BEFORE: I'll get back to Owen Wilson in a few days, this time Vince Vaughn carries over from "The Internship", and as I count down to movie #2100, I've got to make a decision about whether to stay the course, or take a look at my linking and revise the plan for the rest of the year. Thanks to an influx of new films, plus my week off for Comic-Con, my watchlist remains stuck at 145 films. I should probably re-institute the policy of watching two films for every one I add if I want to make some dent in that number. Right now there's a pile of new films at the bottom of the list, and theoretically if there's an actor chain that will take me through not just this year but also 2016, I'm going to have to start looking for it.
Yet part of me says to stay the course - I've got a chain that will take me through the next two weeks, then lead me topically into some documentaries, then I've got another chain that will take me right up to the Halloween topic and into Christmas, and I've even thought of a link to get me from there to "Star Wars: The Force Awakens", if I've counted right. Why would I mess with that? Who cares if next year's chain is just a jumbled mess. Or maybe things will work out next year, if I just leave things alone. The actor links will either be there, or they won't, it doesn't matter. Oh, but it does. How do I know that my plan is the best it can be, unless I tear it apart and rebuild it? I'm trying very hard to resist, because that's a time-consuming process. I want to just coast, so to speak, until October, and then I'll have plenty of time in November to work out next year's plan. But it's eating at me.
THE PLOT: An affable underachiever finds out he's fathered 533 children through anonymous donations to a fertility clinic 20 years ago.
AFTER: This is based on a true story, one which also got turned into an earlier French Canadian film titled "Starbuck", from the same director, and a later French film titled "Fonzy". There was a news story in 2011 that revealed that one man was believed to be the father of over 150 children through his donations to sperm banks over the years. But that man still remains anonymous, and his story was used just as the jumping-off point here.
Once again, Vaughn plays a lovable loser, David Wozniak, a mostly-incompetent truck driver for his family's meat business, who expresses concern over becoming a father when his girlfriend announces that she's pregnant. She's assuming she'll be going it alone, because over time she's learned to expect nothing from David, so she won't be disappointed. Around the same time, he's contacted by a representative of the clinic he used to donate to, informing him that there's a class-action suit being filed by 142 of his children to determine his identity.
He's given their profiles and decides to surreptitiously meet them, curious about whether his children are losers like him, or perhaps more successful. It's the old nature vs. nurture question - and when he finds that some of his children need a helping hand, his fatherly instincts kick in and he feels obligated to make each of their lives better in some way. A good portion of the film is devoted to his actions as a sort of "guardian angel" to his unintentional brood.
For the second night in a row, I'm surprised by the heartfelt nature of a Vince Vaughn film. Here's a guy up to his eyeballs in debt, he's not great at his job and can barely function in a relationship, but he wants to succeed, he wants to help others, even if it's just with a kind word or an act of friendship, stemming from a responsibility for something that he never even knew he had. When he stumbles into a support group for the children who are all seeking the father they don't know, even his passing comment has an impact. They're all brothers and sisters, and somehow they found each other, and that means something. (Though I'm not sure why they didn't have this little revelation on their own.)
Before long, the group is organizing camping trips and sing-alongs, posing for group photos that strain the limits of how many people you can fit in one photo, and David is playing father figure to many of them - it's not a large leap from there to predicting the end of the plot. What's more important, winning a lawsuit or winning people over? Preserving your anonymity or bonding with your biological children? It's an unusual, complicated family situation, but then, what parental relationship isn't? Most people don't know if they'll make a good parent until they try, it's just that most people start with one kid, not 142.
Also starring Chris Pratt (last seen in "Guardians of the Galaxy"), Cobie Smulders (last seen in "Avengers: Age of Ultron"), Bobby Moynihan (last seen in "Grown Ups 2"), Simon Delaney, Andrzej Blumenfeld, Bruce Altman (last seen in "The Paper"), Britt Robertson (last seen in "Dan in Real Life"), Damian Young (last seen in "Birdman"), Dave Patten, Jack Reynor, Adam Chanler-Berat, Jessica Williams, Matthew Daddario, with cameos from Jay Leno (last seen in "Stuck on You"), Bill Maher (last seen in "A Million Ways to Die in the West").
RATING: 6 out of 10 basketball jerseys
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