BEFORE: Before going to bed on Friday night (OK, Saturday morning) I took another stab at trying to come up with a chain that would get me to "Avengers: Endgame" in the right number of steps, but one that maybe wouldn't go through "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote", a film that hasn't been released yet, which I do want to see, but maybe not on the big screen. Logically there must be thousands of theoretical chains that would get me from early March to late April, but with an ever-changing line-up of 155 films (and more on the "someday" list) to choose from, how could I narrow it down? As each film could lead to 3, 4 or a dozen others, as soon as you plan three films, I find I've increased the possibilities exponentially, so I soon hit a wall after being flooded with possibilities.
But somehow I worked on the problem while I was asleep, and I woke up on Saturday morning (OK, Saturday afternoon) with a way to narrow the focus. I had programmed my post-romance chain up to a Netflix film called "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs" (with a large cast) so I searched my list for every film that shared an actor with that film, and labelled those films with a code, BS1, to show me what options were one step away. Then every other film that shared an actor with THOSE films, which would be two steps away, got labelled BS2. Plus I worked it from the other end, so every film that shared an actor with "Avengers: Endgame" got labelled AE1. This allowed me to see all of my options, and any time I circled back to a film with more than one code, that's a possible chain. Of course, I didn't want to get to "Avengers" too soon, the preferred number of steps was in the range of 33 to 36. So any combination of a film's BS number with its AE number that added up in that range would be a viable chain.
I didn't even get that far, because this allowed me to see a direction forming, giving priority to films that I really want to see in late March, like "Super Troopers 2", which is airing on cable now. And if I got to another big tentpole film with a big cast, like "Fantastic Beasts 2", then I saved my progress and started labelling new options FB1 and FB2, then I could see a bunch of new paths that could get me closer to "Avengers", which at this point was 10 days closer in theory. And if I hit an actor like James Franco or Bruce Greenwood, well, they're good for 5 or 6 films in a row, so that's another few steps closer. I worked this method - find all the links, pick the path that gets to the next tentpole, look for a way to get within range of an "Avengers" actor - until I found a path that's not only the right number of steps, but also contains a bunch of films that I'm excited about. I'm talking like "Venom", "Alien: Covenant", "Mary Poppins Returns", "A Quiet Place", and "The Death of Stalin"-level of excitement.
Now, of course I don't have to stick to it, I can always change it around later. But it's comforting to know that I CAN get from here to there, and even though the sands are constantly shifting, there's a way to make some sense out of the strange combination of films that I have access to on cable, Netflix and a pile of recent Academy screeners. Then once spring is here, I can figure out a path to "X-Men: Dark Phoenix" and/or "Toy Story 4". I've already got a documentary chain attached to "Spider-Man: Far From Home", I just have to decide whether it's a lead-in or a lead-out.
Now, the schedule for TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" line-up for tomorrow, February 11, which is also focused on "Show Biz" during the daytime, with a prime time face-off for "Douglas Shearer Best Sound Award" and a late-night "East Coast vs. West Coast Dance-Off":
5:00 am "The Perils of Pauline" (1947)
6:45 am "Morning Glory" (1933)
8:15 am "What Price Hollywood?" (1932)
10:00 am "My Favorite Year" (1982)
12:00 pm "The Band Wagon" (1953)
2:00 pm "The Star" (1953)
3:45 pm "Inside Daisy Clover" (1965)
6:00 pm "The Bad and the Beautiful" (1952)
8:00 pm "Naughty Marietta" (1935)
10:00 pm "San Francisco" (1936)
12:15 am "On the Town" (1949)
2:15 am "Singin' in the Rain" (1952)
It's almost an advance look at the musicals category, just the musicals that are about being in show biz, which is a lot of them. I've seen "My Favorite Year", "The Band Wagon", "Inside Daisy Clover", "On the Town" and "Singin' in the Rain", so that's another 5 out of 12, which brings my total up to 57 out of 126, still at 45%.
Rose Byrne carries over again from "I Give It a Year".
THE PLOT: An aging widow from New York follows her daughter to Los Angeles in hopes of starting a new life after her husband passes away.
AFTER: At first I wasn't sure including this one in the romance chain was a good idea, because I thought it would be largely about the mother-daughter relationship, but there's enough here about romantic love that I can work with - the daughter's trying to get over her ex-boyfriend and the mother's dealing with the death of her husband, but she's also taking those first tentative steps toward finding a new relationship partner. She meets one guy who's also from Brooklyn while at a bridal shower, but then happens upon an ex-cop from California later on in the film. Yes, J.K. Simmons can play down-home, folksy divorced guy, in addition to sadistic white supremacist or sadistic music teacher. (Which reminds me, I have to get started on watching Season 2 of "Counterpart", where he gets to play two characters, one good and one bad, from parallel universes.)
But, oh, how I wish that a comedy about a smothering helicopter mom were a narrative slam-dunk, if that were the case, I'd have enough material for my own TV series. The story still needs to GO someplace, and this one just ambles around in circles, mostly. So she doesn't have proper boundaries, there's been so much of that around here, between "Welcome to Marwen", "Wilson", "2 Days in New York" and even yesterday's film. Just because she's following her motherly instincts, and has good intentions, that doesn't mean what she's doing is right. Sure, she's dealing with a lot, but there comes a time when you have to take a stand against your mother, and not let her insert herself into every aspect of your adult life.
By the time the (supposedly) adult daughter here realizes that for her own sanity she has to take a stand, and lay down some ground rules if she and her mother are going to share L.A., it's nearly too late. She needs a quiet space to write (or be unable to write, more likely, from what I've seen in films) and this is why you should never give a housekey to your mother, because she'll walk right in and not even ring the bell or wait to get you on the phone to tell you she's coming over. Finally, the daughter has to go to New York to shoot a TV pilot, but then she puts her mother in charge of her house and her dogs, which is probably a mistake. Some distance is needed here, but this way she still has to check in with her mother to see how the dogs are doing.
Plus, in the daughter's absence, the mother still needs someone to take care of, so she volunteers at the hospital, befriends a salesman at the Apple Store who needs career advice and then a ride to school, and offers to plan the lesbian wedding of one of her daughter's friends, even if she never gets around to learning the friend's full name. Because it's good to be needed, and even if you're not doing things for yourself, doing things for others is almost as good. Look, a favor here and there is fine, but this sort of behavior is beyond ridiculous, and yet the movie can't seem to decide if it's good or bad. It should ultimately be portrayed as bad, but it feels like someone forgot to write that part. Where are the people who SHOULD be telling her to butt out of their lives? Why is this portrayed as having only good effects, when in reality, things should fall off the rails at some point? Don't these other people have mothers who would be jealous if they knew someone else was mothering their kids?
Maybe I'm projecting here, because when I was a teenager, my family ran a local theater group and my mother, a music teacher by trade, got a lot of my friends and classmates involved in singing and performing, making them think (right or wrong) that perhaps theater was a viable profession for them. Meanwhile, their own parents probably all wanted them to be on different career paths, like actuarial accounting or real estate, things that pay the bills. Then here was this crazy lady, acting like a surrogate mom, showing them how they could get up on stage, have fun, and sing their hearts out while on a path to financial insolvency. What right did my mother have to take a few dozen kids under her wing and get them interested in theater, leading them to think it's a viable career - OK, it might be, but for like 1 percent of the BEST performers...let's get real, following your dreams can only get you so far, and it's easier to adjust your dreams to match your skills and talents, rather than the other way around.
And the key to understanding this film is that the main character is named Lori, with a penchant for writing screenplays and a meddling mom, while the writer/director of the film is named Lorene, and I'm betting this is somewhat autobiographical. But that's a double-edged sword, because that means the mother character never gets her comeuppance here, nobody ever rises up and tells her to butt out, which they should, because I'm guessing the writer/director herself never got around to that. She just turned her into a character in a film and forgot to give her a narrative arc to follow, so this is just a simple character study. Save that for your improv group, please.
NITPICK POINT: How did she even get her husband's convertible out to L.A.? We know he died in the New York area, so why isn't the car still there? Did she have it shipped all the way out to the West Coast so she could NOT drive it? That makes no sense.
Also starring Susan Sarandon (last seen in "Bob Roberts"), J.K. Simmons (last seen in "The Snowman"), Jerrod Carmichael (last seen in "The Disaster Artist"), Cecily Strong (last seen in "Ghostbusters" (2016)), Michael McKean (last heard in "Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Part 2"), Lucy Punch (last seen in "Ella Enchanted"), Jason Ritter (last seen in "W."), Sarah Baker (last seen in "Mascots"), Casey Wilson (also last seen in "The Disaster Artist"), Randall Park (ditto), Amy Landecker (last seen in "Doctor Strange"), Billy Magnussen (last seen in "Game Night"), Megalyn Echikunwoke, Rebecca Drysdale, Bill Fagerbakke (last seen in "The Artist"), Robert Picardo (last seen in "The 'Burbs"), Lou Volpe, Tony Amendola, Harry Hamlin (last seen in "Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives"), Laura San Giacomo (last seen in "Sex, Lies, and Videotape"), Shiri Appleby, with a cameo from Blues Traveler (last seen in "Blues Brothers 2000").
RATING: 4 out of 10 pregnancy tests
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