BEFORE: I've decided that February is a fickle month - sure, we get Valentine's Day, which is a great day if you're in love or in a relationship, but a bad day if you're not. Or, I suppose it's a bad day if you're in love with one person but in a relationship with another. We also get President's Day, which celebrates the great Presidents our country had in the past, but it also reminds us about the bloated walking ego-ball that we have now. And Groundhog Day? Don't even get me started on that one. The weather's up and down, too, like we'll get a day that's a bit warm and reminds us that spring is on the way, but it also feels like we could get snow or sleet with very little notice. This is also reflected in the films I've been watching, because for every 5 or 6-rated film I watch, there's a 3 or a 4 to balance things out. Thankfully, it's almost over.
Tomorrow's the last day of February, and TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming features the topic "You're So Dramatic", which starts off with a film about college friends, just like my film today, then for primetime it's "Favorite Boxing Biopic", with the battle for "Best David Raskin Nominated Score" overnight:
4:15 am "The Big Chill" (1983)
6:15 am "Penny Serenade" (1941)
8:15 am "The Magnificent Ambersons" (1942)
10:00 am "Jezebel" (1938)
11:45 am "Kings Row" (1942)
2:00 pm "A Patch of Blue" (1965)
4:00 pm "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (1958)
6:00 pm "Rebel Without a Cause" (1955)
8:00 pm "The Great White Hope" (1970)
10:00 pm "Somebody Up There Likes Me" (1956)
12:15 am "Forever Amber" (1947)
2:45 am "Separate Tables" (1958)
I'm claiming 6 out of 12, which I think counts as a push: "The Big Chill", "Penny Serenade", "The Magnificent Ambersons", "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof", "Rebel Without a Cause" and "Somebody Up There Likes Me". Thankfully I've focused on Cary Grant movies, Orson Welles films, James Dean essentials, and boxing films. So now I'm up to 132 seen out of 319, which is still 41.3%.
Parker Posey carries over from "You've Got Mail", and I'm back on the Noah Baumbach beat.
THE PLOT: After college graduation, Grover's girlfriend Jane tells him she's moving to Prague to study writing. Grover declines to accompany her, deciding instead to move in with several friends, all of whom can't work up the inertia to escape their university's pull.
AFTER: I got on a Noah Baumbach kick last year, after watching both "The Squid and the Whale" and "The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)" and finding both of those films to be pretty good. "Hmm, what else has he directed?" I thought. And that led me to "Kicking and Screaming", and also tomorrow's film. When I saw the poster for "Kicking and Screaming", I immediately felt I'd tried to watch that once, sort of paid half-attention and now couldn't remember exactly what the film was about. But I remembered that it starred Anne Heche and Kevin Corrigan, and was probably worth another look. Anyway, I found it on Netflix so I figured I'd add it to the list and make up for another movie sin from the past, and also get myself one step closer to seeing all of Baumbach's filmography.
As February drew near, I also noticed it was on Starz On Demand, and that's one channel that doesn't run that signal that prevents me from copying films to DVD, so I was all over that. The only problem there was, when I selected the film, the On Demand service played the OTHER film with "Kicking & Screaming" in the title, which is that Will Ferrell film about a guy coaching a soccer team. Starz claimed to be featuring both films on their service, but really, they're both just the Will Ferrell film. This should have been a warning sign to me, the fact that Starz is running the wrong film, and nobody has taken the time to correct the mistake - that means nobody's watching this film, or nobody cares, or perhaps they realize that the Will Ferrell film is better, so they'll just watch that.
Only today, when watching the film on Netflix, did I realize my mistake - this is not the film I tried to watch once with Anne Heche and Kevin Corrigan (and, it turns out, Catherine Keener...) because that film is called "Walking and Talking". I totally confused the two titles in my head, because I couldn't really remember one, so when I saw something similar, I just assumed it was the same movie. It's not. BUT, the die is cast, the linking is already in place, so I just have to forge ahead and watch the wrong movie - what other choice do I have, if I want to maintain the chain?
But now I'm paying the price - because this film is just dreadful, like God-awful. A bunch of students who can't seem to decide if they want to be preppies or stoners (because those are two very different classes of people) so they seem to be exhibiting traits of both classes. And all they seem to do is sit around in bars and talk about meaningless trivia - like I played pub trivia for 8 years, but at least my team had a chance of winning a prize, a group of friends sitting around and quizzing each other for no prizes is just plain stupid. None of them seem able to graduate from this college, either, and even the ones who do come back and take more useless classes, so what's the point? Imagine the group of Delta frat boys from "Animal House", these guys are just as aimless, only they don't know how to party, like at all, so they're just plain boring.
Noah Baumbach based this story on his time at Vassar College, but made this film when he was 26. Dude, you were 26 and still thinking about your college friends, and how great they were? Somebody had trouble after graduation, I think, because by 25 I think college should be totally in your rear-view, unless you go to grad school for some strange reason. Writers don't need to go to grad school, by the time they've got their first degree they should be out in the world writing, or filmmakers should be filming, and it should be about something besides college. So essentially, this is a delayed student film, and here's the secret to understanding student films: they all suck. My student films sucked, everybody else's student films at NYU sucked, every student film everywhere has sucked. Spike Lee's student thesis film sucked, and I know because they made us watch it at NYU (I was there a few years after Spike graduated). It's called "Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads", and it sucks. It's one hour long, and I spent that whole hour wishing the film would just be OVER already. (Even the first review I saw on the IMDB for "Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop" reads, "with this film it's clear that Spike Lee would go on and make better and greater films." That's the nice way of saying that it sucks.)
But student films suck for a reason, you're supposed to learn what NOT to do while making them, and start thinking about ways to make them better. Mine were so bad that when it came time to submit ideas for senior year to make a thesis film, I found a unique way of getting out of this - I graduated. I had enough A.P. credits from high-school, and they were in subjects like math and science that took care of many of my required liberal arts courses, so I found I had enough credits to graduate at the end of junior year. Never made a thesis film, and I believe the world is probably better off for that - film school basically taught me that I didn't have the proper ideas, or the proper arrogant attitude, to be a director. Because you not only had to have good ideas, you had to have the confidence to fight for them, and I had neither.
What I can't understand is why someone would hand around college for another five (or ten, as seen in this film) years. You're in your twenties, it's the prime of life, why stagnate on a college campus when you can be out in the world, making things happen, or at least trying to? I couldn't wait to get out there, good or bad, live in a shitty apartment on the Lower East Side and take a night job tearing tickets in a movie theater so I could job-hunt during the day. I didn't sit around in a bar playing meaningless mind games (well, I was 20 and underage, so I bought my beer from the deli and sat around playing Trivial Pursuit, but that's neither here nor there...).
Thankfully, this does qualify for the romance chain, because Grover spends a lot of time flashing back to happier times, before his girlfriend went to Prague to study. Something tells me this was the easiest way for her to dump Grover, and really, she's somewhere in New England, but I've got no proof of that. Grover wouldn't know, because he never calls her while she's in Europe, because the international dialing codes are "too long". What a guy. Finally, after an hour of almost nothing happening, Grover decides to jump on a plane and visit Jane in Prague, only to discover that he doesn't have his passport handy. So nothing continues to happen. It's just as well, Grover probably would have just ended up living in an abandoned building in Prague so he could spy on Jane, if the other films I've watched recently are any indication.
I'm not sure which character is based on Baumbach himself, or if these are pastiches of his various college friends, but if so, he really should have tried harder to find better friends, or at least more interesting ones to write about. Ding! The best thing I can say about this film is that it made me forget, for a short time, how much I hate hipsters, but only by reminding me how much I hated preppies, back in the day. Ding!
Also starring Josh Hamilton (last seen in "The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)"), Carlos Jacott (ditto), Olivia D'Abo (last seen in "Conan the Destroyer"), Chris Eigeman (last seen in "Maid in Manhattan"), Eric Stoltz (last seen in "Little Women"), Jason Wiles, Elliott Gould (last seen in "Nashville"), Marissa Ribisi (last seen in "The Brady Bunch Movie"), Dean Cameron, Kaela Dobkin, Perrey Reeves, Cara Buono (last seen in "Happy Accidents"), with cameos from David DeLuise, Noah Baumbach.
RATING: 2 out of 10 "Friday The 13th" movie titles
No comments:
Post a Comment