BEFORE: OK, that's one film down for 2019, only 299 more to go...
If you're wondering why I didn't make any New Year's Resolutions yet, it's because I took care of most of the things I wanted to do last January, like catch up on TV (easy to do over the holiday break) and get my hearing checked. I didn't manage to get my hearing FIXED, but I did get it checked, that should count for something. My other resolution last year was to watch more films on Netflix - that definitely got done.
Beyond that, I think I've got leftover resolutions from 2017 that weren't attended to, like taking a look at my modest retirement account to figure out if I should be making additional contributions to it, and beyond THAT, I've got to finish re-alphabetizing my comic books (I only got to the letter "D" in December) and take some more longboxes to my storage unit. There's other work that needs to be done at home, like hiring someone to fix the hole in the basement ceiling and maybe get a plumber to figure out how to get my wedding ring out from behind the bathroom vanity, where it fell sometime last summer. I can't move the vanity because the sink is in it, and the pipes are in place - so I'll have to call in a professional at some point.
All the others are standard "good idea" sort of resolutions - try to lose some weight, think about getting a better job somehow, etc. I suppose I should finish replacing all my music cassettes with digital files, because I stopped a couple months ago after hitting the letter "W", and I think I should probably look into dropping some cable channels to try to save some money. When my last DVR got replaced I lost the ability to dub movies from HBO and Cinemax to DVD, because those channels run some kind of signal that prevents dubbing - and it's been 6 months since I tried figuring out a workable solution, so those channels now are just streaming services to me. Whatever - but I haven't recorded anything good off the Encore channels in months, so maybe I can drop those. As I said yesterday, I'd love it if there were ONE service that could stream every movie, any time, without them ever going away, for one low fee - but even as I type that, it sounds impossible. Maybe in a couple years....
Jason Bateman carries over from "Game Night", and now I realize that I could have put that film and tonight's film right after "Office Christmas Party" - why didn't I do that? Then my post-christmas films would have been all about games and toys, and thematically that fits right in with Christmas. What the hell was I thinking? But then again, if I hadn't saved these two films for January, I might not have had a clear linking path between Jan. 1 and Feb. 1 - so you see, most of the time everything works out for the best. Umm, sure, let's go with that.
THE PLOT: Molly Mahoney is the awkward and insecure manager of Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium, the strangest, most fantastic toy store in the world. But when Mr. Magorium, the 243-year-old eccentric who owns the store, bequeaths the store to her, a dark and ominous change begins to take over the once-remarkable emporium.
AFTER: This might seem like an odd direction for me to go, because I think this film has a bit of a reputation as a bomb, either critically or financially, so why waste a slot on it? Well, I was trying to clear the DVR a bit, and I needed another movie to go with tomorrow's film, and as I mentioned before, I'm limited now by which channels will allow their programming to be dubbed, so this fit the bill. I admit I was curious about this film, like if it's bad, how bad is it? And more importantly, WHY is it bad? Like is it stupid, or did it just fail to connect with the audience somehow?
After watching it, it's tough to say. It almost feels like it was trying too hard, or maybe it aimed a little too high in its attempts to generate a sense of wonder, does that make sense? Like it was a little too obvious in stating what it was trying to do, which was to entertain. I think a movie needs to tell a good story first, and not be all in-your-face with its goals, as if it's saying, "Hey, everybody, look over here, look how dazzling I am? Are you not entertained? Come on, I'm trying really hard!" In other words, stop talking about it and start being about it - and all this film wants to do is talk about how magical everything is.
I mean, I get it, it's a toy store where everything seems to be alive and move on its own, and the usual rules of gravity and time/space don't apply. But is that really magical? I feel the need to break down the concept of "magic" into three distinct things - there's magician magic, there's real life magic, and then there's movie magic. Magician magic is the stuff magicians do, like making playing cards disappear and then re-appear inside a sealed box, or appearing to saw a lady in half, or pretending to make the Statue of Liberty disappear. Magician magic is not real, there's a simple enough explanation for every trick, most of which can be found on the internet, and if I can't guess how a trick is done, I look it up immediately, because I constantly need to reassure myself what is real and what is not. And magicians are liars, if they say "I'm about to do magic", they're not, and if they say, "I'm going to saw this lady in half", then I know for sure that's not what they're about to do. The only non-lying magicians are people like Penn & Teller, who are at least honest about the fact that they're about to lie to you, and that all magicians are liars.
Next there's real-life magic, and this is the sort of thing that happens when you meet the love of your life, or someone makes a large donation to charity, or gives someone their kidney or something. These are real, possible, tangible things, but they have enormous effects on our outlook and well-being, plus they're not always logical, and so because they can't always be explained, their effects are considered a form of magic. Then there's movie magic, which is all about special effects, and making the unreal appear to be real - and since most people don't get enough real-life magic in their lives, watching movies can sometimes work as a sort of stand-in. Personally, since I no longer believed in magician magic, I think I set out on a career in movies because it was magic that I did believe in. But just as a magician knows how to do his tricks, going to film school taught me how the magic was made, so for a while I didn't believe in this magic either. It took me years after film school to get back my love for movies, can you imagine that?
Now, as I see it, here's the problem with "Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium" - you can't just fill the screen with movie magic in an attempt to create real-life magic. That, in itself, is just not enough. There comes a point where "more" isn't more at all, it becomes too much. If everything within the walls of the toy store is magical, then doesn't that cheapen magic in some way? Compare that to a film like "Big" where there was ONE magical fortune-telling device that did something incredible. It's a little more believable, right? And then a kid has an encounter with it, and later needs to find that one magical machine to put things right again. Or take "Field of Dreams", where there's ONE magical ball-field in Iowa where the ghosts of the old ball-players appear. If the ghosts appeared at every baseball field in the country, then that wouldn't be special, you could see them every time you bought a ticket to a game, and then you'd grow tired of that, as special as it might be.
So here we have a store where the owner is magical, and the paper airplanes are magical and the finger-paints are magical and the books are magical, and damn, but isn't all this magic exhausting? And then whenever the movie lags, it's "Hey, look, there's something magical over THERE" and that's when I feel it's just trying to hard to get my attention and win me over. Now, I should state that I don't have any children, so I've never gone through that period of adulthood where I have to play with kids, read stories to kids, and get to re-connect with that childlike belief that everything is possible, including the things we can think of that probably aren't. I do watch movies aimed at kids, but I do so from an adult non-breeder perspective, so they affect me differently, and as always, your mileage may vary.
The cynical part of me is cynical enough to say that someone just set out to do a gender-swapped "Mary Poppins" with the Mr. Magorium character, or riff on Willy Wonka, because weird adult characters who both entertain kids and teach people lessons have a solid cinema history, but I'd like to think there's more to this film than that. But I'm JUST not seeing it. The main lesson here seems to be if you've lost your way creatively in your career, just hold on and surround yourself with friends who are more talented, and eventually you'll get your mojo back. But it's also possible that there's nothing really there, that the film just functions like a big, dark mirror, and different people are going to see different things in it, depending on what they bring to the table.
So I think this definitely belongs in the category of "OK, all of this is probably a big metaphor for something, but for WHAT?" The death of a parent of loved one? The fact that adults work too hard and forget how to play? The fact that the only limits people have are self-imposed? Honestly, I don't have a clue, I'm just grasping at straws.
My sole NITPICK POINT tonight is about that age-old question that Mr. Magorium asks, which is why hot dogs are sold in 10-pack but the buns are sold in 8-packs. Umm, sorry but this was covered years ago, like in the 2nd year of the internet people finally got to the bottom of it. It's no longer a mystery, that's all I'm saying. First off, if you're having a big party, just buy 4 packs of hot dogs and 5 packs of buns. Boom, 40 hot dogs, 40 buns, no more problems, thanks to math. Secondly, you CAN find hot dogs sold in 8-packs, you just have to look a little harder on the store shelves and pick the right brand. (I've heard you can also find hot dog rolls sold in 10-packs, but I have not personally looked for them.)
Finally, the "reason" this happens is not (as this film posits) in case you drop a couple of hot dogs, nor is it because some people like eating their hot dog without a bun. Going gluten-free is a recent development, after all. The reason this occurs is because butchers and bakers package their foods separately and differently. Often (I won't say "always", that's how you get into trouble) 10 hot dogs together weigh one pound (though again, if you buy the larger hot dogs, it can be 8) and bakers, for whatever reason, determined that 8 buns stack the best on store shelves. Or some people say since they're baked in 4-roll pans, that's how they ended up getting packaged. Yes, it would be a perfect world if butchers and bakers got together and worked this all out before going to market, but they just didn't, because it's not a perfect world, OK? Back in the day you had butcher shops and bakeries, and nobody bought their sausages and rolls at the same time. It's only since the invention of the supermarket that anybody even thought of this as a problem - both butchers and bakers then stated that the other fellow had to change the way they were selling things, and anyway, people had more important things to worry about, like World War I and fighting cholera. So there you go, it's no longer one of life's unanswerable lingering questions. Plus, if you really wanted to investigate this, you wouldn't go to ask a hot dog vendor like Mr. Magorium did. Why would a hot dog vendor even care, much less know the answer? Wasn't there some Oscar Mayer company hotline he could call?
Also starring Dustin Hoffman (last seen in "The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)", Natalie Portman (last seen in "Brothers"), Zach Mills (last seen in "Super 8"), Ted Ludzik (last seen in "Owning Mahowny"), Rebecca Northan, Kiele Sanchez, Jonathan Potts, Mike Realba, David Collins, Marcia Bennett, Quancetia Hamilton, with a cameo from Steve Whitmire as Kermit the Frog (last heard in "The Muppet Christmas Carol").
RATING: 3 out of 10 integers in the Fibonacci sequence
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