BEFORE: The next part of my chain is going to take me back to Netflix for all three days of this three-day holiday weekend. Two actors carry over from "Hello, My Name Is Doris" - Natasha Lyonne is the more prominent one, the other's "that guy" from "Mad Men" and is listed below.
Ah, it would have been great if TCM could have played a little ball here and programmed crime films or film noir or something today, but no, they had to run Westerns today, didn't they? Anyway, Musicals are finally here tomorrow (followed by "Favorite Movie Nun" in primetime and "Favorite Movie with Three Acting Winners" overnight), so here's the "31 Days of Oscar" line-up on TCM for tomorrow, February 17:
6:00 am "Meet Me in St. Louis" (1944)
8:00 am "Top Hat" (1935)
10:00 am "Annie Get Your Gun" (1950)
12:00 pm "Bye Bye Birdie" (1963)
2:00 pm "Oliver!" (1968)
5:00 pm "South Pacific" (1958)
8:00 pm "The Nun's Story" (1959)
10:45 pm "Agnes of God" (1985)
12:45 am "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1951)
3:00 am "Network" (1976)
I'm going 8 for 10 tonight, a perfect score on the musicals, but I've never seen "Agnes of God", and "The Nun's Story" is on my list, haven't watched it yet. But that raises me up to 81 seen out of 196, and I'm back over 40% to 41.3%.
THE PLOT: In a city where greeting card writers are celebrated like movie stars, writer Ray used to be the king. In trying to recapture the feelings that once made him the greatest, he gets entangled in a web of murder and deceit as everyone vies to create the perfect card for a new holiday: Girlfriend's Day.
AFTER: You can sort of see how I mistakenly thought from the title that this was some kind of romance-based film (or maybe I was thinking about the Valentine's Day holiday, and therefore greeting cards and whatnot) but it's just not that kind of film. The problem for me, therefore, is that there's no way I could have KNOWN it wasn't that kind of film, except by watching it, and now that I've watched it, it's become part of the chain and there's no going back.
This is a weird little think-piece, I guess, it's set in am alternate world where people know the names of greeting card writers, and the work that they do is very well regarded, unlike the real world where their work is largely anonymous. I'm somewhat curious about where this came from, like is it a thinly veiled analogy about writing for a sketch show like SNL, which Odenkirk did for several years, or does some other writer have experience working in the greeting card industry, or what? There's this overall feeling that the events of the film aren't really meant to be taken seriously, that's it's some kind of metaphor, even if it's not exactly clear for what. Or is this just a spoof idea taken to the extreme?
It calls to mind many of those old detective stories, like the works of Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler that got adapted into all those movies with Bogart (and others) playing Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe working his way across town, following leads that link back to some vast conspiracy or cover-up and put him in conflict with various goons or thugs along the way. (The IMDB pointed out the shout-outs to 1970's films like "Chinatown" and "All the President's Men", but since the nostalgia for the 1950's was so big in the 1970's, I think this nostalgia thing sort of works in waves.)
The backdrop here is the creation of a new holiday to celebrate the existence of girlfriends, and it's proposed by the mayor to boost the failing greeting card industry, only is that what's really going on? Who benefits from another holiday being added to the mix? Struggling card writer Ray Wentworth is told to "follow the money" to figure out if everything is on the up-and-up when another card writer turns up dead. How deep does the conspiracy go?
But to accomplish this, the other parts of the story have to sort of bend over backwards to make the main storyline possible. For starters, of course Ray's got writer's block, he might have written the best-selling Valentine's Day card, three years in a row, but his best days seem to be behind him. Then for some reason, this is also an alternate world where, in order to write some genuine sentiment, one has to actually FEEL it first, so this is a world where you can't write something that isn't true, so you can apparently tell a lie vocally, but you can't write one down? That seems a little weird, unless someone's trying, in a roundabout way, to point out that it's weird in the real world to send someone a greeting card with a sentiment written by someone else, which now seems like a bit of a lie by comparison. Does that make any sense?
Ray's wife split three years ago, and left him for another man, and he hasn't been able to write a good greeting card ever since, since he's depressed and not in love, and this alternate world's rules therefore dictate his failure. Yes, obviously in the real world there's some connection between the mood of a writer and his ability to write, but here the connection is a direct and literal one. In order to be able to write a heartfelt love note to a girlfriend, Ray has to go out and find a girlfriend and feel those feelings, just so he can write about it. Only once that happens, Ray feels that to give that perfect card over to a greeting card company, instead of the girl herself, would be utterly dishonest.
What doesn't really make sense is why, for some reason, he can't do both. Why can't he give the card to the greeting card company AND to the girl he likes? Why is it one or the other? Why can't those words on the card be mass-produced in the factory AND also hand-written by him on another card? It's like somebody here can write something down only once, but not twice, and that's a little silly. Unless, of course, there's some larger point being made about the absurdity of greeting cards, and it feels like this film is dancing around that point without making it outright. Dumb it down a little for me, would you?
Also, this is a fictional world with all these quirks, but there also exist love songs like Air Supply's "Making Love Out of Nothing at All". Why are there so many constraints on the greeting card industry and how sincere everything has to be, but there are no such limits on ridiculous pop songs? Wouldn't they be affected by this sort of self-imposed ban on creativity, too? NITPICK POINT for sure.
But hey, it's a relatively short feature (just 70 minutes) so watching this won't prevent you from getting to some other things around the house, or watching something else after it and crossing another Netflix comedy special off your list.
Also starring Bob Odenkirk (last heard in "Incredibles 2"), Amber Tamblyn (last seen in "Django Unchained"), Rich Sommer (also carrying over from "Hello, My Name Is Doris"), Toby Huss, David Sullivan, Hannah Nordberg, June Diane Raphael, Stacy Keach (last seen in "Gold"), Andy Richter (last seen in "Dr. T & the Women"), Larry Fessenden, Alex Karpovsky (last seen in "Hail, Caesar!"), Stephanie Courtney (last seen in every Progressive Insurance commercial), Tucker Smallwood, Grady Lee Richmond, with cameos from Derek Waters, Ed Begley Jr. (seriously criminally underused here, but last seen in "Mascots") and the voice of David Lynch.
RATING: 4 out of 10 televised bumfights
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