Goosebumps

Year 10, Day 320 - 11/16/18 - Movie #3,094

BEFORE: Yeah, this is sort of a leftover from Halloween time, but it didn't connect with anything there, so I'm dropping it in here.  Jack Black carries over from "Envy"

THE PLOT: A teenager teams up with the daughter of young adult horror author R.L. Stine after the writer's imaginary demons are set free on the town of Madison, Delaware.

AFTER: Sometimes you can tell what problems a screenwriter probably was facing, because the solutions that solved those problems are front and center, and here they pretty much smack you in the face.  "How do we get people to care about the main character?"  Give him a dead dad, and show him moving to a new town and trying to fit in.  That will get the audience to sympathize with him, because nearly everyone has trouble fitting in at high school.  "How do we get him in contact with the love interest?"  Simple, you make them neighbors, fate has thrown them together.  "How do we get the geeky character to seem heroic, and not just annoying?"  Well, we can give him a name like "Champion" and make sure he's not always just running away from threats.  OK, so far, so good?

But then there's "How do we appeal to the fans of ALL of R.L. Stine's many-volumed horror series, because everyone might have a different favorite book?"  Well, let's just throw ALL the monsters from ALL of the books into one storyline.  We'll make it about the characters somehow getting loose from the books and becoming "real", and all ganging up to threaten the town.  OK, that's a bit of a stretch, but you can sort of see why it was done.  Then the big question was probably "How do we get R.L. Stine to let us play in his sandbox full of monsters and make a film out of it?"  And the answer was to turn the author into a character, played by Jack Black, and give that character the magical ability to create stories that have the power to turn real, and point out at every opportunity that he's a better writer than Stephen King.  OK, now you're just kissing the guy's ass.

It's a heavy buy-in, because then you have to make the author "reclusive" and living under an assumed name, where in real life this guy's probably got more money than a rap star and can hire security to keep fans away.  Then this weird process of locking the manuscripts to keep the monsters in, but then leaving the key in full view and completely unprotected.  So, are we trying to keep the monsters in the books, or not?  Because if that's what we want, shouldn't the key be kept, umm, locked up?  Like in a safe or something.

Then the rules of how this crazy thing all works keeps changing, which is annoying.  Constantly shifting sands.  If the monsters destroy the book, then they can't go back into the book, so somebody has to write ANOTHER book with that character in it so he can be absorbed back into it.  So confusing, and I'd stopped caring at this point, because it's a completely ridiculous premise to begin with.  Show me one fictional character who ever came out of a book and became real.  You might as well have had all the characters climb through a magic mirror out of the nightmare dimension, it would been just as nonsensical.

Maybe kids aren't going to care as much as I do about the logistics of everything, and whether these ideas to bring the monsters together are good ones.  I sure don't think so, because it feels like everything was done this way for matters of convenience, and not with the intent of crafting a strong narrative.

For example, take my NITPICK POINT #1 - Stine can only craft a new book that will absorb all the monsters if he uses a specific Smith-Corona typewriter.  No, my beef is not that a modern-day author would use an old electric typewriter instead of a computer, that's neither here nor there.  The question is, why is that typewriter located at the high school, instead of at Stine's house?  No explanation is given for this, and Stine didn't start teaching at the school until the very end of the film.  So why is the typewriter at the high school?  Because the story needed him to go there, and the school dance is taking place there, so for the screenplay's and convenience's sake, that's where the typewriter happens to be.  Lazy, lazy, lazy writing.

NP #2: Nobody builds a carnival out in the woods, for safety reasons.  Ever notice how a carnival is always built in an open field, or in a large vacant lot?  That's because they need room for the rides to move, you couldn't put a Ferris wheel in the middle of a bunch of tall trees like this, because the branches could grow into the path of the wheel, and then you've got a problem, like a stick in a bike's wheel.  A forest setting would also prevent people from seeing clearly across the fairgrounds, and that's another safety issue.  Not to mention that a forest is filled with dirt, and the rides need flat, solid ground.  Sorry, try again.  Yes, it's possible that the forest grew up around the abandoned carnival, but that would take decades, and then the rides probably wouldn't be in working condition.

Also starring Dylan Minnette (last seen in "The Disaster Artist"), Odeya Rush (last seen in "Lady Bird"), Amy Ryan (last seen in "You Can Count on Me"), Ryan Lee (last seen in "A Merry Friggin' Christmas"), Jillian Bell (last heard in "The Angry Birds Movie"), Halston Sage (last seen in "Neighbors"), Ken Marino (last seen in "Masterminds"), Timothy Simons (last seen in "Gold"), Amanda Lund, Karan Soni (last seen in "Deadpool 2"), Steven Krueger, Keith Arthur Bolden, R.L. Stine

RATING: 4 out of 10 garden gnomes

Envy

Year 10, Day 318 - 11/14/18 - Movie #3,093

BEFORE: Christopher Walken carries over again, but for the last time, and Jack Black will now be the link for the rest of November.

THE PLOT: A man becomes increasingly jealous of his friend's newfound success.

AFTER: I've definitely got a loose theme going here, because one key plot point in "The Stepford Wives" was that the husbands were all very jealous of their wives' career successes, and the fact that they earned more money.  Then in "The Family Fang" you could say that the parents in the family, who were moderately successful outsider video pranksters, were jealous of the mainstream success of their children, who were a professional actress and a published author.  And then in "Jersey Boys" I saw the petty jealousies that worked to tear apart the Four Seasons.  Tonight that concept got taken to the extreme, as one friend becomes wildly successful, creating envy in the less successful other friend.

After a wild invention of a spray that makes dog poo miraculously disappear, so that no pet owner ever has to pick it up again, this man makes a fortune overnight. The less successful friend had a chance to invest in the product, but chose not to, thinking that the product was not possible, then not marketable, and then of course he finds that he missed the financial opportunity of a lifetime.  Suddenly everyone has bought multiple cans of this product, while a fringe group gathers to protest and ask the semi-serious question, "Where does the poo go?"

This is a teachable moment for your kids, too, if you want to get them thinking about environmental issues. What happens to the things we throw in the trash, what happens to the things that we flush down the toilet?  They all have to go SOMEWHERE, it can't just be a case of "Out of sight, out of mind" like it was for previous generations.  So the lesson here is that it's not easy to get rid of things, even if it feels like it.  Yes, there's a big floating plastic mass the size of Delaware in the Pacific Ocean, but even if we clean that up and get it out of the ocean, where's it going to go THEN?  There was a news story a few years ago about dried human waste that was being hauled away from New York City by train, and brought to other states like Arkansas or Oklahoma, I think at some point to possibly used for fertilizer, but at some point it became too much, umm, stuff and they had no use for it, so it was just lying on train cars in rail yards, stinking up the place.  Then there was the famous garbage barge of 1987 that set out to sea from Long Island, and couldn't find any landfill space for its tons of garbage, not in North Carolina, not in Florida, not in Mexico or the Bahamas.  Finally it was returned to Brooklyn to be incinerated, having run up transport costs close to $1 million.

So as a society, we're rapidly running out of places to PUT our trash.  That incident with the garbage barge led to more recycling laws being implemented in New York, but what happens when even THAT'S not enough, and all the landfills eventually fill up again?  I'd be very surprised to find out there's a plan in place for that.

Apart from that veiled ecology lesson, there's not much to recommend here, except the other lesson that if you don't find a way to get rid of envy, that it will make you feel "less than", and then turn into resentment, and you may find yourself hating the people who were once your friends.  Or I guess that message would have been a little clearer if not for the psychotic drifter, the missing horse and the malfunctioning carousel.  Plus it's a shame that we'll never find out if one character's state Senate campaign was successful, or what flan is made of, or who won the bowling tournament.  That's my way of saying there's a lot going on here, and not all of it connects or serves a purpose, it's just sort of all over the place.

Also starring Ben Stiller (last seen in "The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)", Jack Black (last seen in "Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage"), Rachel Weisz (last seen in "The Lobster"), Amy Poehler (last seen in "The House"), Sam Lerner (last heard in "Monster House"), Ariel Gade, Connor Matheus, Lily Jackson, Hector Elias, Maricela Ochoa (last seen in "Mercury Rising"), Tom McCleister (last seen in "Million Dollar Baby"), Blue Deckert, John Gavigan, Terry Bozeman.

RATING: 3 out of 10 employee review forms

Jersey Boys

Year 10, Day 316 - 11/12/18  - Movie #3,092

BEFORE: This is a film that's been on my list for a long time, I'd guess at least two years, possibly more.  But it's filled with actors that haven't been in many movies, so linking to it and away from it have proven impossible until now, when I finally developed enough of a chain to have two other movies with Christopher Walken, so I could sandwich this one in between them.

THE PLOT: The story of four young men from the wrong side of the tracks in New Jersey who came together to form the iconic 1960's rock group The Four Seasons.

AFTER: There's a fair amount of talking to the audience, or "breaking the fourth wall", here, each of the band members does it at different times, but first we hear from Tommy, who tells the audience that if you grew up in New Jersey, there were only three ways off the streets - to join the army, join a gang or become famous.  I've got a big problem with this, because I really doubt that's true.  You also hear this from a lot of NBA or NFL players, when they look back on their childhood they'll say something like "Where I grew up, you either joined a basketball team or you joined a gang."  Really? This sounds more like someone trying to justify their lifestyle choices, and it seems like an over-simplification of how a person could get from here to there.  A person's life is rarely that simple, I think.

There are probably many ways to get off the streets.  How about studying hard and getting a scholarship, why wasn't that an option?  What about getting a job sweeping floors in a store, and working one's way up to stock-boy or even cashier?  What about memorizing the Presidents and state capitals and trying out for Jeopardy's Teen Week?  I'm not saying all of these things are likely to happen, but they represent other ways off the streets, alternatives to sports and gangs.  Besides, what if an impressionable teen misreads the message and thinks, "Well, I'm short and I can't shoot a basketball very well, so I guess I'd better join a gang, since there are apparently only two ways to get off the streets..."  It's a bit like saying that if you're hungry, you can only eat breakfast, there's no lunch or dinner or brunch or dessert, which would be ridiculous.

The breaking of the fourth wall, of course, exists here because this film is based on the long-running Broadway play of the same name, and in a play, the characters would do a great deal of talking to the audience.  We're living in an incredible time, where there's a lot of symbiosis between Broadway and Hollywood, tons of plays have become recent hit movies ("Mamma Mia!", "Fences", "Les Miserables", "Rock of Ages", "Sweeney Todd") and it seems like just as many movies are now hits on Broadway ("King Kong", "Mean Girls", "Frozen", "School of Rock", "Groundhog Day", "Waitress" and so on...) And it used to be that they had to wait for a Broadway run to be OVER before turning a play into a movie, but these days it seems they can even run concurrently and one won't damage the business of the other.

(How long before "Hamilton" is a movie, and what's taking so long with the "Cats" movie?  Just wondering.)

But apparently the breaking of the fourth wall in the stage version of "Jersey Boys" serves a greater structural purpose, as the play is divided into four sections (or "seasons"), called Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter (however did they come up with this?) and a different member of the group narrates each season - Tommy DeVito in Spring, Bob Gaudio in Summer, Nick Massi in Fall and Frankie Valli in Winter.  Collectively there are four different takes on the group, and damn, that's a bit of clever - I might even consider seeing the show (now running off-Broadway) to see how that all plays out.  But the movie doesn't really make this clear, or enforce this structure, and the talking to the camera is drastically reduced, so that it nearly feels out of place when it does happen.  You can't have actors playing their parts 90% of the time and then talking to camera just 10% of the time, that doesn't work.  If that's the bit, you've got to commit to it, "Deadpool"-style, just to make it viable, or else when it does happen, then it's going to take the audience out of the picture, and that works against the suspension of disbelief - suddenly I'll be aware that I'm watching a film with actors saying things, and that's going to break the illusion.

I know that music biopics are hot again, what with "Bohemian Rhapsody" and yet another remake of "A Star Is Born", meanwhile Broadway is giving us a musical based on the life and songs of Carole King, and a new one featuring three actresses playing Cher at different stages in her career. (Why they didn't title this musical "Cher and Cher Alike", I can't quite figure out...) But since I've watched over 50 documentaries about rock and pop music already this year, I'm totally burned out on this topic.  So forgive me if I find a band's petty infighting, plus depictions of the party lifestyle destroying the band as all too familiar, not to mention the problems of signing a bad contract, having problems collecting royalties and paying taxes, and life on the road.  Boring, I've seen all this before, and even though the Four Seasons pre-dated most of those other bands, it's clear that musicians never learn, and they all end up making the same mistakes.  OK, so the Four Seasons maybe had their little unique pocket, the bridge between doo-wop music and rock and roll, but that doesn't mean I'm a big fan of their music, I'm just not.

I honestly knew very little about Franki Valli and the Four Seasons going in to this, but I guess I was willing to learn.  That being said, I can believe that the name of the band came from the name of a bowling alley, but if the depiction here of how they came up with the title of the song "Big Girls Don't Cry" is at all accurate, I'll eat my hat.  That's just now how songwriting works.

And now I know why I had such a hard time linking to this film, because instead of casting actors known for being in movies, they retained the stage play feel here by casting actors directly from the stage production.

The character of Joey in this story (with no last name given) is based on Joe Pesci, who in real life introduced Bob Gaudio to the other three musicians, thus forming the Four Seasons.  Pesci did this when he was 16 years old, then he later played guitar in several bands, including Joey Dee and the Starlighters, where was replaced by (get this...) Jimi Hendrix.  Weird, huh?

One of the last scenes in this film was a depiction of the four original members of the band being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and having seen this as the coda to a fair number of rock documentaries, this sort of felt like a narrative cop-out.

But hey, Frankie Valli's still with us, probably one of the only 1950's music stars still hanging around, I think maybe now it's just down to him and Little Richard, since Fats Domino died a couple years ago. Wait, Jerry Lee Lewis is still alive, too?  How is that possible?

Also starring John Lloyd Young, Erich Bergen, Michael Lomenda, Vincent Piazza, Renée Marino, Kathrine Narducci (last seen in "Miracle on 34th Street"), Lou Volpe, Mike Doyle (last seen in "Rabbit Hole"), Freya Tingley, Elizabeth Hunter, Grace Kelley, Rob Marnell, Johnny Cannizzaro (last seen in "The Muppets"), Donnie Kehr, Jeremy Luke (last seen in "Don Jon"), Joey Russo, James Madio, Erica Piccininni, Steve Schirripa (last seen in "The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas"), Barry Livingston (last seen in "War Dogs"), Miles Aubrey, Kim Gatewood, Jackie Seiden, Kyli Rae, Troy Grant, Heather Ferguson Pond, John Griffin, Chaz Langley, Billy Gardell, Francesca Eastwood (last seen in "True Crime"), Michael Patrick McGill (last seen in "Danny Collins"), Louis Lombardi (last seen in "Wonderland"), Sean Whalen.

RATING: 4 out of 10 hotel towels