BEFORE: This film's going to wrap up my August, so start shopping for school supplies, break out the pumpkin spice-flavored everything and start wearing a jacket, because fall is on the way, and I can't wait. It's been entirely too hot for too long, my backyard is overgrown because it's been too humid to get out there and chop down some weeds, and the stray cat we were feeding on our front porch somehow turned up again, after being gone for six weeks. Maybe she went on vacation, who knows? We asked her where she'd been, and she wouldn't tell us.
Here's a breakdown of my August movie-watching activity, across all the available platforms:
13 Movies watched on Cable (saved to DVD): It Could Happen to You, The Weather Man, Dunkirk, King Arthur, Darkest Hour, Billionaire Boys Club, Baby Driver, Sicario: Day of the Soldado, Beatriz at Dinner, Dogville, Stan & Ollie, How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, The Glass Castle
4 Movies watched on Cable (not saved): The Favourite, Robin Hood, Widows, Churchill
4 Watched on Netflix: Outlaw King, Filmworker, The Little Hours, The Highwaymen
3 Watched on Academy screeners: Norman, Mary Queen of Scots, W.E.,
1 watched on iTunes: Tale of Tales,
3 watched on Amazon Prime: You Were Never Really Here, Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot, Welcome to Me
1 watched on Hulu: The Sisters Brothers
1 watched on YouTube: Bright Star
1 Watched on Commercial DVD: Revengeance
31 Total in August
Cable is still going strong, it still accounts for over 1/2 of my movie supply - of course, part of that is new films and part is a backlog from last year, films stored on my DVR or on DVDs. Still chipping away at my Netflix list, slowly but surely, and Amazon Prime finally became a bit of a player in the mix. Academy screener use has dropped off from, say, April (when I watched 7), but that's probably because most of the films that came on screeners are now running on cable or one of the streaming services. I only fall back on that as a last resort, like if a movie hasn't popped up on Hulu or Netflix, or costs too much on iTunes. We'll see what happens in September.
Woody Harrelson carries over from "The Highwaymen".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Captain Fantastic" (Movie #3,224)
THE PLOT: A young girl comes of age in a dysfunctional family of nonconformist nomads, with a mother who's an eccentric artist and an alcoholic father who would stir the children's imagination with hope as a distraction from their poverty.
AFTER: In many ways this feels like a re-tread of "Captain Fantastic", though it was released just a year later, partially because it has some of the same kids acting in it. Non-conventional nomadic parents, too many kids being home-schooled, an upbringing that some would say borders on abuse, both films were based (at least partially) by real-world instances - the writer of "Captain Fantastic" was raised in "alternative-living" communities, and "The Glass Castle" is based on a memoir by Jeannette Walls about her own childhood. The message is clear - if you have an "alternative" (or even shitty) childhood, you can totally profit from it when you're an adult, if you make it that far and have writing skills. It's almost a competition if you think about it - how many best-selling books have come from the "I overcame a crappy childhood" angle? Because let's face it, there are a lot of terrible parents out there, thanks to the struggling alcoholic middle-class. KA-CHING!
Didn't I also see Woody Harrelson in another film where he played an alcoholic, abusive father who couldn't hold down a job? Oh, yeah, it was "The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio" - another film based on a book by one of the kids, and both films also had footage of the grown-up kids at the end, after they'd come to terms with growing up in a family where their main income came from contests and sweepstakes (and their biggest household expense was probably postage for entering contests and sweepstakes - that's a zero-sum game, if you ask me.). But let me focus just on the competition between "Captain Fantastic" and "The Glass Castle", which are sort of the "Armageddon" and "Deep Impact" of terrible parenting stories. (Or the "Finding Nemo" and "Shark's Tale", or the "Zootopia" and "Sing", you get the idea...)
"Captain Fantastic" at least got an Oscar nomination, for Viggo Mortensen, while "The Glass Castle" got none. "Captain Fantastic" started shortly after the death of the mother, while "The Glass Castle" has both parents living until the children are adults - though the father does get sick late in the picture. "Captain Fantastic" had a twist where the mother's parents are rich, and they want to adopt the kids so they can have a stable life and go to school, and "The Glass Castle" reveals that the mother actually owns a plot of land, which leads to questions about why the family couldn't just live there, instead of traveling around or living in terrible abandoned houses. In "Captain Fantastic" the father taught his kids how to hunt (let's pretend for a moment that's a valuable skill) and also had a heavy educational regimen based on classic literature, while the parents in "The Glass Castle" toss their kids a few books during long car trips and assume that will suffice. And in "Captain Fantastic" the family owns a bus and uses it like a de facto motor home, while the family in "The Glass Castle" travels by station wagon, and occasionally in a truck full of furniture (it's not safe to have the kids ride in the back of the truck with the furniture, I know this from personal experience).
My father was a truck driver, and I remember when we used to go on vacation, he'd convert the back of a pick-up truck or a van into a place where we could ride, but looking back on it, it really wasn't safe, we had no seat-belts or child safety seats back there. OK, so there was never an incident, but that doesn't make it right, anything could have happened. We drove all around New York State one year (let's say 1979) and down to Florida another year. He'd rigged up a piece of plywood in the van so my sister and I could sleep on one level, in separate sleeping bags, and he and my mother could sleep on the van floor. It was barely comfortable, and in hindsight, now I wonder why we couldn't just sleep in hotels, instead of in a van that he'd park overnight in a mall parking lot or something. Agreed, this was before the internet, so it was a lot harder to plan a trip, you couldn't book hotels on-line because there WAS no on-line, but still. I don't think I ever slept in a hotel until I went on an overnight field trip in eighth grade - what were my parents afraid of, that I'd be abducted by hotel staff and forced to work as a bellboy or a pool cleaner?
While I trusted my father's driving implicitly, the worst was probably sleeping in that van with NO air circulation, and then forgetting how close I was to the roof of the van - if I woke up too quickly and tried to sit up, I'd bang my head first thing. There are a dozen ways those trips could have gone wrong, plus this calls my parents' judgement into question. Several times a police officer would come and investigate the van (makes sense - you couldn't do this in modern times) and tell us we'd have to drive away or check into a hotel. Now that I'm an adult, I don't even go camping (I tried it during my first marriage, it was a disaster every time.). Whatever a decent hotel or motel costs, it's worth every penny. But that's my childhood pain, let me get back to "The Glass Castle".
The four kids here (when you don't have valid employment, why not stop after one or two children?) are forced to live in squalor after their nomadic parents finally settle down in a house in West Virginia, where there's no heat or running water. And while the father has detailed plans to someday build his dream-house out of glass (umm, how exactly would this work? There would be no privacy, for one thing...) his plans never come to fruition - even an attempt to dig the house a new foundation only leads to a pit in the front yard where they end up dumping all of their trash. The four children eventually decide to take care of each other, get themselves educated in school and collectively save up money so that they can each afford to escape when an opportunity arises.
Part of this makes sense, kids learning to cook and fend for themselves, especially when the mother shows no interest in cooking, or supervising her children to make sure they don't set themselves on fire, and the father blows all of the family's food money on alcohol. One imagines that he's drinking to forget his problems, only his biggest problem is that his children are starving, because he spent that money on booze. His daughter finally calls him on his B.S. when he says he'll do "anything" for the family - OK, Dad, how about getting sober?
This is another "split timeline" film, though - it toggles between the present, when Jeannette is an adult gossip columnist in New York and her brother and sisters also live in the big city, and the past, as we gradually learn all the terrible hardships the family endured just so Mom could be an amateur artist and Dad could be a professional drunk. Eventually the parents follow their kids to New York and become squatters in some kind of tenement communal house, leading to the line of dialogue (early in the film), "Hey, last night I saw Mom and Dad digging in the trash downtown." OK, I think this film wins the contest for shittiest parental figures. Any parent who teaches their kid to swim by THROWING them in the pool without warning deserves to be drowned themselves, I'll even get the cinder blocks and chains myself.
I think that the scenes are chronologically in order in the two timelines - like all the past scenes are in order, and all the present scenes are in order - but it's really tough to tell, because each kid is played by two or three different actors, so things are constantly changing and it can be tough to tell who's who after they jump forward three years and the kids all look different. Story-wise there are a lot of things that are also unclear, like how did the kids enroll themselves in school? Doesn't a parent usually have to do that? And after they did, didn't Mr. or Mrs. Walls notice that their kids weren't around every day between 9 am and 3 pm? Where did they think their kids were going? And then wasn't there ever a parent-teacher conference or anything? This all sort of seems very fishy and hard to believe.
I just read the plot of the memoir this is based on, and it turns out that the film changed the order of events around quite a bit, and left out a number of things too. Like the fact that the mother inherited land is revealed while the children were still kids, and the family tries to live on that land for a while. The parents are also aware of their kids being enrolled in school while living in West Virginia, and this makes more sense than the kids going to school behind the parents' backs. There's no mention of the book toggling between two timelines, either, so this was likely a convention to make the storytelling easier on film - it's a trendy crutch, I maintain, which helps cover up the slower or more depressing parts of the story. Any time things start to feel slow, the director can just cut back to the present and pick up the story there, problem (not really) solved.
I guess if you've got a choice between watching this movie and reading the book, I'd wager that the book is probably a bit more coherent. Either way, unless your childhood was beyond terrible (and I doubt your story can out-do this one) this tale could make you feel better about your own past by comparison. So, was that the goal here?
NITPICK POINT: Rex Walls claims that one of the best things about living out in the country is being able to see all the stars at night, which is impossible in a big city due to all the "pollution". He's not exactly correct here, because the real reason you can't star-gaze in a place like New York City or Los Angeles isn't air pollution, it's "light pollution". A big city at night gives off so much light that it's hard for the human eye to see many stars except for the brightest ones. You see more stars in the country because it's darker, not because the air is cleaner.
Also starring Brie Larson (last seen in "Avengers: Endgame"), Naomi Watts (last seen in "Movie 43"), Sarah Snook (last seen in "Steve Jobs"), Josh Caras (also carrying over from "The Highwaymen"), Brigette Lundy-Paine (last seen in "Downsizing"), Max Greenfield (last seen in "Hello, My Name Is Doris"), Dominic Bogart (last seen in "The Birth of a Nation"), Joe Pingue (last seen in "Fahrenheit 451"), Robin Bartlett (last seen in "Regarding Henry"), A.J. Henderson, Ella Anderson (last seen in "Mother's Day"), Chandler Head, Sadie Sink (last seen in "Chuck"), Olivia Kate Rice, Charlie Shotwell (last seen in "Captain Fantastic"), Shree Crooks (ditto), Iain Armitage, Eden Grace Redfield, Chris Gillett (last seen in "Man of the Year"), Tessa Mossey, Vlasta Vrana (last seen in "The Human Stain"), Brenda Kamino, Andrew Shaver, Sandra Flores, Kyra Harper, with footage of the real Jeannette Walls and family.
RATING: 4 out of 10 loose floorboards
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