The Polka King

Year 10, Day 327 - 11/23/18 - Movie #3,097

BEFORE: It's Black Friday, and if you want to get trampled while fighting over Christmas gifts in a mall somewhere today, more power to you.  But I'll celebrate my "Jack Black Friday" my way, with the last film in his chain - that's FIVE in a row, so he's definitely making the year-end countdown, which I'm in the middle of tallying up now, even though I still have three films to watch.

I haven't watched anything on Netflix in a while, not since clearing all those rockumentaries from my list, then a couple of Paul Rudd films to get me back on track.  But I've got to try and get to the important Netflix films in January, because who knows when they'll start disappearing off that service?  I'm taking a chance just by waiting that long.  Plus I should probably take a spin through the new releases there to see if there's anything new I want to add to my list, like that "Ballad of Buster Scruggs" film.

After this comes a Christmas movie, so I'm on break until, let's say mid-December.  I need to finally re-organize some comic books, make a Christmas gift list, and figure out what my theme's going to be for my holiday mix CD.  So I'll still have a lot to do, even if I'm not watching movies for a few weeks.   Time at the end of the year always seems to go by much more quickly, so I can't just stop and take a break, not until we're in the car driving up to Massachusetts.

THE PLOT: Local Pennsylvanian polka legend Jan Lewan develops a plan to get rich that shocks his fans and lands him in jail.

AFTER: It's clear that Jack Black wants to be known for his character work, and sometimes that's a positive, like when he plays a teen girl stuck in the body of a male jungle explorer, but it can be a drag when the character is so one-note, which maybe seems like an ironic description for a polka musician.  Beyond talking in a weird European accent and commiting fraud via a Ponzi scheme, there's just not much to the Jan Lewan character.

I'm usually the one complaining when a biopic or a film "based on a true story" (as if "true" and "story" weren't contradictory) changes the facts around, but perhaps this film shows what can go wrong when a story is left alone and not messed with for dramatic purposes.  Because things happen here, don't get me wrong, but very few of them seem to have a meaningful purpose, the parts aren't arranged in a way that properly builds to something greater.  There's very little running narrative, in other words, it just comes off like a series of unrelated things that happened.

We're told that Lewan's financial dealings are very complicated, but were they?  We can't be sure if the film doesn't even try to explain what he was doing, or why it was illegal.  At least in "The Producers" there was a semi-rational way to make money - raise too much cash from investors, make sure the play flops, so the investors won't demand their money back.  But Lewan's music is consistently popular on the German/Polish circuit in the Pennsylvania area, so how is he making money?  We assume it's from taking the money from the new investors and giving it out as dividends to the older investors, but that's only because we the audience are familiar with other similar schemes from the likes of Bernie Madoff.

When an investigator from the SEC comes around, and points out that Lewan never registered his business properly, and informs him he'll have to give all the money back within three days, it's unclear why the investigator just took him at his word, and didn't ask to even look at the books.  I'm not an expert on this, but I'm used to dealing with workers compensation and disability policies for my employers, and there's always an auditor who wants to see our payroll records, so I make sure they're always in order.  I find it hard to believe that an investigator would be satisfied with a phone call saying everything wrong has been fixed.

It seems like he just started the same scheme over under another name, like he didn't register the second business either, but he uses this to start a record label and a pierogi-making business - and at NO TIME does any government entity want to see the official paperwork on those companies?  I also find that hard to believe.  Jan goes on to use the profits from his schemes to bribe beauty pageant judges so his wife will win, and also to get a group of vacationing Americans an audience with the Pope.  Well, maybe there's something to his "dream it, then make it happen" mentality.  How else can you explain someone with a failing real estate empire, a failed vodka brand, a failed university and a failed steak company failed his way all the way to become President?  The only rational explanation is that something illegal is going on behind the scenes.

Eventually the authorities figured out that Lewan's accounting practices warranted a closer look - maybe in the near future they'll finally catch up with Trump's tax returns, too.  That NY Times article a couple months ago certainly suggested that things haven't been done legally since Trump was a small child "inheriting" businesses from his father.  So like several other films already this year, this is another one that ended up full of accidental veiled references to Trump.  The fixed beauty pageants, the media and culinary empire, the central figure who's more of a showman and huckster than a legit businessman - the signs are all right there.

Also starring Jenny Slate (last seen in "Gifted"), Jason Schwartzman (last seen in "I Heart Huckabees"), Jacki Weaver (last seen in "The Disaster Artist"), Vanessa Bayer (last seen in "Trainwreck"), J.B. Smoove (last heard in "The Smurfs 2"), Willie Garson (last seen in "Play It to the Bone"), Robert Capron, Lew Schneider with archive footage of George Burns, George H.W. Bush, Donald Trump, Judy Tenuta and the real Jan Lewan.

RATING: 4 out of 10 mustard stains

Saving Silverman

Year 10, Day 324 - 11/20/18 - Movie #3,096

BEFORE: OK, now the end of Movie Year 10 is really coming up very fast.  Just four film slots left after tonight.  And already I've got a list of films that I meant to get to this fall that I couldn't squeeze in, like "Venom" and "Ralph Breaks the Internet" and "Bohemian Rhapsody".  Oh, and "Mary Poppins Returns" and "Won't You Be My Neighbor", I won't be able to get to those during 2018.  But the Academy screeners are still coming in, so maybe in late December or early January I'll have a chance to go through them and start thinking of ways to work them into the chain, possibly starting in March.

For now, it's the penultimate Jack Black film, I'll watch the last one on the day after Thanksgiving - or I guess that will be "Jack Black Friday" for me. 

THE PLOT: A pair of buddies conspire to save their best friend from marrying the wrong woman.

AFTER: I wasn't expecting something completely hysterically funny here, but I thought maybe this one would be good for a few laughs, but most of the comedy comes from such a weird place, it just all feels too obvious or something.  And being obvious in humor is sometimes worse than not being funny at all.  The director, Dennis Dugan, is best known for a string of Adam Sandler films, and of course all of that humor is either slapsticky or super obvious, but I guess Sandler is a little better at pulling off unsubtle humor, if that makes any sense.

It's like the new "Murphy Brown" episodes, which are all filled with very obvious humor, like some writing team somewhere is just not trying, they're just going for the easiest Trump jokes, the lowest hanging fruit, and there's no artistry or subtlety involved.  Yeah, I'm watching the "Murphy Brown" revival, and one level it's great that the stories aren't pulling any punches and going straight at our Cheeto-colored Commander in Chief, but it all just feels too easy somehow.  And then it pisses me off that it feels like nobody's doing a lick of research to see if this is really how a cable morning news show functions (umm, I'm guessing no) or how election night coverage works, or whether Murphy's son would get such a high-profile job on a competing network in the SAME time-slot as hers - the odds are astronomically against such an occurence, but they're not letting that get in the way of telling a story, because some writer mistakenly thinks that just making random stuff happen is an efficient way to tell a story.

And that's how I feel about "Saving Silverman", all the humor comes from putting the comedy cart before the horse, like some of the early Farrelly Brothers films - take your pick from "Kingpin", "Me, Myself and Irene" or "There's Something About Mary".  They all seem to me like someone wrote a collection of random jokes and slapstick that end up driving the story, rather than writing the story as a framework and then adding the jokes on, like decorations on a Christmas tree.  Do you know what I mean?  Like Jim Carrey's character in "Me, Myself and Irene" had three black sons - why?  Because somebody thought that would be a funny gag, and then the story ends up being based on the gag, rather than the other way around.  The "hair-gel" gag in "There's Something About Mary" drove the story, it became a plot point instead of just a sight gag, and to me that's backwards.

So "Saving Silverman" ends up being one lame gag after another - from the very fake raccoon attacking exterminator Wayne, to Judith being somehow flipped out of a recliner and getting covered in salsa, to the guy in the bar doing terrible magic tricks to try to break the ice with women.  These things just don't happen in real life, not to this degree at least, so it's a little sad that a writer couldn't pay enough attention to the real world to make up gags that at least have one foot in reality.  And if you do that too many times in one film, you end up with a film that's so far removed from real that absolutely none of it can be taken seriously.

There are dozens more examples here - the high-school mascot costume, the logistics of being in a Neil Diamond cover band, the lack of security at a Neil Diamond concert, the way that a tranquilizer gun works - I've got minor issues with all of these things.  The way that someone takes vows to become a nun - did anyone do any research into this, or did they just go with the "Hollywood" version of how people think this works?  My money is obviously on the latter.  The way that the Coach breaks people out of prison - come on, that wouldn't work in a million years. 

I think the worst offense, however, comes from the depiction of a woman who happens to be a psychologist, and the dumber characters in the film (which is basically all of them) are helpless against her "mind tricks" that take advantage of things like Stockholm syndrome, and also she's extremely dominating in her relationship with Darren.  I'm sure there are some good psychologists out there who are not always looking for ways to psych out their romantic partners, right?  But here the only person with a college degree is not only lording it over everyone else at every opportunity, but she's also a complete bitch.  Which I think ends up selling a lot of people short.  And then later she gives therapy sessions to J.D. and either helps him determine that he's gay, or tricks him into thinking that he's gay.  I think both of those trivialize the self-awareness that lead to coming out, and honestly I'm not sure which one is worse.  Probably if she tricked him, right?  But it's yet another sensitive subject that wasn't handled with any subtlety at all - he's either gay or he's not, there's no in-between here, and I think in reality there are more subtle levels to this topic. 

The love triangle is also incredibly over-simplified - Darren's either in love with Judith, or he's not.  Where in reality love and hate are not opposites, and there are many degrees in-between.  He's either in love with Judith, or he's in love with Sandy.  Well, why can't he be in love with both?  In real life there could be times where a person could have feelings for two people at once.  But again, why let the real world have any bearing at all in creating this non-sensical story? 

Honestly, it feels like whoever wrote this was an alien from another planet who knew nothing at all about what it means to be in a relationship.  Sometimes you see writing this bad in comic books, when you can tell that a writer is a nerd who's been single his whole life, and doesn't know how to write about an adult relationship.  This usually then leads to killing off the wife character, or sending her on a long business trip so the hero character can be single again for a while, because that's what the writer knows about. 

It's not all terrible, there were a couple funny moments, like when the coach was quoting inspirational messages like "If you can dream it, you can do it" only he was talking about things like kidnapping and murder.  I can't hear the Disney song "When You Wish Upon a Star" without thinking that its lyrics are hopelessly out of date.  The lyrics "no request is too extreme" and "anything your heart desires will come to you" are overly simplistic and misleading, because there are a LOT of people out there in the world with some very sick requests and desires, and they shouldn't be led to believe that those will come true.

(At least they didn't pull a wedding switcheroo at the end, where they change the bride or groom, and two people get married on the spot who didn't have a marriage license.  Movies pull that crap all the time, and they forget that such a ceremony would not be legally valid.)

Also starring Jason Biggs (last seen in "Anything Else"), Steve Zahn (last heard in "War for the Planet of the Apes"), Amanda Peet (last seen in "Sleeping with Other People"), Amanda Detmer (last seen in "The Majestic"), R. Lee Ermey (last seen in "Body Snatchers"), Neil Diamond (last seen in "The Jazz Singer"), Kyle Gass (last seen in "Jacob's Ladder"), Lillian Carlson, Mark Aaron Wagner, Steven McMichael, Norman Armour, with cameos from Dennis Dugan (last seen in "You Don't Mess with the Zohan") and the voice of Richard Kline (last seen in "Don't Think Twice").

RATING: 3 out of 10 faked photos

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle

Year 10, Day 322 - 11/18/18 - Movie #3,095

BEFORE: We're coming up on Thanksgiving, but I already have to be thinking about totaling up the stats for 2018, and also figuring out what films to watch in January.  The easiest way for me to do this is to create my February chain of romance films first - I've got more than enough, and last month I went through the films available on Netflix so that I'd have some connective material.  Once I have the starting point for that chain, I designate that as the film for February 1 and then I try to work backwards.

I had some time over this past weekend, now that I'm not watching a film EVERY night but instead every other night, and I came up with a rough chain that's 30 films long, which is the right length - but I'm not married to this chain just yet.  I'm not crazy about the starting point since it's not a "one-linkable" film as usual.  Plus, even though it contains a bunch of films that I tried to get to in 2018 but just couldn't, it hinges on me being able to watch "Mission: Impossible Fallout" in January, and I'm not sure that I'll be able to do that.  Sure, it may come to my boss on an Academy screener, especially if it wants to get nominated in the special effects category, but it might not.  And if it's not available on premium cable in January, then I'll be screwed.

So, perhaps I should come up with an alternate January chain, just in case.  If one chain is possible, there must be others that are possible, based on the films I have access to on DVD, cable and Netflix, right?  The trick is then finding one that I like, that also gets me where I need to be on February 1. I still have plenty of time to work on this.

For now, Jack Black carries over again from "Goosebumps" - and with just five films left until the end of Movie Year 10, I'll have to deal with the rest later.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Jumanji" (Movie #924)

THE PLOT: Four teenagers are sucked into a magical video game, and the only way they can escape is to work together to finish the game.

AFTER: I was pleasantly surprised by this one, but also slightly annoyed.  Let me deal with the first part of that before mentioning the second.  But this film was MUCH better than "Goosebumps", which played with some of the same elements - "Goosebumps" had monster characters jumping out of a book and becoming real, and this film had real people being drawn into a video-game, so I guess that's the opposite, real people being dragged into a fictional story, which for them plays out like a virtual reality.  Damn, but it's a much more clever idea this way.  (Side note: "Goosebumps" and this film also shot scenes at the same high-school, so that school also carries over...)

The original "Jumanji" was a story about a man (played by Robin Williams) who had been somehow brought into a magical board game, and as kids played the game, they somehow brought real wild animals into their house, so the elements of the game became real, then they helped rescue the man who'd been stuck in the game.  This sequel puts a spin on THAT idea by morphing the board game into a video game (circa 1996) and bringing the players inside that, where they're represented by avatars that are much different than themselves.  And instead of the jungle taking over a house, instead they've got a whole WORLD to explore in VR (which looks suspiciously like real reality, but OK, whatever).  Oh, that blows the original story out of the freakin' water, there are NO LIMITS here, except for the rules of the video game.

If anything, the game looks TOO GOOD, because they obviously shot in a real jungle, so the "video-game" looks a bit too close to reality - because I remember the video games in 1996, and they mostly sucked, like the graphics sure weren't good enough to fool you into thinking they were real.  I think MAYBE there was Sony Playstation 1 in 1996, and I'm sorry, but nobody's going to confuse "Crash Bandicoot" or "Donkey Kong Country 3" with virtual reality.  But since this is a movie, and not meant to really reflect the actual state of video-games in the mid-1990's, let's move on.  I could just say that these people who got sucked into the game are seeing the game with their avatar's eyes, so maybe to them, everything that should look like 64-bit graphics looks as good as real.

Anyway, you can't get sucked into a video-game, so the whole thing requires some suspension of disbelief.  The opening act of this film plays out like a combination of "The Breakfast Club" and "Tron", like if the kids who were bonding together over having detention at the same time then got digitized and pulled into the game, where the rules of time and space are different.  And I don't think I'm far off with the "Breakfast Club" comparison, because among these four kids there's the nerd, the jock, the spoiled bitch and the mousy shy girl.  They're already walking stereotypes, but then the nervous nerd's consciousness gets put into the avatar that's the strong fearless hero, the jock gets put in the avatar of the weak but smart sidekick, the spoiled bitch gets put in the (male) body of the history and map expert, and the mousy shy girl gets put in the avatar of the fighting bombshell babe.

I love this idea - it would have been so lame if they played the same personalities in the game that they had IRL.  Nearly all of the comedy comes from seeing the words of a gaming nerd coming from the mouth of super-hunk "The Rock", and then hearing tiny Kevin Hart complain about how he's not a big, strong athlete in the game, like he should be.  And of course the shy girl has to learn to overcome her shyness in order to flirt and fight, while the spoiled girl, well, she has to learn to read a map and pee standing up.  (To me, that's a glaring NITPICK POINT, there are no bodily waste functions in video games, except for maybe "The Sims".  Certainly not in an adventure game.  There was one "Grand Theft Auto" game where characters had to eat to gain energy, but that was very unpopular and they never did it again.).

They each have different skills, whether it's zoology or map-reading or dance-fighting, and when the situations demand it, they appear to be able to access these skills, to advance the game.  But each character only has three lives, and they each manage to lose one pretty quickly, so there's urgency to work together and accomplish the game's task before they run out of lives, the fear being that they could die for real if they lose their third life.  And the fact that the characters act differently when they're on their last life is also very smart.  (Though it's also a bit hokey, once they make the comparison to the fact that's how all life works, we're all hanging by that thread...).

Now, the "magic" part of the story is completely unbelievable, like how did the board game turn ITSELF into a video game cartridge?  And how does time pass differently within the game world - like if you're playing a video game for three days straight, shouldn't three days have passed in the real world, and wouldn't the parents of these kids be wondering why they didn't come home from school? But damn it, the story is so much fun that's it's as hard to criticize it as it is to take it seriously.

Now, as to why this story annoyed me - it's because I tried to write something along these lines, and I never was able to finish it.  My best screenplay idea ever was based on my time playing Dungeons & Dragons, as part of a 6-person (occasionally 7) group that played together for years.  During that time, people became friends, people hooked up, people broke up, a lot of stuff went down in the real world between the players that I believe was influenced by what happened in the game.  Of course there were many other factors, but I believe the group interaction was partially responsible for the end of my first marriage - basically my wife was attracted to another female player in the group, and things devolved from there.  We quit the group and tried to keep things together, but the damage was done - and the signs were all there in the gaming world, only I didn't want to deal with them, or I dealt with them poorly.

So, as a form of therapy, I tried to write a screenplay about a group of 6 friends in the early 1990's who met every other week for years, to play D&D - and friendships would form, people would hook up and break up, and then during the course of three gaming campaigns (perhaps depicted in animation), the audience would see how the events in the gaming world affected their real-world relationships, and vice versa.  Essentially, in the animated gaming sequences, where the characters are exploring dungeons or fighting monsters, they'd have the same voices, but look like D&D characters. And in much the same way, their characters would be either a reflection of who the player is in real life, or more likely, the person they WISH they could be, or the person they NEED to become.

But, I could never get the screenplay past an outline stage - whenever it came time to flesh out a scene with dialogue, I'd draw a blank and eventually lose interest.  And now it's too late, because if I ever went back and finished that now, everyone would say that's already been done, because of "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle".  For every little difference between this film and my idea, it seems that this film's idea is better.  My idea would be set post-college, but damn, putting the story in a high-school setting is so much better.  And immersing people in a video-game is so much more visual than watching them roll dice and argue over hit points.  So now I see my mistake, I was trying to make a story that was small and intimate like an indie film, when I should have been thinking of things that were bigger and more crazier.  Anyway, we're too far from the "Lord of the Rings" films, I think interest in D&D is on the wane, so clearly I missed my shot at being a screenwriter.  And that annoys me, though I suppose I should be more annoyed with myself than with this film.

By the way, kudos to Jack Black, who had a very difficult task, that of playing a self-obsessed entitled teen girl inhabiting his body. He totally nailed it, so even though he's usually thought of as not a great actor, or as someone who's too over-the-top, his style really worked here.

Also starring Dwayne Johnson (last heard in "Moana"), Kevin Hart (last heard in "The Secret Life of Pets"), Karen Gillan (last seen in "Avengers: Infinity War"), Bobby Cannavale (last seen in "Ant-Man and the Wasp"), Nick Jonas (last heard in "Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian"), Colin Hanks (last seen in "Untraceable"), Rhys Darby (last heard in "Arthur Christmas"), Alex Wolff (last seen in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2"), Madison Iseman, Ser'Darius Blain, Morgan Turner, Mason Guccione, Marc Evan Jackson (last seen in "Kong: Skull Island"), Tim Matheson (last seen in "Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon"), Sean Buxton (last seen in "42"), Carlease Burke, Maribeth Monroe (last seen in "Downsizing"), Missi Pyle (last seen in "Gone Girl"), Kat Altman, Marin Hinkle, Tracey Bonner, Natasha Charles Parker, Michael Shacket, William Tokarsky, Rohan Chand.

RATING: 7 out of 10 albino rhinos