BEFORE: I know November just started three movies ago, but I've reached the end of my November chain. Weird, huh? But I've been very diligent this year, more so than most years, and I find myself running out of movie slots before running out of year. I capped my years at 300 many moons ago, when I realized that 365 movies per year was too much - I need some time for work matters, vacations, comic-cons, chores around the house, and just general mental health. Interacting with people IRL may be overrated in general, but it's necessary to maintaining some semblance of a normal, non-fictional life. There has to be more to life than watching movies, and over the next month, I'm going to try and get some.
Still, I'll pat myself on the back for maintaining quite a pace this year - 295 movies in 311 days is pretty damn good, and half of those 16 days off were spent in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago. It felt weird to take a week off, and now I'm staring at over a month off. I feel like my blog is a seasonal resort in the Catskills or something, once the leaves all drop off the trees and the frost comes, nobody wants to drive up there for the weekend, so the place just sort of shuts down, at least until hunting season and maybe a big Christmas party.
Quickly, here are the stats on November's formats:
2 Movies watched on Cable (not saved): The Portrait of a Lady, Can You Ever Forgive Me?
1 Watched on Netflix: Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile
3 Total in October
Richard E. Grant carries over from "The Portrait of a Lady", and he's also the link to my next film, which is "Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker". As a fan I've tried very hard to not learn too much about this film, I've looked at each trailer, but only once, because I just wanted to get an impression, not learn any plot details - but just knowing the cast list, which was necessary to plan the linking, probably gives away too much. Obviously I had several ways to get here, I'd been stockpiling films with Adam Driver and Oscar Isaac, but once I knew that my path could lead here in another way, I was free to watch (nearly) all of those films.
(You might well ask, why not watch this film with the other Melissa McCarthy films? Why treat this as a Richard E. Grant film instead? Looking back, I certainly COULD have included this one with the other McCarthy films - or perhaps it hadn't started airing on premium cable yet, now I'm not sure. I think it had more to do with the count, though, and getting to start horror movies square on October 1. Sure, this film could have gone THERE instead of HERE, but then my counts would have been off - it would have meant an extra film in September, and so it got moved here into November, where there was much more room. Capice?)
But damn, December 20 seems like a long ways off, and no movies until then? That's going to be rough. You might think that watching 295 films in 311 days is the tougher part, nah, that's quite easy. For me, 42 days WITHOUT watching a new movie is incredibly difficult. And trying not to let my list get any longer during the break, that's even harder. We'll see how THAT goes. I've got my ticket for opening day of "Star Wars" (a tradition for me on all "Star Wars" films going back to "The Empire Strikes Back") and from there, it will be just four more films to close out 2019. After tonight, it's back to work compiling that list of actors' multiple appearances for the year, so I'll have it for my annual round-up.
THE PLOT: When Lee Israel falls out of step with current tastes, she turns her art form to deception.
AFTER: Eh, I'm not sure about this one, I can't really say I felt sympathetic to the main character in the way that the film clearly WANTED me to. I give props to Melissa McCarthy to trying to stretch herself and do something outside of the inoffensive slapstick comedy of films like "The Boss" and "Life of the Party", and I think she's come a long way from films like "The Heat" and "Identity Thief", but something's just not quite right here. Maybe it's the character, Lee Israel, somebody who apparently was well-known for writing celebrity biographies, but ended up passing off fake autographed letters when she couldn't cut it as an author any more.
Here's the thing, it's possible to get too comfortable as yourself, to get set in your ways and essentially stuck in your career, not moving forward but just basically treading water. Look, just trust me on this, OK? When that happens to you, you've got two choices - either keep treading water for as long as you can, because at least you're not drowning, or get out of the pool, find another job, find another reason for getting up in the morning. OK, if you want to play armchair analyst then maybe I'm seeing a bit of myself in the character, because I've been at one of my jobs for over 25 years - but at some point I'd like to think I got sort of GOOD at it, and in the end, who's to say how long anybody should stay at a job? I'm still getting PAID, right? Not much, like I'll never get rich, but I'm still meeting my monthly expenses most of the time, and I get to take an exhausting vacation every now and again. And I've achieved a certain level of respect, or at least recognition, for hanging in for so long - plus whenever I do travel or socialize with others, chances are there will be someone there who knows my boss's name, and I can humblebrag just a bit. So it's not a fantastic life, but it's the one I've built for myself.
But if something changed, like the whole animation industry fell out of favor or became unprofitable, or my boss died or I suddenly forgot how to do payroll or book airline tickets, then I'd HAVE to move on, right? I can't really say where I'd go or what line of work I'd fall back on, but there's got to be something, right? I can type very fast, maybe I could caption the news in real time for the hearing-impaired. Or I could go work at Marvel Comics or the Daily News and fix spelling and grammar mistakes all day long. I've got tenuous connections at Disney or a couple networks where friends or ex-co-workers are now, maybe I could check around and see what's available. I don't necessarily feel like I've worn out my welcome at my current jobs, though, so I'm likely to hang tough for as long as I can. But still, I don't quite understand why Lee Israel stayed for so long in an industry that didn't seem to want her in it.
You lose a job, get a new job. You lose a pet, get a new pet. Yeah, the cat thing in this film hit a little too close to home, since our oldest cat took a turn while we were on vacation, he spent the last half of that week at the vet's. He's back home now, and functioning, but we just don't know for how long. We had plans to take in the stray cat from our front porch before the weather got cold, so we went ahead and did that, because we figured by now we'd be replacing the older cat - so now we have three, because he's still hanging on. Yes, it will be sad when he goes, but as a friend reminded me, he was a former stray, so we vastly improved his life by housing and feeding him for 15 years - chances are on the streets he wouldn't have lasted so long. That's how you have to look at these life changes, focus on the positive, and not get all bogged down in entropy and depression and the endings of things - otherwise they'll drag your spirit down with them.
But even if life sends a couple of shitburgers to eat, that's still no justification for forging letters from famous people like Dorothy Parker and Noel Coward. I don't care if you can write in their voice or not, typing out a couple of witty letters, forging a signature and then selling the result for top dollar is just NOT O.K., O.K.? I also have some experience with autograph collecting, my focus of course is actors from the "Star Wars" franchise, and by going out to so many San Diego cons, I've amassed a nice little collection, about 114 and counting. Many times I've met the actors in person, like Kenny Baker, Carrie Fisher, Peter Mayhew and Mark Hamill, even Jake Lloyd, Daniel Logan, Ray Park and Richard LeParmentier (yep, look him up...) In the later years I fell back on trusted autograph web-sites so I could build the collection faster - and simply EVERYBODY knows that an autograph is just no good without a COA, certificate of authenticity. Lately they've added holograms and digital tracking, but for years, it was all about the COA, I wouldn't dream of spending money on a signed 8x10 unless I knew I was getting one. (I even bugged Carrie Fisher for the COA, even after she signed her photo and then posed for a pic with me, cheek to cheek.)
Of course, as this movie points out, the COA's can be forged too - they're only as reliable as the company that makes them, so in the end, it all comes down to trust. How well do you trust this company on-line that's selling James Earl Jones' signed photo, or LeBron James' signed basketball, or Alex Rodriguez' autographed baseball card? Every few years there's an exposé on how corrupt the collectibles market is, and how 80% or so of everything on the market is not legit. So I know with the large autograph collection I have, there's a chance that there's little resale value there, but I don't care that much, having the collection brings me a measure of joy, and I'm not really in a position to haggle over what's real and what isn't. So I guess I take it very personally that someone was out there in the 1980's passing off phony letters from famous authors for years, and nobody called her out on it, not for a long time, anyway.
Why couldn't she put that level of creativity, the kind it takes to crack a joke in Noel Coward's or Dorothy Parker's voice, into some sort of work of her own? Why couldn't she BE the next Dorothy Parker, if she could at least pretend to write like her? There's doing and there's faking, and this person spent so much time getting good at faking that it seems she forgot about the doing. Oh, wait, later she wrote a book about her years working as a professional forger, and that book is what this film is based on. But, that's CHEATING, creating a story about the bad stuff you did when you couldn't create a story - it seems worse than making a movie about a writer with writer's block and what they do when they can't write. Plus, isn't there some law that says that people can't profit from their crimes? So how could she write a book about her forgeries and get a check for that?
But, essentially, this is also a film about how we humans form relationships with friends, co-workers, and/or romantic partners, and then often a few months or years later, we often act in ways that are counter-productive and then put barriers up between each other, or act in ways that drive the others away. It's a form of self-sabotage, and we're all capable of it if we're not cognizant of it. Neither Lee or her partner-in-crime Jack have many (or any) friends, and Lee makes reference to a female romantic partner in her past, while Jack seems to prefer the free-wheeling lifestyle of the gay scene - so free-wheeling that it's a bit unclear if he even has an apartment of his own at all.
But with two lead characters who happen to be gay, and are either incapable of or unwilling to be in long-term relationships, what message does that send out? It's almost like the film is suggesting that gay people aren't cut out to be in long-term relationships, and as a point of order, that was something of a stereotype back THEN, which of course has been proven wrong, many many times over, as of NOW. So I guess back in the late 80's or early 90's it was a prevailing myth, but that didn't make it true, and after reverting to that old tired trope, I'm surprised that there wasn't some kind of backlash from the gay community over the way relationships are portrayed here. This story is essentially a tragedy, partly because all relationships within are portrayed as doomed to fail.
But it's also a tragedy because it shows that in life people make mistakes, or have a run of bad luck, or miss opportunities to improve their situations, and then find themselves chasing a couple of broken dreams, wondering when it was exactly that they missed the move that they should have made. But even if all that is the case, committing crimes to get ahead should still never be the solution to one's problems, and any film that even half-glorifies commiting fraud as an option is questionable at best. As seen here, that can tend to make a bad situation even worse, leaving someone with the only goal in life left to get through it, even though we know deep down that nobody ever gets out alive.
And on that cheery note, I'm on break for the next month. Please meet me back here after December 20 for whatever my take on "Star Wars: Episode IX" turns out to be.
Also starring Melissa McCarthy (last seen in "Central Intelligence"), Dolly Wells (last seen in "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies"), Jane Curtin (last seen in "Love, Gilda"), Ben Falcone (last seen in "The Boss"), Anna Deavere Smith (last seen in "The Human Stain"), Stephen Spinella (last seen in "Cradle Will Rock"), Gregory Korostishevsky (last seen in "2 Days in New York"), Christian Navarro, Erik LaRay Harvey (last seen in "Rounders"), Brandon Scott Jones (last seen in "Don't Think Twice"), Shae D'Lyn (last seen in "Café Society"), Marc Evan Jackson (last seen in "Jumaji: Welcome to the Jungle"), Kevin Carolan, Michael Cyril Creighton (last seen in "Game Night"), Joanna P. Adler, Mary McCann (last seen in "Little Children"), Tim Cummings, Rosal Colon, Ethel Fisher, Michael Laurence, Justin Vivian Bond and archive footage of Bette Davis.
RATING: 4 out of 10 fax machines (kids, ask your parents...)
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