The Beguiled

Year 10, Day 160 - 6/9/18 - Movie #2,957

BEFORE: I'm staying at my parents' house in Massachusetts for a couple days, so I don't have my usual computer - forced to use a PC with Windows, because my sister buys them computer tech, while I supply them with cable and internet.  So my posts may look a little different until I can get back to New York and my Mac, where I know how everything works.  But coming up for a weekend conveniently located between Mothers Day and Fathers Day is something of a time-saver, plus there's a German picnic in the next town over tomorrow, and my mother and I like to go to that together.  It's a win-win, really.

Colin Farrell carries over from "The Lobster", and I'll follow a different actor out of this one tomorrow.

THE PLOT: The unexpected arrival of a wounded Union soldier at a girls school in Virginia during the Civil War leads to jealousy and betrayal. 

AFTER: There's just not a lot happening here, unless dramatic tension is your thing, that is. With one wounded man recovering from a battle wound in a large Southern mansion among two women and five younger girls, you can probably see that's a recipe for disaster, once he's a bit healthier and the women start vying for his attention.  This highlights something about wars that you usually don't hear people talking about, that they're often followed by a shortage of men.  For some time after the Civil War there just weren't enough men to go around, if this film is to be believed.

But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself.  First the Union soldier is found by one of the girls at this "school", and the women have to determine the best way to handle the situation.  Turning him over to the Confederate army means almost certain death, so they decide to hold off until he heals from his injury.  And also because that would bring the story to a close much too soon.

Instead there's a few days of recovery, complete with awkward spongebaths and even more awkward flirting.  Then the women start undercutting each other in a kind of competition for his affection, and even the girls who are much too young for this sort of thing start dressing nicer and wearing more jewelry.  I guess it was a different time, the 1860's.  The swinging sixties?  And the women seem to stop viewing him as the enemy and only as a man, which seems like something of a mistake.

The situation gets worse before it gets better - no spoilers here but given the circumstances it's hard to see how this could possibly end well.  And it's a bit tough to tell whether the soldier is being nice to his saviors, or manipulating them to get the result that he wants, which is to be released, or perhaps to stay with the women until the war ends and his situation improves.  But at some point he begins acting irrationally, forcing the women to find another way to get out of their situation.

I didn't realize that another version of this story was released in 1971, starring Clint Eastwood.  If I had known that, I might have tried to work in that older version last week when I had some Eastwood films around Memorial Day.  Oh, well. 

Also starring Nicole Kidman (last seen in "The Human Stain"), Kirsten Dunst (last seen in "Wimbledon"), Elle Fanning (last seen in "Live By Night"), Oona Laurence (last seen in "Southpaw"), Angourie Rice (last seen in "The Nice Guys"), Addison Riecke, Emma Howard, Wayne Pere, Matt Story, Joel Albin

RATING: 4 out of 10 French lessons

The Lobster

Year 10, Day 159 - 6/8/18 - Movie #2,956

BEFORE: Movie Year 10 is just a bit past half over, I'm sort of making the turn toward July 4 and then that long straightaway full of music documentaries and concert films, then I'll have to take some time to check where I am in the count at that point.  Then I can start to figure out how to bring 2018 to a close, right now that's much too far in the distance.  I can only see ahead to the end of August, and one possible small path that will get me to October's horror films.  If no other path presents itself, then it looks like I'll take part of September off, and then if I can't link to anything Christmasey from the end of Halloween then I'll close up for the season early in mid-November. 

As things stand right now, I've seen 156 films in 159 days.  It's all relative, really, so right now I don't think I'm ahead in the count or behind, either.  I'm counting yesterday as a free day, no movie, and counting this as my Friday film, because I'll be away for the weekend and probably able to only watch 2 films in three days - so when I get back on Monday I'll watch my Monday film, then take another free day next Wednesday (maybe I'll go see "Deadpool 2") so my Father's Day film will fall on the right day. 

Colin Farrell carries over from "Roman J. Israel, Esq.".  I've heard various things about this film, (currently available only on iTunes, it seems...) where I guess a man gets turned into a lobster.  See, this is what I was afraid of when I watched the movie "Tusk" - if I include the film where a man gets turned into a walrus, then I have include this one, and then where does it end? 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Tusk" (Movie #2,902)

THE PLOT: In a dystopian near-future, according to the law single people are taken to The Hotel, where they are obliged to find a romantic partner in forty-five days or they are transformed into beasts and sent off into The Woods.

AFTER: So many questions today, I hardly even know where to begin.  First off, WTF?  Secondly, am I supposed to take this movie seriously?  A key element of this near-future is the ability, it seems, to turn people into animals.  How?  Even if you could physically, medically, re-purpose a human into something like a horse or a parrot, why would you want to?  I mean, it's just not possible, because how do you do that, like where do all the extra pieces go, how do you turn a human heart of a certain size into a parrot heart, which has to be much smaller, not to mention the brain size and capacity, turning arms into wings and all that, plus where do the feathers come from?

The amount of surgery we're talking about here, even if it were possible, would kill a person, right?  So it can't be remotely possible, yet that's what we're told, again and again.  The main character, David, wants to be turned into a lobster if it comes to that (more on the rules of this society in a bit...) but how would that work?  Do they turn his internal skeleton into an exoskeleton, somehow make his blood resistant to the cold of the ocean depths, put his eyes on those little stalks, fashion his hands into claws somehow?  It's madness, sheer madness, and I can't really make heads nor tails of this concept.

Now, thirdly, what is going on in this society?  What happened, politically, globally, to bring this all about?  Was it war, famine, disease, economic collapse?  There seems to be this incredible emphasis placed on people forming couples, as if that's somehow better for society as a whole, so nearly everyone is encouraged to find their lifemate, to the point of obsessiveness.  And if someone isn't 100% the perfect partner, these people are encouraged to break that bond and try again - with only limited resources and strategies available to save any relationship, and seemingly ridiculous ones at that.  Huh?  If life-bonds are so important, why aren't there more plans in place to salvage the ones that already exist?  Nothing seems to make sense here.

Single people are taken away to The Hotel (or they visit voluntarily, I'm not quite sure...) where they have a limited number of days to pair up with someone, and all the while they are tortured by having to watch the happy couples eating together in the dining room, plus couples get to play sports like tennis, while singles can only swim and play golf.  Couples also get larger rooms, get to stay on nice yachts for a while, and (presumably) no longer have to watch silly lectures about how much better it is to be part of a couple.

And if the single people don't form a perfect mating bond before their time runs out, they are turned into the animal of their choice.  (Which again, doesn't seem possible, but there it is.)  David wants to be a lobster because he loves the ocean, plus they live for up to 100 years and never lose their virility.  But then again, they're delicious, so he could be caught in a trap and boiled alive, then served with drawn butter.  So there's that to consider.  Single people can also earn more time at the Hotel by participating in a hunt, where more single people, the "Loners", are tracked through the woods and shot with dart guns, and the fate of these people seems a bit unclear.  (Are they killed?  Turned into horses?  Forced to stay at the hotel and watch silly lectures about coupling?  Not sure...)

And everyone in this future seems sort of flat, like they're all depressed or they don't care about anything, or have strong opinions about why things are the way they are.  There's an air of "1984" about this, like millions of people being told what to do by Big Brother and for some reason they don't band together and overthrow the unfair system.  The other thing this story sort of reminds me of is a film that came out back in the 1970's called "Logan's Run".  In that film, the future society had a ceremony where people were "renewed" when they turned 30, in order to preserve the few resources that were left.  The "renewal" ceremony was a sham, just a way to kill off the aging population so the younger people had more resources.

Part of me wonders if that's what's going here in "The Lobster".  David, travels with a dog that used to be his brother.  How do we know that the government didn't just kill his brother outright, and give him a random dog?  We always hear those stories about cats and dogs that get lost on vacation and find their way home again from 1,000 miles away, but isn't the simpler explanation that a similar-looking stray dog showed up on that family's doorstep one day?  Am I being too cynical here, or not cynical enough?  Was there any indication at all that his brother's brain or awareness was inside the body of this dog?

Wikipedia refers to this film as an "absurdist dystopian black comedy" and that gives me at least a little more understanding - perhaps none of this is meant to be taken seriously.  It's all some giant metaphor or allegory, but for what?  The role of some governments in dictating relationships?  I guess there are some societies like China and Russia that try to mandate marriage over singlehood, or try to put limits on bearing children, adopting children, make laws about divorce or gay marriage or something.  Perhaps some people find this ridiculous, like how do you legislate something very personal like relationships?  Then there are things like the "single tax", where married couples get bigger tax breaks, doesn't our own government encourage marriage, on some level?

Or perhaps this is a satire about LGBTQ issues - remember a few years ago, before gay marriage was legal everywhere (and don't think there aren't people trying to un-do that, because there probably are) and the main argument against that was that if we open up the definition of "marriage" so that it's no longer constrained to be between a man and a woman, then it was somehow a "slippery slope" that would lead to people marrying their pets and committing bestiality.  Which was a ridiculous argument, because nobody was asking for that (OK, maybe a few freaks) and anyway, the definitions of words are changing all of the time.  Language is fluid, and changes all the time to represent the changes in our society.  Gender and sexual preferences are fluid too, and some people seem to have a problem with that as well.  Are people who are against gender reassignment surgery (or I think now we're supposed to call it "gender confirmation surgery") also afraid that this will lead to people being turned into dogs, cats and horses?

Anyway, it sort of becomes a moot point because the film didn't really pay off the way that I thought it would.  The procedure of a human becoming an animal ("species reassignment surgery"?) is never really seen, we only see a blond woman before the surgery and then a horse with blonde hair, and as I stated above, that could be easily faked, so I can't really take it seriously.  After David has trouble connecting with "Biscuit Woman" (the other characters aren't given names in this film, just descriptions, which de-humanizes them a bit, but also ensures that we don't get too attached to them...) he pretends to be as heartless as "Heartless Woman" so that she'll mate with him, but this just leads to more problems.  (Is this the moral of the story?  That forming any relationship leads to problems?  Again, it's quite difficult to suss this out...)

David is then forced to escape The Hotel and go on the run, linking up with the band of Loners, the single people who live in the woods and are ritually hunted by the guests of the Hotel.  Damn it, this leads to a whole new set of unanswerable questions, like "Why do they have to live in the woods?" and "Why is their leader so keen on having everyone did their own grave in advance?" and that's all before asking "Why do they let themselves get hunted like that, why don't they DO something about it?" This is so maddening, because we only get information about this future society in drips and drabs, so we're never able to form a coherent picture about why society is like this, what happened in the past (near future) to bring about all these rules and absurd situations (in the farther future).

Whenever any of the Loners wants to go in to the city (and one assumes they have to buy necessities once in a while, like ointment or tampons or new ponchos) they have to pair up and pretend to be part of a couple, so that they aren't harassed by the police, who want to see the papers from all the single people. (Again, WHY?)  Which leads to another question, if it's so easy to pretend to be a couple, then why don't all the single people do that?  People pretend to be married all the time, for immigration reasons or to conceal their sexual preferences, so why can't the Loners just pair up and live the lie, wouldn't that make things a whole lot easier?  I mean, I get it, they're rebels of a sort, but why aren't they working to change the system, instead of pulling silly pranks on the staff at the Hotel?

There's just this constant feeling that I'm missing something, that this is all one big metaphor for some concept that I can't quite grasp.  Instead I have to fall back on guesses about what it all means, like how it sucks to be single, but it can also suck to be married, or maybe about how you have to compromise your ideals a bit in order to accept a partner into your life, and maybe you'll end up smashing your head into the furniture a few times a day, but in the end marriage beats the alternative. Or in the latter part, it seems the film is about how you'll never find a mate if you're looking for one, but as soon as you relax and give up the search, suddenly it seems that love may find you.  But in the end I fear that this interpretation says a lot more about me and what I saw in it than it does about what's inherently there to find, because of how damn obtuse this film is.

Another possible interpretation is that since the film opens with a very strange scene, and also closes with a different strange scene, that the whole thing was a writing exercise, to see what kind of story could possibly link those two strange, random scenes.  It's unlikely but it's not outside the realm of possibility.  I just don't know.

NITPICK POINT: The film mentions there is one animal that nobody wants to get turned into, and then maddeningly never tells us what animal that is.  That's going to drive me crazy.

Also starring Rachel Weisz (last seen in "Youth"), Lea Seydoux (last seen in "Spectre"), Ben Whishaw (last seen in "The Zero Theorem"), John C. Reilly (last seen in "Carnage"), Ariane Labed (last seen in "Assassin's Creed"), Olivia Colman (last seen in "Murder on the Orient Express"), Angeliki Papoulia, Jessica Barden, Ashley Jensen, Michael Smiley, Roger Ashton-Griffiths (last seen in "Mr. Turner"), Ewen MacIntosh, Roland Ferrandi, Garry Mountaine, Imelda Nagle Ryan, Emma O'Shea.

RATING: 3 out of 10 fingers in a toaster

Roman J. Israel, Esq.

Year 10, Day 157 - 6/6/18 - Movie #2,955

BEFORE: This one's easy, Denzel Washington carries over from "Fences", and borrowing this Academy screener gets me to the next actor who'll be around for three days.  Another way I could have gone was to link from "Fences" to "Hidden Figures", the two films are sort of linked in my brain because they were both up for Best Picture in the 2017 Academy Awards, and some people seemed to confuse them, or mention them in the same breath because they were the two African-American themed pictures.  One commentator even combined the two titles accidentally, calling them "Hidden Fences", and that moniker sort of stuck in people's brains for a while last year.  The two films share one actress, Saniyya Sidney, so I could have justified watching them next to each other, but I'm going to go a different way with it.

But, I'll get back to "Hidden Figures" in a few days - this way I can sandwich another four films in between them, clearing a few more off my list and then I'll hit Father's Day and July 4 right on the money.

THE PLOT: A driven idealistic defense attorney finds himself in a tumultuous series of events that lead to a crisis and the necessity for extreme action.

AFTER: An element carrying over from "Fences" is a black character who's not quite all there - while Roman J. Israel is not wandering the streets, playing a trumpet and chasing hellhounds, he's not 100% mentally there, either.  He's competent enough to be a lawyer, but he's got zero social skills, and there are suggestions that he may have a form of autism or perhaps Asberger's, another lawyer refers to him as a "savant" because he's got all the legal codes and stats memorized.  Plus he's eschewed all romantic relationships for decades, while functioning as a sort of silent partner in a small, struggling law firm.  This implies some kind of fear of crowds, or perhaps a fear of social interaction, yet he's high-functioning when it comes to writing legal briefs or quoting precedents from case files.  (A similar character was depicted in "The Accountant", where that guy was a hitman and also some kind of accounting genius, despite being somewhere on the spectrum.)

My first thought here is, maybe this is possible, although I don't know enough about autism or savants to say for sure.  And my second thought is, it's something of a commentary on our times that to depict an honest, well-intentioned lawyer, a screenwriter felt the need to give this character this sort of back-story, because audiences probably wouldn't believe it if they just depicted an honest lawyer as if that were a perfectly normal thing to be.  They've got to exist out there somewhere, but not in movies - maybe that says more about movies than it does about lawyers, I'm not sure.

Anyway, Roman is also something of a throwback, because he became a lawyer during the 1960's, a time of intense social activism and the civil rights movement, so that's the angle from which he approaches law.  And he's been content with his place in a small, activist-oriented firm for such a long time, that when his boss/partner has a heart attack and falls into a coma, he doesn't know what to do.  His partner's niece calls in an old friend, a high-profile lawyer in a larger firm, and former student of the partner, so settle the active cases, then essentially close down the practice.  Roman's attempts to appear in court and work on the cases don't go very well, largely because he speaks his mind and has no social skills.

Eventually the high-profile defense lawyer offers Roman a job at his firm, largely to work on pro bono cases that might also be high-profile.  This more "corporate" lawyer is a much tougher character to get a handle on, as I was never sure about whether he was doing the right things for the right reasons.  What was his angle?  Was he inspired by his mentor's illness to start doing more pro bono work, or was he more interested in getting publicity for his firm?  It's unclear, but maybe in a good way, because each viewer can then decide for himself if this guy is on the level.

Meanwhile, Roman seems to go through a crisis of faith - nothing seems to go right on the cases that he's working on, and his decisions put the firm at risk.  Even speaking at the activist network doesn't go well, because Roman's attitudes are so outdated - the simple suggestion that a man should give up a seat for a woman puts him in a P.C. minefield, where a modern woman gets insulted that a man should have to stick up for her, when she's capable of asking for a seat for herself.  Roman means well in this case, but he's not up on the modern lingo, and gets accused of being part of the patriarchy, pandering, and other problematic things that you see all the time whenever a white person on Facebook makes a comment about race, or a man says anything about gender issues.

And while Roman's new boss starts leaning toward doing more pro bono work, Roman's crisis of faith leads him in the other direction, towards changing his lifestyle by cashing in.  He anonymously collects the reward money related to a case he worked on, without realizing that doing this violates attorney-client privilege. (Or maybe he does realize, this is also a bit unclear.)  Finally he can afford a nicer apartment, better suits and treats himself to a night in a fancy hotel, complete with bacon-maple donuts on the beach.

That's hardly the end of the story, because Roman's actions eventually start to catch up with him.  He's also working on a class-action suit that's related to plea bargaining reform, because it turns out that the whole plea system is not fair to everyone, because it means that the vast majority of people are not getting their day in court, which they should be entitled to.  But this is a case that could make a lawyer's career, and it would demand that he seek help and spend years walking this through the legal system.  Despite watching countless episodes of "Law & Order", I'm nothing close to a legal expert, so I don't fully understand all of the concepts here - the only thing I can imagine is that Roman's brief is like a screenplay that is very ambitious and would take years to develop and produce into a film.

Similarly, the only way for me to understand the differences between a small law office and a larger law firm is to think about my experiences working for animation studios - I've been working for very small studios (1-5 employees) for a very long time.  If I were out of work, I could look for employment at a larger studio, but I'm not sure if I'd fit in there.  I'm used to being a sort of jack-of-all-trades, juggling many tasks at once and getting involved in many different aspects of production, from typing screenplays to entering film festivals and arranging screenings, doing accounting and payroll, running and fulfilling Kickstarter campaigns and promoting things on social media.  At a larger company I might get assigned ONE of those tasks, and that would be it, just doing that one thing, all day long, day after day.  I might be inclined to jump out the window on my third day.

In that sense, I think I can see where Roman Israel is coming from - he's been pulled out of his comfort zone, forced to change his whole approach to practicing law and worse, he can't maintain his old routines.  Suddenly his suits aren't good enough, he's got to get a haircut, and he's got to interact with strangers.  All I can say is, "Roman, I feel your pain."  It's much harder to fight the good fight when you've been thrown off your game.

Also starring Colin Farrell (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them"), Carmen Ejogo (ditto), Amari Cheatom (last seen in "Django Unchained"), DeRon Horton, Amanda Warren (last seen in "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri"), Nazneen Contractor (last seen in "Star Trek: Into Darkness"), Shelley Hennig, Joseph David-Jones, Andrew T. Lee, Hugo Armstrong, Tony Plana (last seen in "Hard Time: Hostage Hotel"), Sam Gilroy, Lynda Gravatt, Niles Fitch (last seen in "St. Vincent"), Elisa Perry, Annie Sertich, Franco Vega, Lauren Ellen Thompson.

RATING: 6 out of 10 jars of peanut butter

Fences

Year 10, Day 156 - 6/5/18 - Movie #2,954

BEFORE: Funny story, the DVR that the cable company gave me (after I carried the old one in from Queens to Manhattan and carried the new one back home) - it didn't work.  I put it in place and plugged it into the power strip, and it didn't even light up.  It was D.O.A., maybe it never had any life in it to begin with, maybe it was an older DVR that someone turned in because it had given up, or maybe since I asked for an older model it spent too much time on the shelf without being given a home, but either way, it wasn't going to work for me.  I called the cable company and screamed at them some more, because the guy at the customer center should have at least plugged it in to check it before giving it to me, and they offered to send someone out in 2 more days - but I had already been without the movie channels for four days, and I couldn't take it any more.  So I demanded that they move my appointment to Tuesday, and first thing Tuesday morning at that.  And I got it.

So a smarter cable tech came to my house this morning, and he told me some bull about how they gave me a Manhattan cable box, and that one wouldn't work in Queens, but I find that very hard to believe - connectivity issues aside, the box should have at least powered up if it was a working unit. He checked the signal coming in to the house, checked the junction box outside to make sure nobody was stealing my signal (I guess...) then gave me a working DVR, the same model as the one I picked up in Manhattan.  It's a four-year old DVR, but it's supposed to allow me to keep dubbing movies to DVD - it's apparently still in demand because it displays the current time and the newer models don't, and some people prefer to use their cable boxes as clocks (I guess...).  Umm, why not just look at your phone?

Anyway, I appear to be back in business.  And I didn't lose anything that was stored on the DVR because I had two days notice to dub two rarely-aired films to VHS, and the other movies are still in constant rotation, so I just have to program the DVR to record them again.  And I can store more movies on the new drive, after one movie it was just 1% full, so that means I can record 100 movies before it fills up!  And it connects better to the OnDemand system, so I should be able to access more movies that way.  (Great, just what I needed, access to more movies...my watchlists are constantly full anyway.)   I can't say I forgive the cable company for all of their faults, but at least I can live with them again.

Stephen McKinley Henderson carries over from "Lady Bird".  Sorry if you were expecting Timothee Chalamet to carry over to "Call Me By Your Name" - I will get there, but not until after July 4.  That's in the works. 

THE PLOT: A working-class African-American father tries to raise his family in the 1950's, while coming to terms with the events of his life.

AFTER: I've been doing this (almost) daily movie-watching thing for some time now, and among the abilities that I've developed is an uncanny sense that enables me to determine when a movie is based on a stage play.  Here are the top three tip-offs: 1) There tends to be only one or two locations, quite often it's a house or an apartment, but other locations are possible, and at least 90% of the action takes place there.  2) A limited number of actors/characters, no large crowd scenes, everything that takes place in a store or an office is mentioned and not seen  3) A lot of repeated dialogue, everything that's stated is stated two or three times, more if it's important and relates to something that will be relevant later.

Or, you know, you can just be familiar with what has played on Broadway in the recent or distant past, and keep a mental record of that.  The August Wilson play that this is based on is very prominent, of course, but even if I hadn't been aware of that play, I probably would have been able to spot this as a play from the techniques listed above.

Anyway, this is my third official Father's Day film, following "Kodachrome" and "Winter Passing", but I suppose you can count "One True Thing" and "Lady Bird" in there as well, they all deal with fathers, or people with father issues, or people who had fathers.  (Umm, wait, that's everyone.)  But maybe it's a clear connection to "Lady Bird", since the main character in that film was looking to go to college, work out what kind of person she was going to be, right there on the cusp of adulthood, and her father was working to help her on the sly, and her mother was putting her down and standing in her way.  "Fences" plays on the same theme, it's just that the gender roles are reversed - Cory's trying to play football and think about college, his mother's being supportive on the sly and his father is putting him down and standing in his way.

I believe in instilling discipline (though I don't have much of my own, I'll admit) but since this is a throwback film set in the early 1950's, it makes sense that the father places discipline before caring, he loves his son but he doesn't necessarily LIKE him, in fact that doesn't even seem to be any of his concern, and instead what's important is that chores are done, rules are followed, and respect is paid.  Times have changed, of course, and any father who expects his son to call him "Sir" in every sentence seems out of touch with the times.  Anyway, respect shouldn't necessarily be enforced like that, wouldn't it be better if the father had to EARN the child's respect?  I can sort of see both sides of this, but I've never called my father "Sir", nor was I expected to.  Now I wonder if he had to call his father "Sir".  My point is, it's now a two-way street, and this sort of comes up during "Fences" when Cory also decides to make his break, and challenge his father, who he perceives as being too harsh.

(And that's THREE films this week, and this wasn't planned, where characters are graduating high school and weighing their college choices.  "The House", "Lady Bird" and now this one.  Coincidences like this are just that, unless I planned them on a subconscious level somehow.  And it's four if you lump in "Superstar" with M.K. Gallagher in high school.)

Just like the mother in "Lady Bird", Troy Maxson sees his child as his responsibility, somebody he has to provide for, and after a certain time, that becomes a habit, and the parent is threatened by anything that will supplant them.  They're not ready for their children to grow up and leave home, so they insult them and don't allow them to do activities that take their focus off of their role as a son or daughter.  Because God knows, if they let their kid do something fun that isn't a chore, that's a slippery slope and before long they'll ONLY want to do fun things, and then the garbage doesn't get cleaned up, the fence never gets built, and the kid doesn't even come to Thanksgiving dinner because they're smoking cigarettes or drinking beers in a parking lot somewhere.  It's a logic trap for sure, and it ends up constricting children so much that they end up going to extremes just to break free from years of parental control.  So there must be another way, only that's rarely seen in dramas like these.

There's a lot more drama to unpack here like Troy's missives about his baseball career, his brother who served in the war and got injured and now wanders the streets with a trumpet, claiming to have been to heaven and been sent back to earth to fight hellhounds.  That was a bit weird, and it's too bad they cast the same actor who played Bubba in "Forrest Gump" because that poor actor's going to be most famous for playing characters who aren't right in the head.  The question of whether this character should be placed in a mental hospital or allowed to wander the streets is a key point - and I thought that perhaps this character was very unrealistic, until I saw that guy in the 6th Ave. subway station who's always on the same bench and always involved in a conversation with people that only he can see, and then I realized that such people do exist.

Then there's the drama with Troy himself, and I don't want to spoil anything here if you haven't seen the film or the play, but let's just say he's not the perfect husband.  And then circumstances force him to reveal to his wife that he hasn't been the perfect husband, and then the family has to deal with all that, and it pretty much tears them apart.  There's a reason why Viola Davis won the Best Actress Oscar for this performance, because people love a tragedy come Oscar-time. 

I just wish that the metaphors here weren't so bleeding obvious - they used that fence idea to symbolize just about everything.  "Some people build fences to keep people out, and other people build fences to keep people in."  God, how pedantic and annoying.  Plus the fence serves as Troy's fear of dying, the authority over his son, the possessive nature of property owners... jeesh, that's a lot to ask for from a simple fence.  What if someone just wanted to keep stray dogs from pooping in their yard?  Sometimes a fence is just a fence, with a simple practical purpose.

The film also seemed to drag heavily at times, perhaps this is due to the tragic and heavy-handed tone, or because it was so dialogue-driven and not action-driven.  It may also be due to the running time, or the fact that 99% of the movie takes place in just that one house and yard.  Which is that terrible side effect you get when you turn a play into a film, just saying.

Also starring Denzel Washington (last seen in "The Magnificent Seven"), Viola Davis (last seen in "Far From Heaven"), Jovan Adepo, Russell Hornsby (last seen in "Meet the Parents"), Mykelti Williamson (last seen in "How to Make an American Quilt"), Saniyya Sidney, Christopher Mele, Lesley Boone, Jason Silvis.

RATING: 5 out of 10 baseball stats

Lady Bird

Year 10, Day 155 - 6/4/18 - Movie #2,953

BEFORE: Up early on a Monday morning, which is very unusual for me - but I had to get in to Manhattan before the lines built up at the cable company (hint: almost rhymes with "rectum") service center.  This was a smart move, because the place probably is crowded right before 9 and then again at lunchtime, so I arrived just before 11, and the line moved really fast.  I was number 7 on the call board, and 3 minutes later I was speaking to a counter rep.  I handed in my old DVR and asked them if they would end its life in a humane manner.  I think I may have inquired about whether they were going to have some formal ceremony, or just take it out behind the barn and shoot it.  At least I made one guy laugh during a stressful situation.

Thanks to my time spent yelling at cable reps over the phone about my movie channels not working, I knew to ask this guy for a slightly older DVR model, one that might give me a chance of keeping up my outdated practice of dubbing movies to DVD to make them more inconvenient to watch.  But since I know that not every movie that's streaming will be streaming forever, I need to maintain this habit in order to make sure that every film will continue to be available when I'm ready to watch it.  Thankfully they didn't call me a heretic for my arcane movie-viewing rituals and burn me at the stake.  Next step will be to get this DVR home and plug it into my system, and program it to re-record the movies that I didn't get a chance to dub off the old DVR before it died.  I've got to get this all straightened out before I start missing movies, and before I go up to Massachusetts this weekend to see my parents.

Lucas Hedges carries over from "Kill the Messenger".

THE PLOT: In 2002, an artistically inclined seventeen-year-old girl comes of age in Sacramento, California.

AFTER:  This film got a lot of attention before the last Oscars, and then once it didn't win any of those awards, it seems like everyone stopped talking about it.  I still have access to Academy screeners that I haven't watched yet, so perhaps people will talk about this film again once it's on cable.  I guess it was a big deal at the time to have a female director nominated, but since she didn't win the fervor over this film seems to have cooled down a great deal.

The linking obviously encouraged me to place this film here, but I was unsure about doing so, because it seemed to be largely about a girl's final year of high school, and I don't usually start my education-themed movies until late August or early September.  But June is also a time to discuss high school and college graduations, so I can justify watching this one here in June also.  Plus it's about halfway between Mother's Day and Father's Day right now, and a film about a daughter's very different relationships with her two parents also seems quite timely.

Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and therefore mothers and fathers work very differently. The older stereotype would dictate that the father would be the disciplinarian, the tougher of the two parents, while the mother would therefore tend to be more nurturing and forgiving.  Ah, but we live in different times, and that's reflected in our cinema - if anything, Hollywood has turned this stereotype around, and in a number of films that I've seen recently, the mother is the authority figure and the father can be portrayed as more reasonable, if also distant at times.  (I'm going to ignore "The House" for the moment, where neither parent acted responsibly or had their shit together.)

Thinking back to "The Squid and the Whale" in March - where the mother was a critic (in every sense of the word) and the rule-maker, and the father was a novelist, and the easygoing rule-breaker.  The kids were caught in the middle, only partially aware that the gender norms were being flipped.  Then I watched "Music of the Heart", where Meryl Streep was a single mother who had to use music to instill discipline into her two sons - here their father wasn't even in the picture!  Then in April there was "Dolores Claiborne", where a mother had to go to extreme lengths to protect her daughter, and getting Dad out of there was a necessary part of that equation.  That brings me to "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri", with another divorced mother acting as the authority figure, even to the point of demanding justice for her daughter after death.

For Mother's Day I hit the trifecta - with "I, Tonya", "Two Weeks" and "One True Thing".  Again, strong mothers and absent (or ineffectual) fathers.  Definitely a trend for this year.  I'm trying to pivot more toward fathers than mothers now, but the films don't want to seem to cooperate yet.  "One True Thing" had another father who was a busy professor/novelist (also seen in "Winter Passing") and this means that such a character can't possibly be there emotionally for his kids.  Come on, a woman can hold down a job and run a household, be a breadwinner, provider and a caregiver but we just don't expect the same thing from men in our society.

(ASIDE: You could say that the mothers in "Two Weeks" and "One True Thing" pulled the same passive-aggressive move - they came down with terminal illnesses.  If you think about it, it's the ultimate passive-aggressive statement, suddenly everyone in the family is expected to drop what they're doing and take care of their mother.  I agree it's a long way to go to make a point, but how else am I supposed to interpret that?  Whereas the mother in "I, Tonya" wasn't so much passive-aggressive, she was definitely more aggressive-aggressive...)

In "Lady Bird", I see a lot of these same elements repeated yet again.  Lady Bird's father is under-employed, then un-employed, and this leads to depression.  What kind of a man can't provide for his family?  And her mother works in some kind of psych ward, though I'm not sure if she's a doctor, nurse or what, it's not made very clear.  But she's clearly bringing home the bacon with this job, so why aren't they living in a better situation, are nurses not paid very well in Sacramento?  Why does Lady Bird joke about living on the "wrong side of the tracks"?  I would suggest that the main reason for the family's financial problems is the high cost of that Catholic school education (what a rip-off, public school is, like, free, right?).

The mother figure here is incredibly passive-aggressive, but in her own unique way.  They temper this by stating that her own mother was alcoholic and abusive, as if this justifies the fact that everything she says that is intended to sound helpful or complimentary has an under-current to it, one that is both hurtful and ego-crushing at the same time.  My mother did a lot of this, she's still unable to give me any advice that doesn't also put me in my place at the same time, or point out my shortcomings.  It's some form of defense mechanism, I reckon, an inability to conceive that her child is somehow different than her, or can possibly get through life without her advice.  It's a bit like a verbal form of Munchausen by proxy syndrome, where a mother has to keep her child sick so that she can keep acting as the healer.  Verbally putting her daughter down keeps the daughter in a place where she constantly needs the mother's help or advice, or so the theory goes.  But what it does instead is create a situation where the child eventually feels the need to leave home for a healthier environment, even if that leads to making terrible mistakes or bad life choices on her (or his) own.  (This is my read on the situation based on my own experience, but as always, your mileage may vary.)

I see the whole religion thing this way also - we all sort of get born into our parents' religion, we become what they were and we believe in God (or not) because they did (or didn't).  Eventually when we're 18 or 20 we get a chance to be something else if we want, and believe in something else (or nothing) if we want.  This is a positive thing.  We've got to be comfortable about the way we're going to spend the rest of our lives, and being financially and morally independent from our parents is a big part of that.  At the same time we set out on a career path, it's a good time to think about what we want to believe in for the foreseeable future.  I decided to stop going to church around the same time I left for college, and for me that was a big step in the right direction.  I got my Sundays back, and I didn't have to listen to a bunch of people tell me how the universe worked when I didn't believe they even knew what they were talking about.

The whole reason she calls herself "Lady Bird" - it's another sign she wants to break from her parents.   I think this is more common than we realize, when people realize that their self-identity is based on a name their parents came up with, and that they had no say in the matter, it's another milestone on the journey if someone changes their name.  Another sign that someone is starting to think for themselves, take control of their own destiny instead of just following the rough guidelines that their parents have suggested for them.

I can't really find a connection between my experiences and those of a 17-year-old girl in Catholic school, except that I was also raised in that cult-like religion, I also was involved in theater productions in high school, and my mother also nearly messed up my driving test.  She got into my head by telling me a story about her driving test, and she was asked to do a three-point turn on a hill, and for some reason back then she was supposed to use her other foot to hold down the brake when switching gears.  When my tester asked me to do a similar turn, I moved my left foot over to the brake, and he said what I was doing was very illegal.  I guess back in my mother's day things were different, like you had to use the choke or the clutch or pedal the car with your bare feet like Fred Flintstone.  Anyway, I think it was her subtle way of trying to make me fail the test, so her little boy wouldn't die in a car crash or take one more step toward being an adult.

And I also did what Lady Bird did, which was to apply for colleges in NYC so I stood a chance of getting out of suburbia and maybe not becoming just like my parents.  And that meant a whole slew of new experiences at NYU, finally getting to kiss a girl and learning how much drinking was too much for one night.  The only way to do it is to go through it at that point.

That being said, the way this film jumps through Lady Bird's senior year feels very disjointed, it's basically a random collection of experiences that she had, and they didn't seem to add up to a coherent whole, not for me, anyway.  Maybe they're not supposed to, but we live our lives in a linear fashion (most of us, anyway) and I'm more comfortable with movies that do the same.  I'm glad that this film didn't jump backwards and forward in time, like so many movies do these days, at least it kept moving only forward, but I still would have like to see more connection between the different scenes, because I think that would have made the story stronger.  I like WHERE it's going, I'm just not sold on how it gets there.

EDIT: I just realized I watched TWO films within one week's time with teen girls in Catholic high schools - the other one was "Superstar".  But they are two very different movies.

Also starring Saoirse Ronan (last seen in "Atonement"), Laurie Metcalf (last seen in "Frankie and Johnny"), Tracy Letts (last seen in "The Post"), Timothee Chalamet (last seen in "Interstellar"), Beanie Feldstein (last seen in "Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising"), Lois Smith (last seen in "The Comedian"), Stephen McKinley Henderson (last seen in "Manchester by the Sea"), Odeya Rush, Jordan Rodrigues, Marielle Scott, John Karna, Jake McDorman (last seen in "American Sniper"), Bayne Gibby, Laura Marano, Marietta DePrima, Daniel Zovatto, Kristen Cloke, Andy Buckley (last seen in "The House"), Kathryn Newton, Myra Turley, Bob Stephenson (last heard in "Nerdland").

RATING: 5 out of 10 hot rollers

Kill the Messenger

Year 10, Day 154 - 6/3/18 - Movie #2,952

BEFORE: After last night's disastrous house call from a cable company technician, I've resigned myself to the fact that I'll need to get up early on Monday morning, disconnect my 14-year-old DVR from life support, and carry it in to the Manhattan service center with as much dignity as possible.  Either that or take it out to the backyard, shoot it and bury it - but that might be hard to explain when the cable company starts asking questions.  No, better to deal with this head on, I've had ample time to prepare myself for the inevitable push toward streaming-only, with no more permanent copies being added to the collection on disc, unless I love a movie so much that I'm willing to shell out for the professional, mass-produced version.  That's what's wrong with the world today, nobody appreciates hand-crafted DVDs any more.  You hipsters with your artichoke toast and your artisanal cheeses, what's so wrong with hand-crafted physical media?  I want to keep making artisanal DVDs, is that not politically correct any more?  Look, the discs aren't going to end up in a landfill until after I die, and even then, maybe my movie collection will be the last of its kind, and end up in the Smithsonian or something, you never know.  People will flock to the exhibit to see the last VHS tapes in circulation, after parents explain to their kids what VHS tapes are, that is.

There's a slight hope, the cable tech on the phone who rebooted my DVR several times remotely, in a last-ditch effort to get the movie channels to come back, told me that if I swap out my DVR and ask for an older model, MAYBE I can still get one that will allow me to dub to DVD without blocking that signal.  Hey, it doesn't hurt to ask.  I'm willing to give up a little storage space on the hard drive if it means I can keep clearing the contents every week and storing everything on DVD.  It's a lot of work being me, but I'm not really happy unless tasks are very difficult and frustrating, so it kind of all works out.  Then I'm satisfied.  Frustrat-isfied? 

Anyway, Jeremy Renner carries over from his cameo role in "The House" for a lead role in today's film.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Post" (Movie #2,937)

THE PLOT: Based on the true story of journalist Gary Webb, who uncovered the CIA's past role in importing huge amounts of cocaine into the U.S. that was aggressively sold in ghettos across the country to raise money for the Nicaraguan Contras' rebel army. 

AFTER: This film is part of that trend of "newspaper people breaking stories" - we had "Spotlight" with the Boston Globe and the Catholic priest scandals, and more recently "The Post" with the Washington Post exposing the Pentagon Papers.  But this one came before those other two films, it was released in 2014 and I don't think it got much attention.  It's set in the mid-1990's, but the scandal involved goes all the way back to the mid-1980's, which much of today's audience is too young to remember, assuming they were even alive. 

If you're old enough to remember President Reagan, and a man named Oliver North, who was an ex-Marine and member of the U.S. National Security Council who was involved in something called the Iran-Contra scandal.  It was much like the scandals we're enjoying (?) today, with all kinds of shady deals going on with other countries, except the press didn't find out about them until after the fact, and the President didn't go on Twitter bragging about how he could make the best trade deals, and the failing New York Times didn't know what they were talking about.  This was mostly because Twitter didn't exist yet, and Reagan was probably too old to read the newspaper any more, but maybe somebody read it to him in the morning while he was eating his oatmeal.  Also there weren't as many porn stars involved, except there was one secretary who stole documents by putting them in her undies, and I think she later posed for men's magazines.  But that's a different story. 

In the first Iran-Contra scandal, the U.S. sold weapons to Iran (they were our allies back then, go figure) that they weren't supposed to have, and in exchange some U.S. hostages in Lebanon got released.  It was one of those "the ends justify the means" things, I guess.  And in the sequel, the CIA took that money from the Iran deal and supported the Contra rebels in Nicaragua, because Congress wouldn't support a war there, and in fact made it illegal for us to fund a war there, so guess what, it happened anyway.  Again, the ends justified the means - one imagines this sort of thing goes on all the time, and it's only those rare cases where some nosy reporter exposes the whole thing and people get a glimpse of how the sausage is made, and it's not very appealing.  Part of the reason our government seems to be doing so poorly right now is that reporting has gotten easier (and one hopes, better) due to the interwebs, so more regular scandals are being discovered every day, and they're getting out to the public more quickly so we can all pretend to be outraged at a faster pace.

There was another twist to the Iran-Contra scandal, this reporter from a small-market paper in San Jose scooped the big papers by stumbling on evidence that the CIA had also decided to raise money by taking whatever Nicaragua had a lot of, which just happened to be cocaine, and getting it to America.  Really, this is just simple economics, supply and demand - take something that you've got a lot of, price it to sell, and get it to where people want it the most.  And where are there a LOT of people?  In big cities, of course.  It would make no sense to bring kilos of drugs out to Montana or Wyoming or some place where there are no people, and therefore no market. 

It all tracks, except for the part where cocaine happened to be illegal and we had Nancy Reagan appearing on TV at the same time to tell kids to just "say NO to drugs", as if it's that easy, while her husband's government was also flooding the streets of the bigger U.S. cities with this new thing called "crack".  Wait a minute, was Nancy Reagan using reverse psychology, telling people to not do drugs so that they WOULD do drugs, and therefore fund the Contras?  God, it's a dastardly plan.  The minute you tell teens to not do something, they'll want to run right out and do it.  So the First Lady was IN ON IT!  A-HA! 

In New York City, we heard the circulating rumors for years about how the CIA invented crack to keep minorities from getting ahead and, also created AIDS to control that population, and was also putting some kind of sterilization chemicals in grape soda and red Kool-Aid.  OK, so the rumor mill was 1 for 3 - who knew that even part of all that would turn out to be proven right?  But it's unfortunate that the guy who reported all this never got any confirmation from the CIA, so his paper was forced to backtrack on the story, and eventually let him go.  He was receiving a "Man of the Year" award one minute for breaking the news, then blackballed soon after for not being able to prove it.

And whatever happened to Oliver North?  After revising his testimony to admit that he lied to Congress in the first round of the Iran-Contra investigation, he was convicted on three felony counts (out of a possible 16) and served probation and community service.  He ran for office unsuccessfully in Virginia, then wrote a few books and I think had a radio show.  Great news, this month it was announced he's going to be the next President of the NRA!  I can't wait for him to screw that up somehow, given his track record this seems to be a fair bet.

Now, as to what we can LEARN from this story, that's a bit trickier.  Now, of course, we know just how dirty the Reagan Administration was, and both dynastic Bush administrations that followed it were just as bad.  (Bush Sr. used to be the head of the CIA, by the way.  What did we expect?)  Democrats don't come off any better, because how many scandals were there during the Clinton years?  A different kind of scandal, perhaps, but I have to concede mistakes were obviously made, and as charming as Bill Clinton was, he always had that used-car salesman sort of niceness about it, like he's secretly screwing you, but at least manages to smile during the process.  I can't really point to any outright scandals during the Obama years, other than the "birther" one, and other ones that seem conveniently manufactured by the alt-right. 

Now with Trump, the pendulum has just swung back the other way, like we all know he's been dirty since day one, heck, since well before that, and now begins the difficult task of proving it.  If we've learned one thing since the 80's, it's this: the process is going to take a while.  Don't be surprised if the 6th or 7th congressional inquiry finally comes to some kind of conclusion on collusion, only by the time they do, Trump's 2nd term will be nearly over and half the defendants will be dead due to mysterious circumstances.  I'd love to be proven wrong here, but I think this is the safe bet.  If you're a reporter, just think of this time as your "salad days" and write your articles like there's no tomorrow, and make a name for yourself while you can, until the CIA comes for your family.  And if you're a voter, go ahead and Rock the Midterms if you think it will make one damn bit of difference - good luck with that.

No matter how hard a movie tries, making the act of a writer writing look interesting on screen is an uphill battle, a near impossible challenge.  You can play cool music, you can show the guy sharpening pencils or changing his typewriter ribbon, but at the end of the day, it's still a man either staring at a page or typing furiously, and it's just not very cinematic.  This film tried harder than most, by intercutting scenes of Webb tacking up photos on his board and tying that little piece of string between two thumbtacks placed on a map, representing Mexico City and L.A.  How else would we ever understand that a plane could fly between those two places?   And thank God he had a photo of a crack baby in an incubator handy that he could post on that bulletin board, or else we'd never understand that concept.  Are you kidding me?

Also starring Rosemarie DeWitt (last seen in "La La Land"), Mary Elizabeth Winstead (last seen in "Bobby"), Oliver Platt (last seen in "Rules Don't Apply"), Tim Blake Nelson (last seen in "Wonderland"), Barry Pepper (last seen in "We Were Soldiers"), Paz Vega (last seen in "Spanglish"), Michael Sheen (last seen in "Nocturnal Animals"), Richard Schiff (last seen in "Man of Steel"), Andy Garcia (last seen in "Passengers"), Michael K. Williams (last seen in "Assassin's Creed"), Jena Sims, Joshua Close, Yul Vazquez (last seen in "Runner Runner"), Robert Pralgo, Lucas Hedges (last seen in "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri"), Michael Rose, Matthew Lintz, Michael H. Cole, David Lee Garver, Andrew Masset, Dan Futterman, Susan Walters, Steve Coulter, with cameos from Robert Patrick (last seen in "Lovelace"), Ray Liotta (last seen in "Sin City: A Dame to Kill For"), Gil Bellows (last seen in "Miami Rhapsody") and archive footage of Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, Nancy Reagan, John Kerry and the real Gary Webb.

RATING: 5 out of 10 DEA agents

The House

Year 10, Day 153 - 6/2/18 - Movie #2,951

BEFORE: It's with great sadness that I come before you today to report on the demise of my constant companion on this crazy journey that I've been on for the last nine and a half years.  Not my wife, who rarely joins me in my movie-watching, or any of my friends that I may go to the theater with, and not my cats, who start nearly every movie with me on the recliner, but fall asleep halfway through.  No, I'm talking about my DVR, the one I've kept in service since we moved into the house in 2004.  A cable tech came today to check it out, since it's no longer showing me the majority of the premium movie channels, except for two of the lamest ones.

The diagnosis is not good, although the signal coming in to the house is fine, the DVR has stopped sending signals back to the cable company, and this somehow marks the movie channels as "unavailable".  I've noticed in the last few months that I've needed to reboot the box every two or three weeks, and if I forget then the OnDemand and search functions become unavailable until I reboot.  The DVR's whole operation has slowed considerably, if I push any button there's such a long delay that I'll start to question whether the box received that signal, so I'll push the button a second time, and that produces a result I don't want, once the box finally gets around to completing the operation I asked it to do in the first place.  Once the premium channels became unavailable, I rebooted the box so many times I started to feel like a doctor in the O.R. using a defibrillator on a patient that just wasn't going to come back, no matter how many times he charged those paddles.

So on Monday morning I need to take it to the cable company's Manhattan office and exchange it, and it feels very similar to taking a beloved pet in to the vet's office to be put down.  There's still life in the animal, but it's not a viable one, so the only conclusion to come to is to put it out of its own misery sooner so we can all get on with things and stop taking care of it.  Who knows, maybe I recorded one bad movie too many, and the poor thing committed suicide.  (This does not bode well for the last movie I taped from OnDemand, which is "Ghost in the Shell".)  While I might look forward to a newer DVR model with much more storage space and the ability to tape SIX channels at once (like my bedroom DVR, which I use for TV shows) the older model had one thing going for it that the younger ones don't - I could record a movie on VHS and then burn that to DVD.

So, really, this is the death of physical media.  The cable company broadcasts some kind of signal through the newer DVRs that prevents me from making a DVD copy - if I try to catch a movie on my upstairs DVR and dub it, I get an error message that says I don't have the rights to copy that film, even though I'm paying my cable bill for the rights to watch that film.  This annoys me to no end, because there's no movie that's ALWAYS being broadcast on cable, everything has an expiration date, and I need to watch films on my schedule, not corporate America's.  A new film airs, and I can't watch it today, but I might have a slot open for it three months from next Tuesday - so I need to make a DVD copy so it will be viewable when I'm ready to view it.  And now I won't be able to do that, not without buying the mass-produced DVD for $15 or whatever.

Now I have to change my whole approach to movies, and everything becomes streamed or disposable, and will have to be deleted after I watch it.  Unless the cable company happens to have an older DVR that they're willing to let me use, I can ask this on Monday but I very much doubt this will be possible.  But I'll be the crazy guy at the counter who asks for the older-model DVR that can still output to a VCR, even though that means less storage space overall and the ability to only record two channels at a time instead of six.  It's a little like going to the car dealer and asking for a used car that can't get above 55 and doesn't have a ton of miles on it.

Anyway, I've got enough movies already dubbed to DVD to get me through the next few months, and then more than half of the Summer Rock Concert Series will be on Netflix and iTunes anyway, so that gives me until mid-August to work something else out or find another way to keep physical media alive, and if I can't, then maybe streaming is the real future - all the kids seem to be doing it - and I just have to adjust.  But I don't change my patterns easily, I don't go gently into that disposable lifestyle.  I like having a collection of things that just keeps getting bigger and bigger, call me crazy.

Speaking of premium cable, it would have been very nice if they had run "Daddy's Home 2" to fit in with my Will Ferrell week and serve as another pre-Father's Day film, but I guess it wasn't meant to be.  It's on PPV for $5.99 and I'm just not paying that.  If they don't premiere it on Father's Day in a couple weeks, they might be saving it for Christmas season.  Anyway, Ferrell carries over from "Casa de mi Padre" and brings the week to a close.

THE PLOT: After their town takes away their daughter's college scholarship, a couple start an illegal casino in their friend's house to make back the money.

AFTER: The whole set-up here is just lazy screenwriting - because there's no town that pays for a girl to go to college, not in this case anyway, because the town shown here seems very upper middle-class, and it would obviously be expected that each set of parents in such a town would pay for their own kid to go to college, and this just wouldn't be the town's responsibility.  Usually such things, if they existed, would be based on need, like maybe some town might raise funds so an inner-city teen could attend college, but this isn't that, so it just wouldn't exist.  And even if it did, which it wouldn't, the town wouldn't grant scholarship money so far in advance that the parents would be able to factor that money in to their kid's college fund, and therefore fail to save the appropriate amount of money themselves.

And even if all that could happen, which it couldn't, that town would then have promised a certain amount of money for that scholarship, and it would be obligated to deliver, not divert these funds into a community project or into the town councilman's pocket.  There would be some kind of paperwork that the parents could fall back on to prove the town's obligation.  And then there would be several reasonable steps taken before one would get to "Hey, let's open a casino in our friend's house."  Like, how about hiring a lawyer?  How about bringing the matter to small claims court, forcing the town to then defend this action in front of a judge?

And in general, before resorting to this line of raising money, since the parents had YEARS to improperly prepare for this, what about bake sales, Go Fund Me campaigns, getting social media on their side, and that web-site that lets you raise money for your kid's college by getting your friends to shop in certain stores?  Nope, those aren't even considered options here, because the film is SO bent on getting this couple to run a casino.  There's an obligatory, "Hey, boss, can I have a raise?" and when that answer is "No", it's straight on to "Well, I guess we have to open an illegal casino, because there just aren't any other ways to raise money".  What about student loans?  Financial Aid?  State grants, Pell Grants, the G.I. Bill?

There's barely even any consideration made toward whether what they're doing is, you know, legal.  Forget the city, what about the state gaming laws, is there even legalized gambling in their state?  Of course this is all played for comedy, but even comedy has to come from someplace real, at least as a starting point, and this one just doesn't.  So where it goes from there, with this suburban couple acting like characters from the movie "Casino" becomes even more ridiculous because it didn't lay down a proper foundation first.  He develops another persona named "The Butcher" after an incident with a guy who was counting cards, and she takes to threatening people with the type of blowtorch that a home cook might use to make creme brulée, and it's an awful long time before any authorities in town figure out what's going on behind closed doors.

And I have to call another NITPICK POINT here.  Wouldn't a casino-like party, with 50 or 60 people gambling in a residential house, produce a large amount of noise?  Like, wouldn't there be complaints from the neighbors on the first or second night?  The first night the neighbors might forgive, like someone might be having a loud birthday party, but by night two, someone's calling the cops, I guarantee it.  Then there are daytime pool parties, massage rooms and even lounge acts at all hours of the day, and it seems like hundreds of people are in this house at one time - and all THAT doesn't produce enough noise to alert the authorities?  Yes, I understand this is for comic effect, but COME ON!

And the parents never have the realization that "We're doing this for our daughter, but it's taking up so much of our time that we never even get to SEE her."  They must be profoundly stupid, they don't even realize that their daughter is smoking pot and going down a dark road while they're spending so much time running a gambling operation for her benefit.  This still constitutes some form of neglect, and they're both so stupid that this never dawns on them.  Plus, he's bad with numbers?  Like, in a grossly overstated and improbable way?  This is another NITPICK POINT, because how does he get through the damn day, how does he find an address or calculate how much to pay at the grocery store?

But maybe the biggest NITPICK POINT of all is - if they didn't have the money to send their daughter to college, how did they have the money to buy roulette tables, massage tables, surveillance cameras, soundproofing equipment, and additional funds to re-decorate their friend's house?  Why didn't they just send their kid to college using the money that was spent on all of THAT?

Also starring Amy Poehler (last seen in "Hamlet 2"), Jason Mantzoukas (last heard in "The Lego Batman Movie"), Ryan Simpkins (last seen in "Revolutionary Road"), Nick Kroll (last seen in "Loving"), Allison Tolman (last seen in "The Gift"), Rob Huebel (last seen in "Keanu"), Michaela Watkins (last seen in "They Came Together"), Jeremy Renner (last seen in "North Country"), Cedric Yarbrough, Rory Scovel, Lennon Parham (last seen in "Horrible Bosses 2"), Andrea Savage (last seen in "Sleeping with Other People"), Andy Buckley, Kyle Kinane, Jessie Ennis, Randall Park (last seen in "The Hollars"), Christina Andrea Offley, Steve Zissis, Sam Richardson, Alexandra Daddario, Wayne Federman, Ian Roberts, Jessica St. Clair, Sebastian Maniscalco, Sean Patrick Murphy.

RATING: 4 out of 10 underground boxing matches