junkie ("Novocaine") while the real father denies parentage ("Jobs") and eventually determines that he should have been honest in the first place (also "Novocaine", also "Delivery Man"). Meanwhile the adopted father plays with his child in unconventional ways ("The Lego Movie"), so she can grow up and get a job at Google ("The Internship") before they're all eaten by dinosaurs. Wait, those last parts can't be right...
It's pretty difficult to tell where and when this film takes place - since it's based on a classic novel, maybe they wanted to do a throwback sort of story. The lead character makes furniture by hand, which seems sort of retro, plus he collects antiques from his sister's (friend's?) store. Horse riding, polo, classic cars all set the stage for a tale that seems like it could happen in any decade, plus it's set in some Southern (?) small town, which seems like it's all stuck back in the 1930's or 40's anyway. (Plus, where did they shoot this? There's a swamp, and a bunch of snow in the winter? IMDB says Georgia.)
Look, I don't know about "Silas Marner", but I know about Steve Martin. This is a better fit for him than "Novocaine" was, because it allowed him to act a little goofy, bounce around a field with a weather balloon, and dance and lip-synch to silly songs. Those are the up moments, of course there's a custody battle also, and a theft of personal property, but there's balance in every life. Martin himself became a father for the first time at age 67, so maybe that was an unexpected blessing, and life sort of imitated art, or at least a portion of this film.
This gives me a chance to learn a little bit about Silas Marner, a novel by George Eliot that I have no familiarity with - Eliot seems a bit like the poor man's Charles Dickens (wait, George Eliot is a woman? How did that happen? And she lived with a man named George? That had to be confusing...) Some things obviously needed to be updated for the plot to be used in a modern film, some didn't - but I see where Mr. Martin changed the timing of some occurrences, in the most notable case this leads to a major revelation happening when it needs to, but unfortunately making the ending feel more contrived than the one in "Novocaine".
Also starring Gabriel Byrne (last seen in "The Man in the Iron Mask"), Laura Linney (last seen in "The Life of David Gale"), Catherine O'Hara (last seen in "The Paper"), Stephen Baldwin (last seen in "Casualties of War"), Alana Austin, Michael Des Barres, Amelia Campbell, with a cameo from Anne Heche (last seen in "Six Days Seven Nights")
RATING: 4 out of 10 character witnesses
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