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Year 11, Day 54 - 2/23/19 - Movie #3,154

BEFORE: This week I'm managing to disable at least three connections to "Avengers: Endgame" by watching films with Elizabeth Olsen ("Peace, Love & Misunderstanding") and two more tonight, Gwyneth Paltrow and Mark Ruffalo.  That's OK, I've got about 20 back-up connections, and really, in the end, I'll only need two when late April rolls around.  Right now it looks like Bradley Cooper will be the best lead-in, and Jeremy Renner could be the outro connection, but that could change.  There's another film with both Chris Evans and Scarlett Johannson in it that could work just as well, it will all depend on which path will allow me to link to "X-Men: Dark Phoenix" in the right number of steps.  It's too far away to calculate, so I just have to keep all of my options open for now.

Mark Ruffalo carries over from "Rumor Has It..." and we're getting closer to the Oscars now.  Having seen only two of the Best Picture nominees - "Black Panther" and "Vice" - according to Entertainment Weekly, there's only a combined 13% chance that I've already seen the winner of the top prize, but in some recent years I've had a 0% chance, so I'll have to be good with 13%.  Right now the favorite seems to be "Roma", with an outside chance of "Green Book", but I guess we'll all find out tomorrow.

One thing's for sure, tomorrow's TCM "31 Days of Oscar" line-up consists of "Musicals - Part II" during the day, followed by two films in the category "Best Picture Winners with No Other Wins" and then two films vying for "Best Conrad A. Nervig Editing Win", which sounds oddly specific.

5:30 am "42nd Street" (1933)
7:00 am "Easter Parade" (1948)
9:00 am "Lili" (1953)
10:30 am "A Hard Day's Night" (1964)
12:15 pm "High Society" (1956)
2:15 pm "The Music Man" (1962)
5:00 pm "1776" (1972)
8:00 pm "The Broadway Melody" (1929)
10:00 pm "Grand Hotel" (1932)
12:00 am "King Solomon's Mines" (1950)
2:00 am "Eskimo" (1933)

I've seen 6 out of these 11 - "Easter Parade", "A Hard Day's Night", "High Society", "The Music Man", "1776" and "Grand Hotel".  That brings me up to 109 seen out of 272, or just over 40%.

THE PLOT: Three disparate characters are learning to face a challenging and often confusing world as they struggle against a common demon: sex addiction.

AFTER: Well, I said I was itching to see a different sort of romance film, and I certainly got one today.  You might come to think that everyone in New York City is in some kind of 12-step program, with so many characters being treated for one addiction or another.  Mostly the focus here is on sex addiction, which some people don't believe is really a thing, but you can get addicted to anything, really - food or TV or sex or yes, even movies.  We're a nation of workaholics, alcoholics, sexaholics and chocoholics.  Is there anything we're not overdoing or addicted to in some way?

The film focuses on three male characters in different stages of recovery - Neil, who's just starting out in the program, having been court-ordered to stop grinding on other subway passengers (eewwww...), another, Adam, who's five years "sober", and a third, Mike, who's much further along in the program and acts as a group leader and a father figure, he's married and seems to have found the balance between having a relationship and not overdoing it.  The whole use of the word "sober" here is a little suspect, if you ask me, because for an alcoholic to stay sober, they can't have one drop of alcohol, but a sex addict is apparently allowed to have sex, but only within the confines of a committed, exclusive relationship.  Which means no casual partners, no prostitutes, and no, umm, watching pornography while alone.  As Woody Allen once famously said, "Don't knock masturbation.  It's sex with someone you love."

But I get it, some people need practical rules to get by, or guidelines, or whatever you want to call them, after surrendering themselves to their higher power, because when left to their own devices, people tend to gravitate toward behavior that ends up getting them in trouble.  If you get away with something once and it feels good or benefits you in some way, then you want to have it again, even if it's generally regarded as "wrong" or aberrant behavior.  Then before you know it, you're lumped into a category with Harvey Weinstein or Louis C.K. because you're out of control.  But I'm not sure if the answer is always to air your personal dirty laundry in a group setting, that's so potentially embarrassing I wonder if it does more harm than good.  Can't some people just see a therapist one-on-one and get on the road to recovery faster, like this way they don't have to wait for 20 other people in the room to share their truths before they can talk?

They all encounter bumps on the road to recovery - Neil stops taking the subway, but then has to get around NYC via cab, biking and running, all of which present challenges since he's out of a job and also out of shape.  Adam starts dating again after 5 years, lands a hot girlfriend but then neglects to admit that he's an addict (she only asks if he's an alcoholic, so he's technically not lying, but still, should have come clean from the start) and Mike has to deal with his son returning home after several years away, and his son's an ex-drug addict who wants to make amends with his parents.  Mike eventually has to confront that he might have missed a few steps of his own, like apologizing to his family for his own behavior.

I can't say I have much first-hand knowledge of addiction treatment, but the film feels very real in that  everything the characters encounter is difficult, and nothing is easy - I can't imagine any way that having a relationship with an addict would be easy.  That point alone sets this one apart from the average Hollywood romance film, where the worst thing that happens is that somebody falls into the giant cake before the wedding reception.

Also starring Tim Robbins (last seen in "Bob Roberts"), Gwyneth Paltrow (last seen in "Avengers: Infinity War"), Josh Gad (last seen in "Wish I Was Here"), Joely Richardson (last seen in "Red Sparrow"), Patrick Fugit (last seen in "Gone Girl"), Pink (Alecia Moore) (last seen in "Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives"), Carol Kane (last seen in "Ishtar"), Isiah Whitlock Jr. (last seen in "Pete's Dragon"), Michaela Watkins (last seen in "The House"), Emily Meade (last seen in "Nerve"), Poorna Jagannathan (last seen in "Peace, Love & Misunderstanding"), Okieriete Onaodowan, with a cameo from David Wain (last heard in "A Futile and Stupid Gesture").

RATING: 5 out of 10 triggers

Rumor Has It...

Year 11, Day 53 - 2/22/19 - Movie #3,153

BEFORE: I had a decision to make here, because my original plan was to have Kathy Bates carry over from "P.S. I Love You", from a major role in that film to an uncredited role as "Aunt Mitsy" in this one - which could mean she's in this film for just a few seconds, like in a family crowd scene or something.  Taking a step back, there's another film that's an obvious connection between a film starring Gerard Butler and a film starring Jennifer Aniston, and that film is "The Bounty Hunter". Which is running on premium cable right now, only I'm not sure if that comedy also qualifies as a romance film, and I'm also not sure if I want to add it to my chain at the last minute and throw off my count.  I have been looking to make a couple of additions, just in case I don't get to see "Avengers: Endgame" on opening day.  But I'm not sure if slotting in "The Bounty Hunter" here is the best way for me to get there.  Decisions, decisions.

OK, here's the verdict.  I don't want to extend the romance chain any further, because I'm dying to get to something else, anything else - and the chain's going to run a week into March already, so I'm not adding another new film in this week. But I'm going to record "The Bounty Hunter" later this week, and probably dub it to DVD with tonight's film, and then save that for next year.  Taking an advance look at the romance films I won't be able to get to this month, I can see that a film starring those two actors MIGHT come in very handy for linking purposes.  So I guess I'm hedging my bets, saving that film for next year keeps a couple of options open, and I'll reassess in a few months anyway to see if it makes sense for that film to be part of next February's chain.  The original plan stands, with Kathy Bates carrying over from "P.S. I Love You".

The theme for tomorrow's "31 Days of Oscar" daytime line-up on TCM is "Adventure", followed by the primetime face-off of "Favorite Version: A Star Is Born" and the match-up of "1948 Winning Performances Directed by John Huston":

6:15 am "The Prisoner of Zenda" (1937)
8:00 am "Robinson Crusoe" (1954)
9:30 am "Captain Blood" (1935)
11:45 am "The Black Swan" (1942)
1:30 pm "The Three Musketeers" (1948)
3:45 pm "Knights of the Round Table" (1953)
6:00 pm "Ivanhoe" (1952)
8:00 pm "A Star Is Born" (1937)
10:00 pm "A Star Is Born" (1954)
1:15 am "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" (1948)
3:30 am "Key Largo" (1948)

Hmm, since it's Oscar weekend 2019, it feels kind of appropriate for TCM to focus on "A Star Is Born" - I bet they're secretly hoping the new version will take home a bunch of statues, maybe even Best Picture.  I guess we'll see.  I think I've only seen three of tomorrow's films - "Captain Blood", "A Star Is Born" (1954), and "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" - but two more are currently on my list, "The Prisoner of Zenda" and "Knights of the Round Table".  It's nearly impossible to link to them, though, since most of my list's film were released after 2015.  I don't know if I'll ever find a way.  Another 3 out of 11 brings my total up to 103 seen out of 261, or 39.5%.

THE PLOT: An engaged woman learns that her family was the inspiration for the book and film "The Graduate" - and that she might be the offspring of the well-documented events.

AFTER: Now I know that I've got to get off of this topic very soon, because I believe that I'm losing the ability to judge these romance films objectively.  Like, what basis am I judging on now, believability?  How come I can take a sci-fi film with an outlandish premise about cloning or an alien invasion more seriously than some of these romantic comedies?  Am I judging them by how warm and fuzzy they make me feel, or whether things work out for the best for the couples portrayed?  Is that the goal here, to match up every fictional character with another one so that everyone is happy?  They're not even real, why should I care if they're happy or not?  And I've still got 13 romance films to go?  I don't know if I'm going to make it...

But believability is the key point today, because the jumping-off point is a work of fiction, and a suspicion that every work of fiction was possibly, probably inspired by a real-world event.  As if every book were a thinly-veiled roman a clef, and if you just dig around a little bit into the author's list of friends, neighbors and associates, you can figure out exactly WHO every work of fiction is really about.  Because an author couldn't POSSIBLY create a set of characters and circumstances out of thin air, or his own imagination.  See, the truth is that screenwriters who cheat naturally assume that every other writer does the same.  If you're the kind of screenwriter who rips off a classic film like "The Graduate", it's safe to assume that the writer of "The Graduate" probably got his story ideas from someone else, somebody who managed to sleep with both a girlfriend and also her mother.

I feel it only fair to raise the point that there's a lot more TO "The Graduate" than just the sex, and the unique love triangle, but that seems to be all that anybody wants to talk about, so that's all that this movie wants to focus on. The real truth is that Charles Webb based Mrs. Robinson on a business associate of his father's, so most likely it's just a wish-fulfillment story based on a sexual fantasy he had about this older woman.  But that doesn't fit with the purpose of this movie, so the lead character here figures out that Webb had a friend in high-school with the initials "B.B.", same as Benjamin Braddock, so that must be the guy who slept with her mother and grandmother.

It's a large mental leap, and probably if we were to psycho-analyze the main character here, her desire to learn about her mother's possible fling, before getting married, is related to her own insecurity about her relationship and engagement.  So she feels the need to track down this mysterious "B.B." because there's a slight chance that he might be her biological father.  She also feels disconnected from the man she's been told is her father, and that they don't have a lot in common, like with politics, but who the heck agrees with their parents on politics, especially these days?  Come on, it's not like there's some kind of genetic test that someone can take to prove their parents are really their parents, right?  Um, wait...

Also, the premise doesn't work because Charles Webb did eventually publish a sequel to "The Graduate" in which Ben and Elaine are still together and have two sons, but this film ignores all that and claims that the "Elaine" character didn't stay with Ben and instead went and married someone else.  So any analogy between the Braddock/Robinsons and the Huttingers has to break down at some point.  This only really works if you take the connection to "The Graduate" as a very loose one, just treat it like a jumping-off point for the main story here to start.  What you're left with is the lead character who's unsure about her relationship, and tracks down her mother's old boyfriend to find out more about the fling she had.

I think this could have worked without any mention of "The Graduate" at all, in fact I think it might even have been stronger without relying on that as some kind of narrative crutch.  If she just looked up her mother's old boyfriend, for no other reason than to confirm her possibly paternity, then you'd still have a story.  The thought of a man sleeping with 3 generations of women in the same family is a little too creepy-icky, though.  So that's a little questionable in my opinion.  For that matter, asking any details of a parent's sexual history is a little questionable too - knowing too much about one's parents or grandparents should cause a definite need for mental floss.

Also starring Jennifer Aniston (last seen in "Office Christmas Party"), Kevin Costner (last seen in "Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives"), Shirley MacLaine (last seen in "Michael Jackson's Journey from Motown to Off the Wall"), Mark Ruffalo (last seen in "Avengers: Infinity War"), Richard Jenkins (last seen in "The Shape of Water"), Mena Suvari (last seen in "Factory Girl"), Steve Sandvoss, Christopher McDonald (last seen in "The Faculty"), Mike Vogel, Jennifer Taylor, with cameos from Clyde Kusatsu (last seen in "The Singing Detective"), Colleen Camp (last seen in "A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III"), George Hamilton and archive footage of Anne Bancroft (last seen in "The Elephant Man"), Dustin Hoffman (last seen in "Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium"), Bill Clinton (last seen in "12 Strong") and Barry Goldwater.

RATING: 4 out of 10 yearbook photos

P.S. I Love You

Year 11, Day 52 - 2/21/19 - Movie #3,152

BEFORE:  Well, we finally got some winter weather in NYC, first time since November that there was snow worth talking about, of course today it's going to be 50 degrees, so it's all going to melt.  I kind of like the new climate, where I don't have to shovel as much.  Sure, I'm against global warming but since the change has already happened, is it selfish of me to be OK with the fact that we've damaged the earth to the point where I only have to shovel snow once during each winter?  OK, let's not let it get any worse, let's get off of fossil fuels and fix that hole in the ozone and get the plastics out of the ocean if we can, but let's not hurry back to that point where we get crazy thundersnow and 18 inches of thick heavy snow several times in January, is that too much to ask?  New York doesn't have to turn into a tropical paradise, just a little milder winters than we had before, that's what I want.

I've still got 15 romance films left after this one, and for the record, I don't recommend that anyone else watch this many Hollywood romances in a row - they do tend to warp my perspective after a while.  Fortunately I can counter-program by choosing TV shows that are polar opposites, like right now I'm working my way through the second season of "Counterpart" on Starz.  It's a spy-like thriller, only the agents come from two parallel worlds, and sometimes someone is good on one world but bad in the "mirror universe", and a lot of cool things happen when some characters cross over between the worlds.  J.K. Simmons gets to play a meek, low-level agent on one world and also his tougher, higher-level counterpart on the other.  Plus there's a lot of that split-screen effect where people get to interact with their "others", even though they're not supposed to.  Anyway, I'm halfway through the season and they're finally getting into explaining how the whole dual-dimension thing happened in the first place.  Naturally it's set in Berlin, which kind of makes sense because it's a city that used to be divided by the Berlin Wall, and people used to cross over there between the capitalist world and the Communist one, plus the whole idea of meeting one's doppelgänger is very German to begin with.

Jeffrey Dean Morgan carries over from "Peace, Love & Misunderstanding", speaking of people who can play both types of characters - I'm used to seeing him as The Comedian from "Watchmen" and also clips of him as that villain from "The Walking Dead", and then last night he played the furniture maker / amateur musician / nice-guy and rebound boyfriend, and I think that also shows a lot of range.  Mind blown.

Tomorrow, February 22, on TCM's "31 Days of Oscar", it's "Animal Stories" during the day, "Best Movie Mutiny" during prime-time and "Favorite Liz and Richard Face Off" overnight:

5:30 am "The Day of the Dolphin" (1973)
7:30 am "Mighty Joe Young" (1949)
9:30 am "Umberto D" (1952)
11:15 am "Sounder" (1972)
1:15 pm "Born Free" (1966)
3:15 pm "National Velvet" (1944)
5:30 pm "The Yearling" (1946)
8:00 pm "Mutiny on the Bounty" (1962)
11:15 pm "The Caine Mutiny" (1954)
1:30 am "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" (1966)
4:00 am "The Taming of the Shrew" (1967)

I'm claiming 6 out of these 11, I'm sure I saw "Born Free" and "National Velvet" when I was a kid, I've seen every version of "Mutiny on the Bounty" that there is, plus I've seen "The Caine Mutiny" and both of those Taylor & Burton films.  That brings me up to 100 seen out of 250, which is exactly 40% seen. If I can finish at 40% or above, I'll be happy.

THE PLOT: A young widow discovers that her late husband has left her 10 messages intended to help ease her pain and start a new life.

AFTER: I get it, this is supposed to be a sentimental film about the road to recovery after a spouse dies, but I've got some large concerns about the whole structure and then the little details about how this film gets from Point A to Point B.  Basically, it's replaced the standard 5 stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance) with a new model - 1. whiskey shots 2. karaoke 3. vacation 4. accidentally sleeping with dead husband's best friend and 5. reconnecting with friends.

I hate to sound like a broken record here, because this has become my recurring pet peeve, but this film is way too flashback-intensive, and there's just no reason for it.  In the first scene, we see married couple Holly and Gerry having (we assume) a typical argument, about their apartment being too small, Holly being angry over him telling her mother that she's "not ready" to have kids, and then of course they reconcile and snuggle.  But the third (?) major scene is Gerry's funeral, and we the audience have barely gotten to know him at this point, and what we DO know is that he fights with Holly regularly, so honestly, my formed opinion was not great.  Throughout the following flashbacks we then get to know what a great guy he was, but if those scenes that portrayed him better had appeared EARLIER, in proper chronological order, then his funeral scene would have had a greater impact.  If we knew what a great guy he was (something the film reveals LATER), then we could feel his loss, just like Holly did.  Moving the funeral up to the start of the film makes no sense, and removes any possible dramatic tension.  Would it really have been so bad to tell the story in the right order, instead of having to struggle to keep the pieces of their developing relationship straight in our heads?

Also, this causes problems for us because at the same time that Holly's trying to move forward, we're stuck in flashback mode, because we never got the information about how they met cute in the first place, so we're always gazing back further and further into the past at the same time that she's supposed to be moving on.  Is this to symbolize that she's not really moving on as she's supposed to?  Even if this is true, it still feels like a disconnect to me, because the film's supposed to chart her journey moving forward and letting go, as instructed by Gerry's letters to her, and it doesn't feel like it's happening on schedule because we keep flashing back. So it's a horrible structure, no matter how you slice it.  Who the hell looked at this scene breakdown - (scene 3: Gerry's funeral; scene 27: that time Gerry got Holly to sing in a bar; scene 43: How Gerry and Holly met in Ireland) and said, "Yep, that looks right to me!  No problems with the space-time continuum there at all!"  It's madness.

There's also another character that can't read social cues, which I've seen several times this month already.  They fall short here of saying he's got Asperger's, or adult autism, or anything like that, but if you don't put a name on it, they you sort of leave open the possibility that he's just an asshole, right?  Anyway, it's a really bad use of this technique here, because it seems like some screenwriter just said he has no social graces so that he'll be blunt, and this ends up being a quicker way to advance the plot.  Within the course of like three scenes, this character is introduced as a possible rebound boyfriend, they go on an awkward date which is made even more awkward by his condition, and then he can't help but be blunt about dating her, and this sort of forces the issue.  What a crock this is, playing on a character's disability to avoid the chore of writing realistic human dating dialogue.

NITPICK POINT: Gerry and Holly complain about how small their apartment is, even though it's clearly a soundstage, not an actual NYC apartment, and seems large enough to host a soccer game, if you just moved the furniture to the edges of the rooms or something.  I know couples who have lived in NYC basement apartments easily half the size, and they never complained.  You don't get to bitch about the size of your apartment unless the toilet is in a closet and the bathtub is in the middle of the kitchen.  SO these two should shut up, already.  Then, after Gerry dies, and she ships some of his stuff back to Ireland and cleans out his closets, WHY is "get a bigger apartment" the first item on her vision board?  Logically, she should have twice the space she had before, and the place would probably feel too big anyway, with her husband gone.  AND how can she afford this place without his income?  Her next goal should be to get a SMALLER apartment that she can afford, but why expect logic out of a Hollywood romance?

NITPICK POINT #2: "Fairytale of New York" by the Pogues - it makes sense that this would be an Irish man's favorite song, but they really shouldn't use this song in a movie because it contains an homophobic slur.  For that matter, we should really stop playing "Money for Nothing" by Dire Straits on the radio because it contains the same offensive word.  If white people can't sing or say the "n word", then straight musicians should be similarly sensitive and not perform a song with the "f word" in it (not that "f word", the other one).  For some reason radio still plays this song with the slur intact, saying that it's "satirical", but this is a poor excuse.  If even the BAND doesn't play that lyric any more, then it should be bleeped out.  Just to be on the safe side, isn't it easier to just give the character a different favorite song?

NITPICK POINT #3: I didn't see what the big deal was about Gerry's urn.  So it was a black Borg-like cube, so what?  Why did everyone make a fuss over the fact that she designed the urn?  Was this just to foreshadow her future career as a designer?  Anyway, if she was so distraught over Gerry's death, where did she suddenly find the creativity to design something, if she was at such a low point in her life?

See, I've got a feeling that if you start picking away at this one, the whole plot's just going to unravel. They thought they could cover this up by moving the scenes around, and while we're all so busy trying to piece together what order everything happened in their relationship, we wouldn't notice how many little things just don't make any sense.  Like, that's not how a karaoke night works, or the whole business about who Gerry got to help send his wife the letters.  I guess that's the big "mystery" here, only it's not really a mystery at all, and it doesn't make any sense either.  When we finally find out, that person claims to have thought it was all a bad idea - but then, that doesn't explain why they went along with it.  Gerry was dead, he couldn't force someone to send the letters, so if they thought it wasn't going to be part of a helpful healing process for Holly, they just would not have done it.  Plot logic fail.

Also starring Hilary Swank (last seen in "New Year's Eve"), Gerard Butler (last seen in "Gods of Egypt"), Lisa Kudrow (last seen in "Table 19"), Gina Gershon (last seen in "Pretty in Pink"), James Marsters, Harry Connick Jr. (last seen in "Copycat"), Nellie McKay, Kathy Bates (last seen in "Love Liza"), Dean Winters (last seen in "Rough Night"), Anne Kent (last seen in "The Commitments"), Brian McGrath, Michael Countryman (last seen in "You Can Count on Me"), with a cameo from Mike Doyle (last seen in "Jersey Boys"), and archive footage of Bette Davis and Judy Garland (last seen in "Easter Parade").

RATING: 3 out of 10 shot glasses

Peace, Love & Misunderstanding

Year 11, Day 51 - 2/20/19 - Movie #3,151

BEFORE: Rosanna Arquette carries over from "Desperately Seeking Susan", from a lead role in yesterday's film to a smaller role today.  That's OK - as long as they're playing in the band, it doesn't matter if they're on lead guitar or just playing tambourine.  This is another one of those pesky films that WAS on Netflix when I planned this chain several months ago, but is no longer available there.
So I've got to shill out a few bucks to watch it on iTunes tonight, because that's easier than changing my plans at the last minute.

We're headed into the last 1/3 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" schedule, and tomorrow, February 21, they're off to "Exotic Locales" during the day, then in primetime there's the battle for "Favorite Foreign Language Film Winner: Fellini" and overnight the head-to-head competition for "Favorite Movie Prisoner":

5:00 am "Algiers" (1938)
7:00 am "Lady of the Tropics" (1939)
9:00 am "Miss Sadie Thompson" (1953)
11:00 am "Sayonara" (1957)
1:30 pm "The Rains Came" (1939)
3:15 pm "The Inn of the Sixth Happiness" (1958)
6:00 pm "Mogambo" (1953)
8:00 pm "8 1/2" (1963)
10:30 pm "La Strada" (1954)
12:30 am "Cool Hand Luke" (1967)
3:00 am "Midnight Express" (1978)

Oof, I'm only hitting for one film today, and that's "Cool Hand Luke".  So another 1 out of 11 brings me to 94 seen out of 239, and I've slipped down to 39.3% seen.

THE PLOT: An uptight New York City lawyer takes her two teenagers to her hippie mother's farm

AFTER: At first, knowing this film had scrolled off of Netflix made me question whether I should continue to include it - especially after finding out that Colleen Camp made a cameo in "A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III", because that meant I could skip from there directly to "Rumor Has It", where she also makes a cameo.  But that would also mean I would have had to drop "Desperately Seeking Susan", and also tomorrow's film.  Nope, it's best to stick with the program and not make any changes at this point.

But then after I watched "Peace, Love & Misunderstanding", I'm glad I made room for it this year.  The other option was to try to get to it next February, especially since they're just starting to run "Book Club" now, which also has Jane Fonda in it - but that film also has Mary Steenburgen in it, and I've excluded several films with her in it this time around, so I'll get to those all next year, along with a couple of Reese Witherspoons, and a couple of Keira Knightley films.  Damn, it's impossible for me to clear the romance category, even by extending it past February and into March.  I can't possibly tell if all the romance films I'm putting off are going to connect with each other then, because I don't know what other films will be available to me to fill the gaps.  I'll just have to wait and see.

I'm glad I stuck with this one because there's a lot to like here - there are four different relationship stories going on at the same time, so there you go, it fits right in with this month's running theme.  Though it starts out on a bummer note, with the lead character's husband asking for a divorce, things pick up when she brings her teen son and college-age daughter up to see their grandmother, who's been kept out of the family for 20 years.  We find out why quite quickly, the lead, Diane, is a conservative lawyer and her mother is still living like it's the Summer of Love.  Quick riddle: How do you know if somebody went to the original Woodstock concert?  Don't worry, they'll be sure to mention it very soon.  If everyone who claims to have been there had really been there, I think the earth would have caved in from all the excess weight on Yasgur's farm.

I've never been up to Woodstock, but I really should go sometime - and this year's the 50th anniversary of the 1969 concert, so I'd imagine that something's going to be planned for this summer to commemorate it.  I avoided the 25th anniversary in 1994, and the 30th anniversary concert ended in a riot, but maybe the 50th will be a little more chill.  Those classic rock fans are too old for fighting now, they can barely dance without breaking a hip.  But hey, Jane Fonda looks fantastic for her age, never mind that, for any age.

Anyway, Woodstock the town seems to be a magical place, because Diane and both her children find potential love interests there without searching too hard, and with a little help from Grandma Grace.  Generally, I'd suggest not taking dating advice from your grandmother, because usually that means she's two generations out of touch, but here she seems to know what she's talking about, more or less.  My grandmother's only advice to me about dating was to wait until I got done with college, but I think she failed to take into account that NYU was such a great place to meet girls, like they were all over the dorm, in all of my classes, in Washington Square Park...  So I really didn't take Gram's advice, and spent most of my junior year trying to connect, and finally had some success a couple months before graduating early.  But that's another story.

But what's great here is that the romances are all different - there's the tentative teen romance, the college-age daughter is attracted to the local butcher (though she finds his work off-putting at first) and their mother Diane is pulled toward the local furniture-maker/amateur musician.  You kind of feel like maybe everyone in the town of Woodstock is either an amateur musician or an aging hippie, or perhaps the children of all the aging hippies.  I don't know, again, I've never visited so that could be true.  And then there's Grandma Grace, who seems to have something going with a number of men in town who pose for her paintings, plus she runs a drum circle for the local hippie women - she's pretty open and free sexually, so who knows, she may have something going with a few women too.

Another thing I like is that none of the romances are easy, there are obstacles in each one, and that makes this feel more real, like it rings true because the Hudson family members each need to learn to let go of their emotional baggage before they can have real relationships.  For Diane that means coming to terms with and forgiving her mother, letting her back in to her life and her children's lives, lifting that weight that's holding her down, also accepting that divorce isn't the end of the world, and it can be the start of a new chapter.  For daughter Zoe, this means realizing that issues about eating animals and farming are more complex than just black and white, that it might be possible to butcher animals in an ethical, respectful way, and that someone can work in a butcher shop and still appreciate Walt Whitman.  Also that we don't need to seek out romantic partners that share all of the same opinions, we can form relationships with people who challenge us and allow us to see things in different ways.  And for son Jake, well, he just needs to connect with a girl that will let him get to second base, because those NYC girls have been giving him the cold shoulder.  Stay strong, Jake, I've been there.

Jake's also an amateur filmmaker, he's got the standard film student posters on his wall, and carries his video camera around everywhere.  Yes, this is a great way to break the ice with girls, as he finds out, and near the end of the film, we see the result of all of his shooting, the film he made about his time in Woodstock.  Like many student films, it's all over the place, it has no real focus or point to it, but you know what, that also rings very true.  Watch a few student films and you'll see what I mean.  Or hey, just watch "A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III" and you'll get the same feeling.

Also starring Catherine Keener (last heard in "Incredibles 2"), Jane Fonda (last seen in archive footage in "Vice"), Jeffrey Dean Morgan (last seen in "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice"), Elizabeth Olsen (last seen in "Avengers: Infinity War"), Nat Wolff (last seen in "The Intern"), Chace Crawford (last seen in "Rules Don't Apply"), Kyle MacLachlan (last seen in "The Flintstones"), Marissa O'Donnell, Joyce Van Patten (last seen in "God's Pocket"), Maddie Corman (last seen in "Adam"), Denise Burse, Poorna Jagannathan, Katharine McPhee (last seen in "The House Bunny"), Terry McKenna.

RATING: 6 out of 10 shots of tequila

Desperately Seeking Susan

Year 11, Day 50 - 2/19/19 - Movie #3,150

BEFORE: To get me back to this "lost classic" from the 1980's, Richard Edson carries over from "A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III".  If you don't know who Richard Edson is, he's probably most famous for playing that weird burn-out parking garage attendant in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off", who takes Cameron's father's sportscar out for a joyride and puts all those miles on it.  Anyway, he's got a small role in tonight's film, but that's enough - I needed a way to connect between these two films that feature different Arquette sisters in their casts.

Tomorrow, Feb. 20, on TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming (and we're getting very close to this year's Oscars now, just 6 days to go...) it's a line-up of "Courtroom Dramas" during the day, a battle of "Who Played It Better: Henry VIII" during prime-time, and another battle between the "1954 Best Score Winners: Dramatic vs. Musical" late at night:

4:00 am "Philadelphia" (1993)
6:15 am "Fury" (1936)
8:00 am "Trial" (1955)
10:00 am "Libel" (1959)
12:00 pm "Inherit the Wind" (1960)
2:15 pm "Twilight of Honor" (1963)
4:15 pm "Madeleine" (1950)
6:15 pm "12 Angry Men" (1957)
8:00 pm "The Private Life of Henry VIII" (1933)
10:00 pm "A Man For All Seasons" (1966)
12:15 am "The High and the Mighty" (1954)
3:00 am "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers" (1954)

I've seen 6 out of these 12, of course "Philadelphia" (running this great film at 4 am seems very strange - why not run the more obscure "Madeleine" then?), "Inherit the Wind", "12 Angry Men", "A Man For All Seasons" and two films I watched just last year, "The Private Life of Henry VIII" and "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers".  This brings me up to 93 seen out of 228, and I'm still just above 40%.

THE PLOT: A bored suburban housewife, seeking escape from her life, suffers amnesia after an accident and is mistaken for a free-spirited New York City drifter named Susan.

AFTER: This one's been on the books for a long time - I think I picked it up off the Starz Encore channel last year, but since then that channel's been pretty non-useful to me, so I'm thinking of dropping it.  The number of films from the 1980's that I haven't seen, that I would also WANT to see, is getting very low, like maybe two or three films.  And you have to figure, if I've spent the last 34 years not watching a film like this, there's probably a good reason, right?  Like, if this film were very important or there was some urgent reason to watch this, I would have done so already - it's got a big cast, so it should be easy enough to link to, however many of them are fairly obscure actors, so it did kind of prove to be a huge headache to work this in somewhere.  Honestly, I'm glad to cross it off the list today and move on to bigger and better things.

Because if you watch a lot of romantic comedies from the 1980's, like, say, this one and "Overboard", you could easily get the impression that the 80's decade was full of rich and middle-class women falling off boats or getting hit on the head to cause amnesia, and then being led to believe that they were really poor rural housewives or gold-digging club kids.  Then inevitably this would lead to them falling in love with a struggling but good-natured carpenter or film projectionist, and rejecting their old lifestyle and marriage, even after remembering who they really are, in favor of a new love with a much poorer man.  I don't remember this actually happening so much during that decade, though who's to say?  I think the practice of putting the images of missing people on milk cartons started about the same time, and I wonder how many of those people weren't really missing, but had just hit their heads and suffered from soap-opera style amnesia and just got mistaken for someone else with the same hairstyle and jacket and continued on under their new identity.

That being said, if you take this as a movie about a woman from New Jersey with big hair whose husband sells hot tubs to yuppies via commercials on late night public access channels, who follows the antics of a free-wheeling club kid through the personal ads (because people didn't yet use cell phones or text messages to communicate) and she ends up wearing some giant earrings and working in a Times Square club while falling for a projectionist at an indie revival movie theater, after they dance to "Into the Groove" - well, it's hard to think of a sentence that better captures the essence of the 1980's.  The only thing they didn't do here was play a couple games of Galaga while on their way to buy some designer jeans.

Now, with that being said, I don't think there was ever a place in NYC like "The Magic Club", where dime-store magicians did this sort of show with simple tricks like sawing a lady in half, or making doves appear inside a cage.  It's like some low-rent version of L.A.'s "Magic Castle" but this would never fly in 1980's Times Square, where the most popular attractions were peep shows, brothels and drug dealers, all of which had ways of making your money disappear.  But this film got some other prominent NYC locations right, like Battery Park and St. Mark's Place (where Susan buys the hat), and the vintage clothing store "Love Saves the Day" on 2nd Ave and East 7th (where she sells her jacket) which closed down in 2011 to become a fast-food place, and then got leveled by a gas explosion in 2015.  And a web-site that lists where in NYC certain movies were filmed confirms this, the Magic Club sign was a front-piece that was built on the outside of the Audubon Ballroom up in Washington Heights, where they also shot the interiors for the same club scenes.

Just like yesterday's film, there's a lot of randomness to "Desperately Seeking Susan" - sure, a lot of STUFF happens, but it's hard to say that the parts definitely all add up to some coherent whole.  Not with so many unanswered questions - who was the guy in the hotel room at the beginning?  Who stole the earrings in the first place?  Why was Roberta so fascinated by the cryptic personal ads, if she didn't know the people involved?  Why didn't the used clothing store keep better records, or even wash the clothing before re-selling it?  Why couldn't Roberta just be happy married to the hot-tub sales king of New Jersey?  That sounds pretty sweet to me.  Let's not forget - why are most magic tricks so lame?  And was it really that much easier in the 1980's to be mistaken for someone else, because nobody could send you a selfie or look you up on your Facebook page?

It's getting harder and harder for me to reach back into the 1980's and maintain my linking - which is a real problem because even though about 2/3 of my watchlist was made in the new millennium, which makes linking easy because all those films are drawing from the same pool of actors, I've got about 30 films on my list that were made BEFORE 1980, and some reach back to the 1930's.  How am I possibly going to link to them?  I'll have to take a hard look at them after my October horror chain to see just how bad the damage is.  Right now there's a 10-year gap, no films to watch between 1984 and 1994, so I'll have to keep finding actors with long careers to jump over that gap.  Today I linked from a film made in 2012 to one made in 1985, and tomorrow I'm linking to a film that was released in 2011 - how much longer can I keep getting lucky like that?

Also starring Rosanna Arquette (last seen in "Hope Floats"), Madonna (last seen in "How the Beatles Changed the World"), Aidan Quinn (last seen in "Music of the Heart"), Mark Blum (last seen in "Miami Rhapsody"), Robert Joy (last seen in "Shadows and Fog"), Laurie Metcalf (last seen in "Lady Bird"), Anna Levine (last seen in "I Shot Andy Warhol"), Will Patton (last seen in "Gone in 60 Seconds"), Peter Maloney (last seen in "Boiler Room"), Steven Wright (last heard in "The Emoji Movie"), John Turturro (last seen in "God's Pocket"), Anne Carlisle, Jose Angel Santana, Richard Hell, Rockets Redglare, Annie Golden, Ann Magnuson (last seen in "Tequila Sunrise"), John Lurie (last seen in "Wild at Heart"), Victor Argo (last seen in "Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai"), Shirley Stoler, Arto Lindsay, Kim Chan, Patrick John Hurley, with cameos from Giancarlo Esposito (last seen in "Rabbit Hole"), Michael Badalucco (last seen in "Rules Don't Apply"), Carol Leifer, Richard Portnow (last seen in "Trumbo").

RATING: 4 out of 10 newspapers stolen from a vending machine

A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III

Year 11, Day 49 - 2/18/19 - Movie #3,149

BEFORE: This time, Mary Elizabeth Winstead carries over from "The Spectacular Now", to cap off my three-day holiday weekend on Netflix.  I don't have anything appropriate for President's Day, I don't see how that would be possible while I'm square in the middle of the month-long (plus a week or so) romance chain.  So I'm just going to carry on, from a film about a hard-partying teen male with a girlfriend who broke up with him to a film about a hard-partying adult male with a girlfriend who broke up with him.

I'm realizing now that there's something about the way that Netflix promotes its films - they're using an image of lovable Bill Murray to publicize this film, and so for weeks I've been looking forward to a Bill Murray film - only now I find out that he's just a bit player and not the star of the film.  The central character is played by Charlie Sheen, so now I'm less enthused about it.  I heard that they've been using misleading art to pitch films to different demographics, and now I've fallen right into their trap.  Who wants to see a film about nasty, wild Charlie Sheen?  But sad, approachable Bill Murray, sure, I'd watch that.  Oh, well, I can't change the chain now, I've got to soldier on.

Tomorrow, February 19, on TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" line-up, it's all about "Family Ties". Well, during the daytime, anyway, in the evening there's the head-to-head match-up for "Favorite Best Actor Win: Spencer Tracy" and then during late night it's "Creepiest Voyeurism":

4:00 am "I Remember Mama" (1948)
6:30 am "Edward, My Son" (1948)
8:45 am "You Can't Take It With You" (1938)
11:00 am "The Little Foxes" (1941)
1:00 pm "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" (1962)
3:30 pm "Life With Father" (1947)
5:45 pm "A River Runs Through It" (1992)
8:00 pm "Captains Courageous" (1937)
10:15 pm "Boys Town" (1938)
12:00 am "Blow-Up" (1966)
2:00 am "Three Colors: Red" (1994)

I think I can only claim three here, out of a possible 11.  I've definitely seen "You Can't Take It With You", "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" and "A River Runs Through It".  I'm not sure about "Life With Father", I always mix that one up with "Father of the Bride" (to be fair, Elizabeth Taylor is in both of them...) and I've seen "Blow Out" but not "Blow-Up".  Another 3 out of 11 brings me to 87 out of 216, or 40.2%

THE PLOT: A graphic designer's enviable life slides into despair when his girlfriend breaks up with him.

AFTER: Well, in addition to themes carrying over from last night's film (both films had a lead male character who likes to party and has just been through a break-up) there are echoes here of other films watched earlier this month, like "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past" (both have prominent artist/photographer male leads, who've been through a parade of beautiful women) or "The Singing Detective" (male character has prominent fantasies that invade his reality).

Beyond that, it's hard to find some solid ground to pin a story on, since everything's sort of lost in a haze of confusion - if anything, this sort of resembles "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" in tone, and that's a film I've watched maybe 5 or 6 times, since I'm such a Terry Gilliam fan, and I feel like I'm no closer to fully understanding that one than I was before I saw it.  Both that film and this one are movies where a lot of STUFF happens, but it's hard to see how any of it relates to any other part of it, or to get the whole thing to add up to anything.  Still, stuff continues to happen, and really goes nowhere in the end - that's a real problem, sometimes when a filmmaker doesn't seem to have a fixed destination in mind, and so the film doesn't so much end but just merely STOPS at some point.

This is what I can tell for sure: Charlie Sheen plays Charlie Swan III, so right there I'm wondering how autobiographical this was supposed to be.  I just found out that this film is set during the 1970's, and I didn't pick up on that fact at all.  I guess I was supposed to figure that out from the terrible fashions and the cheezy-looking graphic art that Swan is responsible for, or maybe from his attitude towards women, where he sees them all as disposable sexual playthings, for the most part.  Since Sheen himself had that attitude up until just a few years ago, that turned out to not be much help in pinning down the decade here.

Back in the 1970's, there was no such thing as "toxic masculinity", the most macho people like Burt Reynolds and Joe Namath probably always had swinging good times, enjoying the sexual revolution to the fullest extent, and that's coincidentally the decade of the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, the acme of Playboy's popularity, and also the explosion of the X-rated film industry.  See where I'm going with this?  Charlie Sheen would have fit right in back then.  But to celebrate all that stuff now seems very questionable.

Because it couldn't POSSIBLY be that a woman had a right to break up with a man because he had a drawer full of naked Polaroids of his ex-girlfriends, right?  No, clearly there was something wrong with HER, only Charles Swan can't quite understand what that might be.  It would be great if he could take that experience of her feeling unloved and, I don't know, maybe LEARN from it, maybe treat her (or the next woman, whichever) with a little more respect?  Nah, that's crazy talk.

Where did the inspiration for this come from?  One of the first names in the credits (after the director and main actors) is Charles WHITE III, who turns out to be a legendary graphic artist from the 1970's, famous for his airbrushing technique, and he worked on many album covers, in addition to the animated film "Heavy Metal". How much of this character here is based on that guy, and how much of it is based on Charlie Sheen's wild dating antics?  It's kind of tough to say.  Since the film also prominently features songs from just one musician, it almost feels like this film was designed to showcase that, assuming that this musician is a friend of the director, Roman Coppola.  My theory is that the director here was trying to do all three things at once, showcase the fictionalized Charles White, the antics of sheen and the music of Liam Hayes, and therefore there's no one single direction for the film to take, and it ended up a jumbled, unfocused mess.

Also starring Charlie Sheen (last seen in "The Three Musketeers"), Jason Schwartzman (last seen in "The Polka King"), Bill Murray (last heard in "Isle of Dogs"), Katheryn Winnick (last seen in "The Art of the Steal"), Patricia Arquette (last seen in "Holes"), Aubrey Plaza (last seen in "Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates"), Dermot Mulroney (last seen in "The Grey"), Tyne Stecklein (last seen in "Michael Jackson's This Is It"), Lindsey McLevis, Lexy Hulme, Fabianne Therese, Bar Paly, Margarita Kallas, Maxine Bahns, Richard Edson, Alim Kouliev, Liam Hayes, Gloria Laino, Mary-Pat Green (last seen in "Fantastic Four"), with cameos from Colleen Camp (last seen in "Factory Girl"), Stephen Dorff (last seen in "Cecil B. Demented") and the voice of Marc Coppola.

RATING: 3 out of 10 Native American women in bikinis

The Spectacular Now

Year 11, Day 48 - 2/17/19 - Movie #3,148

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