BEFORE: Bob Odenkirk carries over from "Girlfriend's Day", to what I assume is a much smaller role, but that's OK, as long as an actor carries over. Sometimes they're the lead singer in one band, and the next day they're playing tambourine in a different band. It's all part of the game. There's just a week and a half left in February, but my romance chain is going to run long, and since I know it will also lead me to "Captain Marvel", I've decided to stick with it and just let it be. Still, that's nearly another three weeks of romance films, and the genre already feels a little played out. It's going to get tough to endure at some point, but hey, in two weeks I'll be looking forward to a change of scenery.
There are only 14 days left in TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, so get your films watched now. The line-up for tomorrow, Monday, February 18 includes "Epics" during the day, then the battle of "Best Picture Nominee Non-Winner: 1952" during primetime and "Sibling Rivalry: Brother & Sister Oscar Winners" during late night:
5:15 am "Julius Caesar" (1953)
7:30 am "Quo Vadis" (1951)
10:45 am "Khartoum" (1966)
1:15 pm "55 Days at Peking" (1963)
4:00 pm "Ben-Hur" (1959)
8:00 pm "High Noon" (1952)
9:45 pm "The Quiet Man" (1952)
12:15 am "A Free Soul" (1931)
2:00 am "None But the Lonely Heart" (1944)
As much as I might want to see a battle of the Barrymores (Lionel vs. Ethel), I think I'll pass. I've seen "Julius Caesar", "Ben-Hur" and "High Noon", so that's another 3 out of 9, bringing my total up to 84 seen out of 205, or 40.9%.
I've passed on pretty much everything TCM's running that I haven't seen, but I'm only 10 Best Picture winners away from seeing them all - maybe I should have picked up films like "Cimarron" (which ran yesterday) and "The Great Ziegfeld" (last Saturday) - I could have crossed off three of those 10 I haven't seen, but I didn't. At least I've scheduled "Moonlight" for April so I can at least knock that number down to 9. But I guess by then we'll have a new Best Picture winner for 2018, so it will still be 10.
THE PLOT: A hard-partying high school senior's philosophy on life changes when he meets the not-so-typical "nice girl".
AFTER: There's a whole wave of these romance films based on YA novels, and I've been avoiding the vast majority of them, because a bunch of them tend to feature teens with terminal conditions, or teens that had stronger relationship game in high school than I did, or both - and why would I want to be reminded that even dying teens were getting lucky in high school, and I wasn't? Since I regarding girls like they were some kind of alien species, I was afraid to even talk to girls in high school. If adult me could go back and give one piece of advice to 15-year old me, that would be that girls are just regular people, and I should try just addressing them as such, and see where that path leads. Because I didn't figure that out until midway through college.
The lead male character here, Sutter, has the opposite problem. He has no problem talking to girls, in fact he often knows exactly what to say to get them to be interested in him, but they all seem to get tired of him after about a month, then they drop him flat. Maybe it's the fact that he's always ready to party, in fact he's often refilling his soda cup with a flask from his pocket, even when he's at school or at work in the necktie store. He's also got no drive when it comes to schoolwork and no plans for college, so clearly the girls see him as a good-time pal, and split when they realize there's no THERE there. Perhaps it's the fact that his father split ten years ago, and his mother won't allow any contact with his father that forces him to live in the "now" and regard that as a viable lifestyle.
One morning, after somehow ditching his car and sleeping on a stranger's lawn, he's woken up by Aimee, a girl who knows him from school, but also one that he otherwise might never have noticed. In many ways she's his polar opposite - she's got a clear vision of her future, going to college in Philadelphia, but she doesn't have the energy to stand up for herself and tell her mother that this is what she wants. She also somehow knows that she wants to be married in the future, work for NASA and live on a horse ranch with her husband, but has no concrete plan on how to bring all this about. Since she's never had a boyfriend before, she ends up falling for Sutter's drunken prom promises, as she can't recognize that these might just be things he says to get girls into bed.
Though Sutter's still getting flirty texts from his ex, even though that ex is now dating the class president and star athlete, you can probably tell where this one's going - with the two polar opposite kids getting together, maybe she can learn a thing or two from him about standing up for herself and maybe also cut loose a little bit, and maybe he can learn a thing about planning for the future and thinking that a relationship can last beyond the sexual conquest part. I know, it sounds crazy and maybe we shouldn't wish for the things we can't have, but I've got a good feeling about these two.
And I think this is pretty common, there's nothing like becoming familiar with your parent's chosen path in life to help one solidify the desire to make a different choice. That's part of being a teenager, getting to the point where you feel adult enough to make your own path, and making sure that it's different from theirs. After all, who wants to go out in the world and make the same mistakes their mother or father did, when they can instead get out there and make entirely new and unique mistakes of their own?
Also starring Miles Teller (last seen in "Only the Brave"), Shailene Woodley (last seen in "Snowden"), Brie Larson (last seen in "Kong: Skull Island"), Jennifer Jason Leigh (last seen in "Annihilation"), Kyle Chandler (last seen in "Game Night"), Mary Elizabeth Winstead (last seen in "Kill the Messenger"), Dayo Okeniyi (last seen in "The Hunger Games"), Andre Royo (last seen in "Shaft"), Kaitlyn Dever (last seen in "J. Edgar"), Masam Holden, Gary Weeks (last seen in "Hidden Figures"), Whitney Goin, Nicci Faires.
RATING: 5 out of 10 pitchers of beer
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