Battle of the Sexes

Year 11, Day 26 - 1/26/19 - Movie #3,126

BEFORE: It's the start of Steve Carell Weekend, but I've also got a little running theme going with biopics, fictionalized versions of real-life events.  (They're like documentaries, only with actors!). A couple days ago it was a movie about the founding of the National Lampoon magazine, which I saw in documentary form first, and tonight it's a ground-breaking tennis match, where a man played a woman to determine which gender could play better.  Really, they had "mixed doubles" in tennis for a long time, which is one man and one woman on each side of the court, so really, this was just the first professional "mixed singles" match, right?  Why was it such a big deal, then?  But of course this was also the subject of a documentary first, since it was such a turning point in sports and gender equality.  Umm, right?

Before I get to some Oscar contenders for 2018, let me finally cross off this one from 2017.  Fred Armisen carries over from "Game Over, Man!".  I don't recall seeing him in that film, I must have blinked, but according to two sources, he was in there somewhere.

THE PLOT: The true story of the 1973 tennis match between number one women's tennis player Billie Jean King and ex-champ and serial hustler Bobby Riggs.

AFTER: Ah, we're going to have some difficult conversations tonight - this is one of those films that can't help but spark debate, over everything from gender equality to LGBTQ rights to discussing which male celebrity from the 1970's was the biggest chauvinist.  Bobby Riggs is an obvious choice, of course, someone who not only delighting in saying shocking statements about how superior men are, but seemed to REVEL in it.  And it was a different time, because today if a man says anything even approaching "Men are better because..." they'll find themselves ostracized and banned from Twitter.

I've found, as a rule that generalizations are always to be avoided.  "All men are stronger than all women" can easily be disproven by comparing the strongest woman to the weakest man.  "All white people are this..." and "all black people are that..." should set off red flags right away, as should "All lesbians don't shave their legs" or "All gay men talk like this."  Really, the PC police should have beaten all of this stuff out of our minds by now, due to repetition alone.  All generalizations are bad, umm, except this one itself.

Still, we have to remember that it wasn't that long ago where such generalizations were commonplace, and if enough people said, "Black people can't swim" or "White people can't run as fast as black people" or "Women aren't as strong as men" then it sort of became a generally accepted factoid.  And most people tended to not speak out against it, or try to disprove it - so as a result, women got less prize money for winning sporting events, like TEN TIMES less, and protesting only resulted in dismissal, or getting oneself banned from winning any prize at all.  Women tennis players took a stand in the 1970's, which was a step toward gender equality in pay, but while there are some sports that seemed to have gotten the memo, the main sporting leagues today are still far from integrated.  We've got a WNBA now, which is great, and tennis and golf and the Olympics seem to be fair where gender is concerned, but what about baseball?  (You mean the film "A League of Their Own" didn't fix everything?).  I remember there was a women's baseball TEAM a few years back, the Silver Bullets, that would travel around and play exhibition games against men, but where's the WMLB?  Where's the WNHL?  (I don't expect there to be a WNFL, because I think women are smart enough to not want to play football and get concussed.)

Running concurrently with the gender equality story here is Billie Jean King's personal story of coming out, having a relationship with a woman while still married to a man.  And of course I have no right to say "Oh, that's not how it went down..." because I wasn't there, but I might still have issues with how they tied her personal journey to her sports performance, because at the end of the day I think those are two separate issues, linked together only by her own self-confidence.  I've lived in that space myself, since my first wife came out while we were still married, so perhaps I'm not the best judge of a similar story, I'm too close to the issue and I can't necessarily separate the movie story from my own experience.  Because of course I'm going to empathize with Billie Jean's husband here, Larry King (not that one, another Larry King).  At the same time that people tend to champion people who come out of the closet, very little emphasis tends to be put on the hardship of the spouses who get left behind.  Who speaks for their rights and their feelings, while we celebrate another person's sexual awakening?

My take on the topic seen here is that Larry figures out his wife's sexual orientation just a bit too quickly, and processes it even faster - now, this could be because the movie needed to condense a long period of development and realization into just a few short incidents, given a limited time.  Or it could be because it took me so long to figure out my wife's deal, and even longer for me to properly deal with it, so I could be projecting.  (Either way, I know the stress dreams that resulted from my first marriage are now due to return...).  Seriously, Larry finds ONE bra he doesn't recognize in Billie Jean's room, and suddenly he knows exactly what's been going on?  This (and bumping into Marilyn in the hotel elevator) is very easily explained, because the new women's tennis association was just starting out, funds were tight, and the women probably needed to double up and share hotel rooms, anyway.  Why didn't she try, "Hey, Larry, what a surprise, this is my roommate, Marilyn..."?  A perfectly reasonable explanation, even on the fly.

But again, I wasn't there, so it's not for me to say.  My point is that we'll never have sexual equality while one type of relationship is portrayed as "better" because it's trendier, freer, newer and the other type is portrayed as staler, more rigid and somehow inferior, just because it's been acceptable for a longer period of time.  And if it was wrong of Larry to tell Marilyn that Billie Jean's fling with her was "just a phase", then it's just as wrong to treat hetero relationships as if they're somehow out of step with the times.  In a truly equal world, neither one would be considered better or more right than the other.  By showing King's performance on the court suffering when her husband was around, and then getting better after her girlfriend shows up, this film definitely displayed a bias for one over the other.

Bear in mind, a few years after the match with Bobby Riggs, Billie Jean was sued by her girlfriend Marilyn Bennett in a palimony suit.  So eventually there was trouble in paradise, and not every single gay relationship works out for the best.  Clearly Billie Jean's coming out was not the perfect solution to everything, so there's no reason why it should be portrayed as such.  A few years back, when gay marriage became the law of the land in the U.S., people were celebrating far and wide, but with gay marriage comes gay divorce - you have to learn to take the bad with the good, and there are no easy answers, and winning a battle is not the same as winning the war.

But I think the film did a very good job of re-creating the 1970's, right down to the horrible fashions and the terrible TV graphics.  Interesting special effects involve getting a modern day actress to appear to be standing next to Howard Cosell in archive footage, and the whole time, his hand is creepily on her right shoulder, and he's literally talking down to her and hovering over her.  Ugh, is it possible to be grossed out by 40-year old footage of a sports reporter?

I didn't know that this was the second "mixed singles" match that Bobby Riggs played, so I learned today about the first match against Margaret Court, which he won, and the fact that this raised the financial stakes for the match against Billie Jean King.  I didn't know Riggs was such a degenerate gambler, either, but that tracks.  But there again is the suggestion that Riggs couldn't possibly become a good husband in some way until a woman humbled him on the court, and I'm not sure how I feel about that.

NITPICK POINT: They really didn't give poor Eric Christian Olsen anything to do here.  He played Bobby Riggs' coach, only we never saw him coaching, or doing anything but sitting down and just watching the match.  That seems like a real missed opportunity.

Also starring Emma Stone (last seen in "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping"), Steve Carell (last heard in "Despicable Me 3"), Andrea Riseborough (last seen in "Nocturnal Animals"), Sarah Silverman (last seen in "The Book of Henry"), Bill Pullman (last seen in "Independence Day: Resurgence"), Alan Cumming (last heard in "Strange Magic"), Elisabeth Shue (last seen in "Hamlet 2"), Austin Stowell (last seen in "12 Strong"), Natalie Morales (last seen in "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps"), Jessica McNamee, Lewis Pullman, Martha MacIsaac, Mickey Sumner, Bridey Elliott, Eric Christian Olsen (last seen in "Eagle Eye"), Wallace Langham (last seen in "War Dogs"), Matt Malloy (last seen in "The Stepford Wives"), James MacKay, Lauren Kline, Ashley Weinhold, Fidan Manashirova, Kaitlyn Christian, Nancy Lehehan, Michael Chieffo, Bob Stephenson (last seen in "A Futile and Stupid Gesture"), Nelson Franklin (ditto), with cameos from Mark Harelik (last seen in "Trumbo"), Dan Bakkedahl (ditto), Jamey Sheridan (last seen in "Sully"), Tom Kenny (last seen in "Comic Book: The Movie"), Chris Parnell (last seen in "The Ridiculous 6"), John C. McGinley (last seen in "Sweet Liberty"), and archive footage of Lloyd Bridges (last seen in "The Talk of the Town"), Howard Cosell, Chris Evert, Pancho Gonzalez, Ricardo Montalban (last seen in "The Train Robbers"), and Rosey Grier.

RATING: 6 out of 10 packs of Virginia Slims

Game Over, Man!

Year 11, Day 25 - 1/25/19 - Movie #3,125

BEFORE: Finally making some progress on getting my Netflix list down to a manageable size, this makes three nights in a row streaming, but after this I'm going to switch over to Academy screeners so that Steve Carell can get me close to the end of January.

Joel McHale carries over from "Adult Beginners" to play (you'll never believe this...) Joel McHale in today's film.  Seems like a bunch of cameos in this one, with stars playing themselves - not much of a stretch.

THE PLOT: Three friends are on the verge of getting their video game financed when their benefactor is taken hostage by terrorists. 

AFTER: Sometimes it really is all about tone, like it's hard to tell if you agree with how spoof-y a spoof should be.  This sort of came up after watching "A Futile and Stupid Gesture", the difference between a film like "Airplane", which just can't be taken seriously at all, and "Caddyshack", which only gets about halfway to total parody, so it still functions as a coherent story, provided you buy into it and believe in it. (puppet gopher aside, obviously)  So I guess that consitutes a farce, rather than a spoof?  In the same vein, this can't really be a spoof of "Die Hard", because there just aren't any one-to-one comparisons to be made, like there's no direct John McClain or Hans Gruber analogs, so therefore this can only be a farce based on the ideas suggested by films like "Die Hard", you follow?

I never watched the show "Workaholics", which is good because as a result I don't have any pre-conceived notions about these three actors and the characters they play, but it's also bad because I'm not used to their unique brand of humor, and I found it hard to get into their groove.  I mean, sure, nothing here can really be taken seriously either, but there was just way too much "bro"-ing around among these guys and hardly any focus on the tasks at hand.  Really, terrorists have taken over the building you're in and you're going to take THIS exact moment to hash out long-standing arguments based on your personality quirks?  When the crap hits the fan and people are called upon to do extraordinary things, or people face incredible danger and must find a way to survive, those are the things that really should get tabled for later discussion. 

It's so obvious that when these guys pitch their idea for "Skintendo Joysuit", a wearable video-game controller that as a by-product allows a remote user to move the wearer around, that this is going to be very important before the end of the film.  It's, like, super-telegraphed, because why else would these characters talk about it every few minutes?

There's so much obvious humor here, from the gay jokes to the poop jokes and the jokes where people's heads and other things explode, and most of that feels like it's pandering to the absolute lowest common denominator, and that's a real shame.  There could have been a funny comedy buried under all this nastiness, and not just a gross one.  I don't find exploding cute animals to be funny, and I don't think anyone else should, either.  For shame.  Find another way.  Same goes for jokes about having sex with animals, even dead animals.  Aim higher.

A surprising amount of male frontal nudity, too.  Don't say I didn't warn you.

Also starring Adam DeVine (last seen in "Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates"), Anders Holm (last seen in "How to Be Single"), Blake Anderson (last seen in "Neighbors"), Utkarsh Ambudkar (last seen in "Pitch Perfect"), Aya Cash (last seen in "The Wolf of Wall Street"), Daniel Stern (last seen in "Whip It"), Neal McDonough (last seen in "Paul Blart; Mall Cop 2"), Jamie Demetriou, Rhona Mitra (last seen in "The Life of David Gale"), Sam Richardson (last seen in "Office Christmas Party"), Steve Howey, Mac Brandt, Geno Segers, Roe Hartrampf, Andrew Santino, with cameos from Shaggy, Sugar Lyn Beard, Jere Burns, Fred Armisen (last seen in "Zoolander 2"), Steve-O, Donald Faison (last seen in "Wish I Was Here"), Action Bronson, Chris Pontius, Mark Cuban, Jillian Bell (last seen in "Rough Night"), Chloe Bridges, King Bach. 

RATING: 4 out of 10 used condoms

Adult Beginners

Year 11, Day 24 - 1/24/19 - Movie #3,124

BEFORE: All right, let's talk about the Oscars.  It's a rare moment when I've seen one of the nominated films BEFORE the nominations are announced, but that's the case with "Black Panther".  Congratulations to all of the nominees, but special congrats to the first superhero movie with an Oscar nomination for Best Picture!  That's big news for the whole genre, and I think I may sneak out tonight to see "Aquaman" to celebrate.  (Review will be put on hold until I can link to it, which I suspect will be in early March, right before "Captain Marvel", which it links to.)

Between now and the Oscar ceremony, I've got some time, and access to screeners - but the big problem is that I always turn February over to films about love and romance, so there's really not as much time as I think.  I can definitely get to "Vice" in a few days, that's always been part of the plan.  But except for the Animated Feature category, where I've seen two nominees ("Incredibles 2" and "Isle of Dogs") and the Visual Effects category where I've seen THREE ("Avengers: Infinity War", "Ready Player One" and "Solo: A Star Wars Story") I'm afraid the rest will have to wait.  I'd love to see "Bohemian Rhapsody", "A Star Is Born" and even "BlacKkKlansman", but they're not easily scheduled at this point in time, I've got too much else to try to get to.

Today, Joel McHale carries over from "A Futile and Stupid Gesture" - and I've also started watching his new clip-show on Netflix.  Since it's already been cancelled, it could disappear from the service at any time - so now I see the evil genius in their plans, people are FORCED to binge watch shows and movies there, because they could vanish at any moment.  It's damn near diabolical.

THE PLOT: A young, narcissistic entrepreneur crashes and burns on the eve of his company's big launch.  With his entire life in total disarray, he leaves Manhattan to move in with his estranged pregnant sister, brother-in-law and nephew in the suburbs.

AFTER: I almost put this film in the romance chain, because I've got two Rose Byrne films there together, and this could have just slipped on in between them.  But then I noticed it also provided me a link to get from "A Futile and Stupid Gesture" to where I need to be on February 1, so though it could have probably worked in either spot, it seemed to fit better here.  I'm never 100% sure about this sort of thing, but at the end of the day, whatever happens, that's what happens.

The title comes from the name of an adult swimming class, because two of the main characters are adults who never learned to swim, and I never did either, so I feel their inadequacy.  I dreaded the week during high school where "everybody" had to get in the pool for gym class, and I'd have to get a note from my doctor saying I had a crippling fear of going in the water, which wasn't exactly true.  However, I did have a crippling fear about drowning, and even worse, drowning right in front of my classmates, with the shame carrying over into the afterlife.  So I had to sit out a week of P.E. every year, I've endured worse.  Here's a tip, teens, your gym teacher has no power over you, and simply can't make you do anything you don't want to do.  So you get a "C" in gym class, and you'll never be valedictorian that way, but it's more important for you in the long run that you stood up for yourself.

But that's a life lesson, and if you don't learn how to swim when you're a teen then you at least have to learn a way around (or over, or under, or somehow through) that little problem.  When I became an adult, I didn't let my fear of the ocean (or drowning, or sharks, or appearing in a swimsuit in public) stop me from going on some very enjoyable cruises.  I just told myself that if the ship goes down, and I can't make it to a lifeboat, well, then, I'm dead and there will be no more discussion about it, so now let's go and have a good time with whatever time I have left.

But this is really a film about failing at adulting, only never giving up and always striving to be better, which is another important life lesson.  The main character, Jake, is a tech guy whose company is creating a product called "Minds I" which looks a heck of a lot like Google Glass.  But the manufacturer has an unexpected problem making one of the parts, and so the whole company goes belly-up, taking many investors' money with it.  In the real non-movie world, there probably would have been some safeguard in place so this wouldn't happen, but it's necessary here to drive the plot.  Still, it leads to the obvious question, "Whatever happened to Google Glass?  Wasn't it supposed to be the Next Big Thing, back a few Next Big Things ago?"  Was it just a terrible idea, or did it fail to function as it was supposed to?  Let me check - ah, it seems there were a host of ethical, privacy and security concerns over the product.  Duly noted.

With his career ruined and his reputation destroyed, he drops in on, and then moves in with, his sister Justine - and she's not adulting much better, trying to balance raising a three-year-old with her job as a guidance counselor, and since she's pregnant again, she's always ducking out of meetings saying that she's got a doctor's appointment, but instead she ends up watching "The Vow" in her car in the parking lot just to feel all emotional over something.  And her husband is doing contracting work, but might also possibly be stepping out with his attractive female business partner, who's a real-estate agent.  And then there's their son, who's three years old and just learning how to be difficult and stand up to his parents.  They're so non-cute at that age, right?

Jake learns to function as a sort of nanny (or "manny") for his nephew, while Justine tries to find the motivation to get some work done, and Danny smokes a lot of pot, while trying to break free from his affair and get back to focusing on his wife again.  Meanwhile Jake and Justine have to finally deal with their emotions concerning their mother's death years ago.  Their father certainly seems to have moved on, because he's re-married and living elsewhere, while Justine's still living in the house they grew up in.  Can these three people also share a house and propel

Also starring Nick Kroll (last seen in "The House") Rose Byrne (last seen in "Peter Rabbit"), Bobby Cannavale (last seen in "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle"), Paula Garces (last seen in "Dangerous Minds"), Jane Krakowski (last seen in "The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas"), Jason Mantzoukas (last seen in "The Disaster Artist"), Bobby Moynihan (last seen in "The Book of Henry"), Josh Charles (last seen in "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot"), Neil Casey (also carrying over from "A Futile and Stupid Gesture), Mike Birbiglia (last seen in "Popstar; Never Stop Never Stopping"), Julie White (last seen in "Lincoln"), Jeffrey DeMunn, Celia Weston (last seen in "Happy Tears"), Caitlin Fitzgerald, Caleb Paddock, Matthew Paddock and the voice of Fred Melamed (last heard in "Passengers").

RATING: 4 out of 10 sonograms

A Futile and Stupid Gesture

Year 11, Day 23 - 1/23/19 - Movie #3,123

BEFORE: You might recall that I tried to watch this film last year, right after the rock/pop documentary chain, which happened to end with a Rush documentary narrated by Paul Rudd, and that got me neatly back to fiction films starring Mr. Rudd, and according to Wikipedia, he's got a cameo in this film, as a photo in the magazine's high-school yearbook parody.  OK, a couple of problems with that - it's just a photo, not any kind of footage, not even archive footage.  Secondly, according to the IMDB, Paul Rudd is NOT in this movie, and that's another actor playing "The Nobody" (Larry Kroger), in the mock yearbook.  And even if that WERE Paul Rudd, and I'm not saying it is, it's barely recognizable on screen - so how can I count that as a proper Paul Rudd appearance?  

I did the only honest thing I could do, and removed this film from the Paul Rudd Chain - I easily found not one but TWO films on Netflix to take its place, "Mute" and "The Fundamentals of Caring".  Then I mentally rescheduled this film for a later date, and I made sure that my January chain from "Game Night" to Feb. 1's film would include this, because I really really want to see it, and how often does THAT even happen?  

So here it is, rescheduled from last September, and thankfully it stayed on Netflix long enough for me to re-program it. Domhnall Gleeson carries over from "Frank", which works out pretty well because both films are probably about the creative process, how art (music or comedy) is connected to genius but also to madness.  And Gleeson's got a major role in this film, not just a yearbook photo, so it all worked out for the best. And with such a large cast of actors, it makes perfect sense to follow a different actor to forge a new path away from this film. 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "National Lampoon: Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead" (Movie #2,279)

THE PLOT: In the 1970's and '80s, National Lampoon's success and influence creates a new media empire overseen in part by the brilliant and troubled Douglas Kenney. 

AFTER: Hey, the Oscar nominations are out, but I'll talk more about them tomorrow.  It's also time once again for the Sundance Film Festival, so I should probably take a look at what's playing there, because I'll probably be adding a lot of them to my Netflix queue in a few months.  Tonight's film premiered at the Sundance Festival in 2018, almost exactly one year ago (damn, I'm one day off.). 

Eventually every documentary ever will be re-made as an acted fiction film, because who even watches docs any more, besides me?  That's a little too close to learning.  Hell, I only even watch the fun ones, about rock music and geek stuff.  I've got a bunch on my list about politics, children's TV stars like Fred Rogers and Big Bird, and comedians like Robin Williams and Joan Rivers that I'm looking forward to, the rest of them I keep putting off, using the fact that they don't link to each other as a lame excuse.  

So if you have seen the documentary "Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead", the bad news is that this basically tells the same story, only with actors instead of interviews with the people who were there.  If you have NOT seen the documentary, then you need to know that National Lampoon was a magazine that came along in the 1970's during a very dark time in American history - like, the U.S. was still involved in a war in Asia that had dragged on for far too long, and there was a President in the White House who was generally hated by young people and was known for rigging elections and blatantly lying to the American people.  Wait a second...

But my point is, America needed to laugh at the time - we're seeing the same sort of thing going on now these last two years, with Trump in charge the country is literally falling apart, but it's been a gold mine for comedy writers.  Every late night talk show that's made fun of the President is doing well, so if we're going to hell in a bucket, at least (on some level) we're enjoying the ride.  But the Lampoon had a real target market in mind, to occupy the vast space somewhere in-between MAD Magazine and the New Yorker.  Humor that was sick, irreverent and aimed squarely at the college crowd.  It only took a few issues (and a cover photo threatening to shoot a dog if people didn't buy the magazine) to get the word out.  Oh, and lawsuits from the offending parties helped get more eyeballs on the magazine, too.  National Lampoon was to the New Yorker sort of what Hustler was to Playboy.  

But this maybe also signified the point in time where the geeks started to inherit the earth. A couple of Harvard grads with minds for parody, Doug Kenney and Henry Beard, took the Harvard Lampoon into a national magazine, and then surrounded themselves with the sharpest, funniest, darkest New York satirists they could find, and started shocking people and breaking down conventions.  They allowed their writers to speak their minds through their humor, and say things most people wouldn't say in mixed company.  You know, kind of like Twitter today, only on paper.  But bear in mind that there were probably hundreds of writers in and out of this little dysfunctional family, and this movie is openly apologetic over only being able to focus on four or five of them.

There's also the narrative device of using the older version of a man who died young as the narrator of the story.  I spotted this right off, because I'd seen the documentary about National Lampoon, and I knew Doug Kenney died in his 30's, after being the guy in the "Animal House" movie that made people sit up and ask, "Who the hell is THAT guy, and why does he look and act so weird?"  (For the record, he's the Delta House frat brother who only has one line in the movie, and in the end parade/riot, he's the one that leads the marching band into that blind alley.)  But then here he is, being interviewed at the start of the film, only he's old, and Kenney never got old.  So it's what somebody THINKS that Kenney might say, if he'd lived, like not claiming to be the guy who changed comedy in the 1970's.  And who's asking him interviewquestions, God?  St. Peter?  

It's clear from some of the scenes here, however, what did change comedy in the 1970's - cocaine.  It changed all of Hollywood, really, but it enabled comedy writers to work harder, tell jokes faster, and stay up all night partying and/or writing jokes. Maybe sometimes a combination of the two.  But the other side of that is what drugs took from us in return, since it quickened the loss of John Belushi, Chris Farley, Mitch Hedberg and many others.  You know that show "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee"?  Well in the 1970's and 80's they were all out in cars getting something a little stronger.  

Doug Kenney was some kind of addict, sure, but he also had the extra pressure of never feeling good enough to please his parents, since he couldn't live up to the memory of his older brother who died young.  Toss in the added pressures of running a magazine and trying (in vain, it seems) to be faithful to his wife, and that was sort of a recipe for disaster.  Kenney went walk-about for several months, got clean and started to write the "great American novel", and the film uses one of those Hollywood tropes where you see a guy with a typewriter in a beautiful tropical setting, pounding away at the keys, free from writer's block and all the conventions of society that have been holding him back.  Only here there's a surprise twist, he comes back to New York with the manuscript, lets his best friend read it, then realizes it's terrible and throws it away.  I must admit I've never seen that in a film before.  

The casting here ranges from terrible to awesome - it's bad when the actor cast in a part looks nothing like the famous person they're playing, like John Belushi or Rodney Dangerfield. OK, I realize Rodney was unique, you're never going to find someone all bug-eyed like he was, but how hard did they TRY?  Instead they got a sound-alike and mostly filmed him from very far away so nobody could tell.  The there's the OK casting (Joel McHale as Chevy Chase, Seth Green as a young Christopher Guest) and the really inspired - Jon Daly as Bill Murray, Lonny Ross as Ivan Reitman, Ed Helms as talk-show host Tom Snyder and Thomas Lennon as (seriously, a pitch-perfect) Michael O'Donoghue.  And sometimes, like with Paul Scheer playing Paul Schaffer, you wonder if the process was just alphabetical or something.  Then there's a bunch of other cameos that will please fans of "Animal House", like seeing Martha Smith as "Babs", the Universal Studio Tour Guide, or the actor who played Neidermeyer as a publisher rejecting the idea for the National Lampoon magazine, probably his biggest role since that Twisted Sister video back in the late 1980's.  

Maybe Doug Kenney really got upset when he saw the movie "Airplane", but probably that was either petty jealousy, or else to me that's a NITPICK POINT, because that film was a spoof, and Kenney, who co-wrote "Animal House" and "Caddyshack", didn't really make that kind of film.  Both are straight comedies, not genre spoofs like "Airplane" was.  They just don't occupy the same space.  That being said, "Caddyshack" didn't really find its audience at first, it took years (and the advent of cable and home video) before it became a cult classic.  The critics at the time pointed out that there are really four different storylines going on, and they don't seem to have much to do with each other, Bill Murray's going in THIS direction, and Michael O'Keefe's story is going in THAT direction, but really, it does all come together in the end, so who cares?  Just imagine, if the first cut was four hours long, how terrible the movie could have been.  It's amazing that they got any sort of coherent storyline out of that film, one suspects maybe they saved the film in the editing room.  

And it's true that Lorne Michaels got most of the cast and the writing staff for the first season of "Saturday Night Live" from the National Lampoon's Radio Hour.  But to be fair, NBC offered the timeslot first to the publisher of the Lampoon, who turned it down.  So Doug Kenney could have been even more famous if he'd gone along for the ride, and in some alternate universe, "SNL" stands for "Saturday National Lampoon", or something like that.  But hey, no worries, it's not like that little sketch comedy show blew up and lasted for four decades (and counting) or anything like that. 

Also starring Will Forte (last seen in "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping"), Martin Mull (last seen in "Tim's Vermeer"), Neil Casey (last seen in "Ghostbusters" (2016)), Jon Daly (last seen in "Masterminds"), Nelson Franklin (last seen in "Jobs"), John Gemberling, Rick Glassman, Seth Green (last seen in "Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope"), Max Greenfield (last heard in "Ice Age: Collision Course"), Harry Groener (last seen in "Amistad"), Camille Guaty, Ed Helms (last seen in "Vacation"), Thomas Lennon (last seen in "Le Divorce"), Joe Lo Truglio (last seen in "Pitch Perfect 2"), Matt Lucas (last seen in "Alice Through the Looking Glass"), Natasha Lyonne (last seen in "Yoga Hosers"), Joel McHale (last seen in "A Merry Friggin' Christmas"), Annette O'Toole (last seen in "Superman III"), Emmy Rossum (last seen in "Poseidon"), Jackie Tohn, Matt Walsh (last seen in "Office Christmas Party"), Finn Wittrock (last seen in "La La Land"), Elvy Yost, Erv Dahl, Mitchell Hurwitz, Lindsey Kraft, Andrew Gray McDonnell, Brad Morris, Lonny Ross, Michael Sherman, Steven Sims, Martha Smith, Armen Weitzman, with cameos from Rick Overton (last seen in "EdTV"), Mark Metcalf (last seen in "Julia"), David Krumholtz (last seen in "I Saw the Light"), Kerri Kenney-Silver (last seen in "Downsizing"), Bob Stephenson, Chris Redd (also last seen in "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping"), Brian Huskey (last seen in "The Disaster Artist"), Paul Scheer (ditto), Rich Sommer (last seen in "The Devil Wears Prada"), Carla Gallo (last seen in "Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising"), the voice of David Wain, and archive footage of Leslie Nielsen, Robert Hays.

RATING: 7 out of 10 bags of "energy powder"

Frank

Year 11, Day 22 - 1/22/19 - Movie #3,122

BEFORE: Michael Fassbender carries over from "The Snowman" to something a little more upbeat, I hope.  This is a film that I had on my Netflix list for a while, just for the curiosity factor alone, but it scrolled off of Netflix before I could get to it.  So, iTunes is once again functioning as a catch-all, it's going to cost me $3.99 but I think I can take that hit, as long as this doesn't happen too often.  I'll be on Netflix for the next three nights and then on Academy screeners for a few nights, so right now whatever gets me to February 1 has got to happen.

After February, I'm good until about March 12 or 13, when I plan to review "Captain Marvel", but then I have to figure out how I'm going to get from there to "Avengers: Endgame".  One links to the other, but I'd rather not sit on the "Captain Marvel" review for over a month, because if it's this year's "Black Panther", then everyone could be talking about it.

I thought maybe I could link a bunch of documentaries together to fill the gap, but that's not easy because as I learned last year, and the year before that, the IMDB cast lists for documentaries are notoriously unreliable, especially when it comes to archive footage appearances.  But I tried to assemble the docs on my list into some kind of coherent chain, which only works for about half of them, and then I noticed that a comedian in one of them is in another film with Jake Gyllenhaal, who was just announced as a villain in the upcoming Spider-Man film.  So it might make sense to riff off of that, and start the documentary chain in July to either lead into "Spider-Man: Far From Home", or to follow after it, I haven't decided.  Whichever gives me the best options, I guess.

This linking thing gets tricky when some films have very few cast members - tonight's film only has about six major roles - and others have a lot.  Tomorrow's film is something of a tentpole film because it has nearly 50 credited actors of note, and from there I could go just about anywhere.  In fact it seems like a shame to just focus on two of them, and let about 16 potential linking possibilities go to waste.  But what can I do?  I can only precede a film with one other film, and I can only follow a film with one other film.  And I'm compelled to keep doing that for as long as I can, with "Avengers: Endgame" as my next destination film, with about 22 possible actors that I can link to.

So in the near future, I'll need a chain of about 33 to 36 films to get me from March 23 to April 26, between two films with a lot of actors.  Mathematically I know there must be thousands of possible chains, so really, it's just a matter of me stumbling on one that I like, but also leaves me plenty of linking opportunities for the rest of the year.  I can't even calculate it now, because in a month I could have 20 or 30 new films on my list, and that means more possibilities that I don't have now.  Plus right now it seems like a daunting, maddening task.

THE PLOT: Jon, a young wanna-be musician, discovers he's bitten off more than he can chew when he joins an eccentric pop band led by the mysterious and enigmatic Frank.

AFTER: OK, now that I've watched the film I can do a little research.  I've got some experience with weird bands, like I enjoy listening to cover bands like Big Daddy (80's songs performed in a 50's style), Me First and the Gimme Gimmes (soft songs in a hard punk style), and Richard Cheese (hard modern songs in an old lounge style).  Hell, I even collect Dread Zeppelin CDs (Led Zeppelin songs in a reggae style, with an Elvis impersonator on lead) and saw them play live once.  But as far as the performing in costume thing, I don't really go for bands like Mac Sabbath (McDonaldland characters performing Black Sabbath songs) and I'm not even a fan of KISS.  My only real reference point is the Residents, a band that's been around forever, they play wearing giant eyeball masks to conceal their identity, and nobody really knows their names.  (Only I once worked on a documentary about them, and I kind of gave one band member a ride home.  So I know things, but I'm sworn to secrecy.)

It turns out there's another guy, though, who wore a giant head much like the one seen in today's film, and his name was Chris Sievey.  With the big cartoonish head on, he became a character called Frank Sidebottom, so that's clearly an inspiration for the character of Frank here.  I suppose I would have known this if I'd kept up with my collection of Beatles cover albums, because he performed "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite" on the 1988 tribute album "Sgt. Pepper Knew My Father", which is currently only available on vinyl, not CD or download.  But Chris Sievey passed away in 2010, and he was best known for fronting a band called The Freshies, but the screenwriter of "Frank" was Jon Ronson, who played with Frank in a band called the Oh Blimey Big Band.  Robson also wrote a book called "Frank: The True Story that Inspired the Movie" and there was a documentary that was completed last year called "Being Frank: The Chris Sievey Story", so I'll have to keep an eye out for that.  Looks  like it could be out in theaters soon.

But let's just stick to the 2014 film "Frank" for the moment.  Jon joins a band that needs a keyboard player, and somehow he's not deterred by the fact that he saw their last keyboard player try to drown himself in a lake.  Umm, that should have been a warning sign.  So's the fact that the name of the band seems unpronounceable - it's The Soronprfbs.  Like it seems to start out OK, but then what happened, did someone run out of vowels?  (According to an arbitrary ranking I just found online, the list of the worst band names of all time includes "Let's Get Out of This Terrible Sandwich Shop", "Test Icicles", "Cerebral Ballzy", "We Butter the Bread With Butter", and "Adolf Hitler's Nipples".  More familiar names like Limp Bizkit, Butthole Surfers, Chumbawamba and Enuff Z'Nuff are also on the list, but the clear winner at #1 is Hoobastank.).

And surprisingly, Jon doesn't run for the hills when he finds out the band's lead singer wears a giant paper-mache head, like all the time.  He doesn't even take it off to eat, drink or shave, or even wash his face, so you've got to figure it's probably getting pretty gamey under there.  And Jon doesn't even bolt when the band doesn't seem to want to rehearse - instead they prefer to sort of make it up as they go along, following the lead of Frank, who engages in a sort of improv slam poetry, or something.  Before long, the band is off to a "gig" in Ireland, which involves living in rustic cabins and engaging in team-building exercises while preparing to record an album, and they're prepared for it to take as long as it takes.  Which then manages to stretch on for months, as Frank insists the WHOLE album must be rehearsed, over and over, until perfect before any recording takes place. 

Frank starts describing his unseen expressions for Jon, since they can't be seen through the mask, but Jon still can't help wondering if this man is more crazy than genius - really, there's such a fine line sometimes, which I think is one of the points this film is trying to make.  And there are indications that maybe Frank is the SANEST one in the band, or even that all the band members met while inmates at the same asylum or as part of a therapy group.  I mean, come on, who plays the THEREMIN, for goodness sakes?  Only insane people, right? 

There's a lot for me to like about this plot, because I also happen to work for/with some very creative people who also all have their own quirks, some of which drive me crazy, but hey, that's the job.  And I've learned to console myself by thinking that someone who is great at writing and directing movies, known in some circles as talented, genius even, but who has no idea how to balance a checkbook, or apply for an insurance policy, or even book an airline ticket, well, that's somebody I want to stay close to.  My best advice for anyone getting into the entertainment field, based on what I've seen and learned, is that every really creative person needs someone close to them who can do these things, like rent a car or get them a booth at Comic-Con or even buy food and beer for the office Christmas party.  I've made an entire career out of this, for over 25 years now, and as for job security, the more things you volunteer to handle, to allow that person more time to just create, the more that creative person will come to depend on you, even to the point where they can't even consider making art without you there to handle all the grunt work.  Trust me on this.  

Jon starts tweeting about his experiences with the band, and making YouTube videos about their creative process, which don't seem to make much sense, but at least the videos start racking up the hits and likes.  This even leads to an invitation to perform as the prestigious SXSW Film & Music Festival in Austin (which is very cagey, because then even if "Frank" the movie sucked, I bet there would still be one festival that would program it, no matter what...)  But given how the band starts to REALLY fall apart once they hit Texas, Jon starts to wonder if he might have pushed them too far, or too fast.  I've lived in this space, too - before my annual trips to Comic-Con began, I went to Sundance/Slamdance three times to help promote animated features, back in 1998, 2001 and 2004.  "Frank" feels like a very Sundance-y film, and while I'm not sure if it played there, it was a nominee for the Audience Award at, you guessed it, the 2014 SXSW Film Festival. 

Who is the man under the mask?  Is he talented or just quirky?  A genius or a madman?  Can the band get past their differences and bring it together, and if they can, should they?  Or maybe a band's not meant to stay together for long, and we should just appreciate the time that they had and the work they were able to produce.  I certainly watched enough rock documentaries last year to determine that it's nearly impossible for band members to get along for any extended period of time, unless they're the Rolling Stones, and even the Stones have had their differences over the years, and, let's face it, should have packed it in long ago.  But if they did, then there would be room in the marketplace for, like a dozen more terrible hipster bands, so maybe we're better off in the long run with the Stones out on the road.  

Also starring Domhnall Gleeson (last seen in "Peter Rabbit"), Maggie Gyllenhaal (last seen in "Cecil B. Demented"), Scoot McNairy (last seen in "Promised Land"), Carla Azar, Francois Civil, Lauren Poole, Hayley Derryberry, Tess Harper (last seen in "Ishtar"), Bruce McIntosh, Alex Knight.

RATING: 6 out of 10 cans of Grownut

The Snowman

Year 11, Day 21 - 1/21/19 - Movie #3,121

BEFORE: Michael Fassbender carries over from "The Light Between Oceans", and it's clear that when I put this chain together, I was thinking a bit of the weather.  I figured we'd probably have some snow on the ground by January 20, but no such luck - however, today in New York City was the coldest day in recent memory, with temperatures down in the single digits and the wind-chill factor on the negative side of zero.  The heating system in our house can only do so much to combat our drafty upstairs windows, so the only thing to do is to put on three or four layers of clothing and hunker down with a movie and a hot beverage.

Yesterday was the big NFL Conference Championship Games, and even though the Patriots weren't playing in chilly Foxborough, MA, it looked like it was just as cold in Kansas City, so there you go.  Let's hope things are a little less frigid in Atlanta in two weeks.

THE PLOT: Detective Harry Hole investigates the disappearance of a woman whose scarf is found around an ominous-looking snowman.

AFTER: Warning: Possible SPOILERS ahead, this is another film that's difficult to discuss without divulging some of the details.

From watching this film, I've determined that I've had a loose theme developing for the past week, though it was not intentional - it's something about difficult or non-existent relationships between fathers and children.  In "The Beaver", much was made of the toy executive's inability to relate to his teen son or be a part of his life, and talking through a puppet didn't seem to help much.  In "Red Sparrow", Domenika's father wasn't in the picture, so her uncle made her do espionage stuff to support her sick mother.  And then there was "Mother!", and the less said about the father's indifference there toward his baby, and what happens to the baby, the better.  In "Goodbye Christopher Robin", writer A.A. Milne was happy to let his son be raised by a nanny, and couldn't be bothered to interact with him until he had to, but hey, that led to a best-selling children's book series.  And in "Peter Rabbit", Peter's father had been eaten by old Mr. McGregor, so the bunny children had to get by, and get revenge, on their own.  And then of course in "The Light Between Oceans", the baby was found in a rowboat with a dead father, so it got raised by the lighthouse keeper and his wife.

All of which brings me to Harry Hole and the Snowman - who we meet at the start of that film, but not necessarily in that order.  Harry is an older detective in Oslo known for breaking the tough cases, only he's got some personal issues, like his drinking, and the fact that he never married the mother of his son, Oleg.  Now his ex-girlfriend has a new boyfriend, and he's struggling to be a part of his son's life - in fact Oleg keeps running away to try to find his "real" father, not realizing that it's probably Harry. Wow, there's a lot to unpack there, but these days, through one circumstance or another, divorce and blended families and single mothers and such, perhaps many people find themselves parenting someone else's kids, or watching someone else parent their own kids.  Then there's the Snowman, who was raised by his mother and watched helplessly as his "uncle" came by infrequently to abuse his mother.  It's no wonder the guy became a serial killer, after his mother drove their car out onto the half-frozen lake, seemingly choosing a watery grave over the living hell that her life had become.

At least, I think that's the origin of the Snowman.  There's sort of a huge mistake here, where we see the background of the serial killer first, and then this is immediately followed by a scene with the adult Harry Hole.  One might easily draw the conclusion that the child seen in the opening sequence grows up to become Harry, and that we've just fast-forwarded 30 or 40 years ahead in the life of the same character.  A similar mistake was notably made in "Saving Private Ryan", where the whole middle of the movie was a flashback told from the point of view of Tom Hanks' character, and then it was revealed that the person having the flashback was the adult version of the Matt Damon character.   What?   How could one character have a flashback from another character's memories?  That Steven Spielberg, what a hack.

So I was a bit confused at first, but I figured that the dysfunctional childhood we were shown was so effed-up that it was probably supposed to be the origin of the bad guy, not the good guy.  They just needed a less abrupt transition there - in Harry's first scene he mentions that his uncle recently died, and the kid in the opening sequence had an "uncle", so you can see where I made my mental mistake, right?  Anyway, Harry meets a new recruit in the Norwegian police force, a woman who studied his cases at the Academy, and since he's looking for a case to work on, she brings him the reports of a number of women who have gone missing, all single mothers, or married women who had recently gotten pregnant from affairs, and all had disappeared on days when it was snowing.  As Harry correctly points out, "So what?  This is Norway, it's always snowing."  But Katrine is convinced that the snow is some kind of trigger, prompting Norway's first-ever serial killer to strike.  If true, that's one giant case of Seasonal Affected Disorder right there.

Never one to follow the rules, Harry breaks into her files and finds a report about a similar disappearance of a woman 9 years ago in Bergen - and here's my old bugaboo about non-linear narratives, because the movie then jumps back nine years to show us THAT investigation, from the POV of Rasto, a detective in Bergen played by Val Kilmer (only you can barely recognize Val Kilmer these days, he looks nothing like he did back in the 1980's, or even the 1990's.  For a while there he just looked very puffy, now he looks like he got a whole new face, like maybe one of Kurt Russell's hand-me-downs.  Sorry, just keeping it real.).  Anyway, things didn't end well for Rasto, so apparently he got too close to the case.  Katrine, the new recruit has some definite ideas about who killed Rasto, but Harry finds out that she's got a personal involvement in the case, so she might easily be jumping to conclusions and seeing connections that just aren't there.

That's the difficult part of detective work, making sure that when you put the pieces of case together, that you do it in the right way, and let the evidence guide your conclusions, and not the other way around.  And speaking of pieces, this is a killer who likes turning people into pieces, if you know what I mean.  He's got some very weird cutting devices, and he's got a thing for putting people's heads on snowmen, and vice versa.  Plus he builds a snowman outside every crime scene, but one looking AT the house, rather than away from it.  Like many things about this movie, I wish they just took a little bit more time to explain the WHY of everything.  I think there are a lot of dangling pieces here, and I'm not just talking about the body parts.

Is the Snowman like one of those Batman villains who can't resist leaving clues behind for his nemesis to follow, like The Riddler or Two-Face?  There's also a fair amount of mis-direction here, but I suppose that's to be suspected in any murder mystery, we're led to believe it could be THIS person, but then later you realize they were really just setting up some kind of twist.  Meanwhile, among all the hype over Oslo trying to land the "Winter Sports World Cup", whatever that is, there's some kind of prostitution ring going on, and a woman who cuts the heads off of chickens.  All or none of these things could have some bearing on the case - I guess we're all just supposed to realize that Norway's got a lot going on, besides snow.

The director later said that he signed on for the film quite late, after Martin Scorsese declined to direct, that the production was very rushed, and then later in the editing process they realized that up to 15% of the screenplay was never filmed.  With all that in mind, it's a wonder that there aren't plot-holes big enough to drive a Volvo through.  I checked the plot-line for the original novel, and the movie is quite different in some places, especially with the fate of certain characters.  I guess they didn't want to save them for future Harry Hole films, since it seems questionable that they'll film any more.

Also starring Rebecca Ferguson (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - Fallout"), J.K. Simmons (last seen in "Rendition"), Charlotte Gainsbourg (last seen in "Independence Day: Resurgence"), Val Kilmer (last seen in "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang"), Toby Jones (last seen in "Atomic Blonde"), David Dencik (last seen in "War Horse"), Ronan Vibert (last seen in "Tristan + Isolde"), Chloe Sevigny (last seen in "The Dinner"), James D'Arcy (last seen in "Let's Be Cops"), Genevieve O'Reilly (last seen in "The Legend of Tarzan"), Adrian Dunbar (last seen in "The Crying Game"), Peter Dalle, Jamie Clayton, Jakob Oftebro, Jonas Karlsson, Silvia Busuioc, Michael Yates, Alec Newman, Jeté Laurence, Roger Barclay (last seen in "Johnny English Reborn").

RATING: 5 out of 10 ring-tones