BEFORE: Oliver Platt carries over from "Professor Marston & the Wonder Women" and tonight I'm back on Netflix, still trying to clear my queue before things start disappearing on their own. My list there is down to 75 films, I can remember when it was hovering around 105. I should probably scroll through the "Recently added" list on Netflix to see if there's anything new for me, but I haven't added anything in a while, maybe a few more of the Oscar-nominated films are there now.
I watched yesterday's film on Hulu, and that interface is so problematic - when films I added to my list are no longer available on that service, they don't automatically get removed from my list, they just get shuffled down to the bottom of the list, but when I select them, "Play movie" is no longer an option. What's the point of keeping a film on my list if I can't WATCH it, are they just trying to taunt me, or piss me off with their half-assed form of "service"? How is this a good business model anyway, promising stuff and then not delivering it? These streaming services were supposed to be an improvement over cable, and with these weird quirks, many just are not living up to their ideals.
Then I made the mistake of scrolling through the "Recommended for you" section, and while I have to give their matrix credit for coming close to figuring out my tastes, based on what I've viewed before on that platform (it recommended several films I've already watched elsewhere, which was a good sign) what the matrix doesn't realize is that I'll watch just about anything at this point, but adding another 40-plus movies to my watchlist isn't really going to help me now, that's more like negative progress. Thanks a lot, Hulu. A year from now I'll be removing many of those films from my Hulu list when they're no longer available, and then I'll have to rent them on iTunes at $2.99 each. Maybe I'll get lucky and some of them will end up in the garbage bin that is Tubi.com for free, as long as I'm willing to watch a few ads.
Over on Turner Classic Movies, Fernando Lamas links from "The Merry Widow" to tomorrow's first film, can you fill in the other links? Answers below.
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 17 on TCM (31 Days of Oscar, Day 17)
7:00 am "Rich, Young and Pretty" (1951) with _____________ linking to:
9:00 am "Small Town Girl" (1953) with _____________ linking to:
11:00 am "Kiss Me Kate" (1953) with _____________ linking to:
1:15 pm "Show Boat" (1951) with _____________ linking to:
3:15 pm "Anchors Aweigh" (1945) with _____________ linking to:
5:45 pm "An American in Paris" (1951) with _____________ linking to:
8:00 pm "Gigi" (1958) with _____________ linking to:
10:15 pm "One Hour With You" (1932) with _____________ linking to:
11:45 pm "Naughty Marietta" (1935) with _____________ linking to:
2:00 am "The Chocolate Soldier" (1941) with _____________ linking to:
4:00 am "Frenchman's Creek" (1944) with _____________ linking to:
6:00 am "The Green Goddess" (1930)
Now, tomorrow is President's Day, so if I were a TCM programmer, that's when I would have scheduled the films from last Tuesday, which included "George Washington Slept Here", or even the films that ended up on February 7, which included "Sunrise at Campobello", for the FDR tie-in. Or something with Ronald Reagan in it, even. Since the whole chain is one big circle, it shouldn't matter where you start, and the whole thing could be shifted to put the program in line with one day on the calendar - let's see, if they had moved everything 5 days forward, that would have put the Feb. 9 programming on Valentine's Day, like the 1954 "A Star Is Born" and "On the Waterfront".
I guess there was no easy way to get everything to line up - the Feb. 12 programming could have gone on Valentine's Day, with film titles like "The Subject was Roses", "Always in my Heart", and "Of Human Hearts". But those are just titles, thematically tomorrow's programming could have also fit on Valentine's Day, with "Kiss Me Kate", "An American in Paris" and "The Chocolate Soldier" - kisses, Paris and chocolate, get it? That would also have the benefit of moving "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" on to Presidents Day, so to me that might have been the best solution (only then the cycle would have started on Feb. 1 with Ann Harding instead of Laurence Olivier...). Anyway, I've seen four of tomorrow's (non-Valentine's Day) offerings: "Kiss Me Kate", "Show Boat", "An American in Paris" and "Gigi" - how fortunate that in February 2018 I did a 5-film chain starring missing link #3. I've probably seen "Anchors Aweigh" but I can't prove it right now, so 4 out of 12 brings me up to 65 out of 195, still holding at 33.33%
THE PLOT: G.J. Echternkamp tells the story of his relationship with his parents, his mother Cindy and his step-father, Frank. Frank used to be a member of OXO, a band from the '80's and Cindy was the ultimate groupie who married Frank and thought life would be glamorous, but that's not how it turned out.
AFTER: I had this one pegged as a "based on a true story" movie pretty early on, based on the fact that the lead character was named G.J., the same as the film's director - plus the main character is a filmmaker trying to apply to film school, much like a character in "Happy Endings" just four days ago. After that, things sort of fell into place, like there really was an 80's band named OXO, and they did have a bass player named Frank, and so on. Of course during the end credits they put up photos of the real Frank and Cindy next to pictures of the actors who played them, as many films do these days, to inject that extra dose of truthiness.
But of course, this then raises the questions about how close the fictional Frank and Cindy come to the real people, and if the real people are so fascinating, why aren't we watching a documentary instead of a fictionalized version of one? I guess some documentaries, like "White Boy", end up becoming fiction films, too, like "White Boy Rick" - it turns out some people don't watch any documentaries at all, but some of them might watch the same story if Matthew McConaughey is appearing in it. Anyway, let's break it down.
G.J. comes back to live with his parents (mother and step-father) after several years away, and we learn later that he's been raised by his grandmother, who left him money for film school when she died. We also learn that he tested well as a teen and somehow skipped high school, but it took him eight years to finish college, or something like that, so it's a bit of a wash. If he went to college, I'm not quite sure why he didn't just study film in college, which would have killed two birds with one stone. I went to film school but I also had to fulfill NYU's requirements in things like English, History, Math and Science - thank God I passed several A.P. exams in high school, which got me college credit toward most of those requirements, I just had to take Intro to Psychology (science) and Astronomy (which counted as a Math class, for some reason). I was then able to spend more of my time on film courses, and as a result I was able to graduate a year early, which saved my parents a bunch of money and enabled me to be student loan free. In return I've been paying my parents' cable bill for the last 15 years, and I like to tell myself I got the better of that deal - any time I visit them I still have access to (non-premium) cable and wi-fi that may not be great, but it works - and the rest of the time they get to watch CBS, PBS and History Channel in HD.
Sorry, back to Frank and Cindy. G.J. soon learns that their relationship is quite unusual, Frank can't climb the stairs so he lives on the ground floor, where there is no bathroom but plenty of old coffee cans, and Cindy sleeps upstairs and decorates the house with items swiped from other people's porches, or (one assumes) collected from the trash. He's always tooling around in his sound studio, which is decked out with the latest equipment and she's always making plans for how to better her life, none of which ever come to fruition. He's an alcoholic and she's a smoker and pill-popper, but both are constantly preparing to get sober, or claiming to be sober by their own definition of that condition. Moving back in with them brings G.J. (or "Geej", which is about as horrible of a nickname as it is difficult to say) right into the middle of their cycles of addiction and co-dependency, so naturally he starts filming them, hoping to end up with some kind of short documentary that can secure him a spot in the Arts Center.
Unfortunately, he learns that the rules of quantum physics are in place here, and the act of observing and recording his parents' dynamic has an effect on it, and inserting himself into their equation makes them bounce back and forth between doting parents, quarreling lovers and a pair of roommates who can't quite seem to function together, yet also can't bring themselves to the point where they can consider any kind of separation. This seems somewhat impossible and untenable, yet at the same time very real and believable. If you live with any one person long enough, you may find that their quirks will have a very special way of getting under your skin, yet you also can't contemplate living without them, so ultimately there becomes a form of begrudging acceptance of all that they are and the crazy things they do. They've both got pre-loaded responses to justify their own bad behavior by pointing out things that the other one did that could be regarded as much worse.
That's a relationship, I'm not saying it's the best one or the most productive one, but it's at least a long-lasting one. And people often have plans within plans that may not ever happen, but the human mind does go down these avenues, thinking about what they'd do if the other person moved out or passed away, or deciding to go on job interviews, but only after they get their teeth fixed or buy some better clothing, and those things may or may not ever happen, and on some level, that's OK too. "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans", somebody once sang. This really should be called "Lennon's Paradox", and while it doesn't specifically say you shouldn't make plans, or that the process is pointless, but rather that making plans is only part of life, and another part is things happening that you couldn't possibly plan for, so you've got to roll with the changes.
All of this qualifies the film for inclusion here in the romance/relationship chain, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it makes for the best story - I'm not a big fan of "Let me take my life experiences and turn them into a movie" because to me that's very ego-centric, and it's the kind of attitude that people have when they're trying to get into film school. You may be sitting on a few interesting anecdotes about your own life, but you can't force other people to find those anecdotes interesting. These events may be real, but that doesn't make them important, you know what I mean? I tried several times to turn the break-up of my first marriage into a screenplay, but each time I got bogged down in negative thoughts like, "Sure, these events meant something to me, but how do I know that other people would be interested in them?" So while the process of reliving the events was very therapeutic, the story never got formed into anything that I was willing to show to others.
I wish I could have seen more of G.J.'s biological father, who's played by Marc Maron, who's only in the film for a short time, although also heard leaving long rhyming messages on an answering machine. To me this was the most fascinating character in the film, he lives in a trailer with several cats and I don't know what his job is or how he's slept with so many women or the extent to which he is also neurotic and messed-up. Great casting, I love Marc Maron and I wanted to see more of him. But perhaps his character is so interesting because so much is unknown, so it's a tough call.
Maybe we all have plans that don't develop fully, life is long and there are many choices of roads to walk down, and nobody can walk down all of them. To me it sort of feels like cheating to get further along by making a story out of part of your journey, unless that's a super-interesting story, and this one only got me about halfway there. Which is not nothing, but neither is it everything.
UPDATE: I just found out that this story WAS a documentary before it was a fiction film - and both versions are currently on Netflix. Obviously I can't squeeze in the doc version without breaking my chain, but if you want, you can watch them back-to-back. Better hurry, before one of them disappears from that platform, which could happen at any time. That means, however, that the same filmmaker was double-dipping, telling the same story from his life several times, and to me that's almost like cheating twice.
Also starring Rene Russo (last seen in "Velvet Buzzsaw"), Johnny Simmons (The Stanford Prison Experiment"), Jane Levy (last seen in "Fun Size"), Marc Maron (last seen in "Joker"), Jessica Garrison, Claire Titelman, Fabianne Therese (last seen in "A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III").
RATING: 5 out of 10 missed job interviews
ANSWERS: The missing TCM "360 Degrees of Oscar" links are Jane Powell, Ann Miller, Howard Keel, Kathryn Grayson, Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron, Maurice Chevalier, Jeannette MacDonald, Nelson Eddy, Nigel Bruce, Ralph Forbes.
No comments:
Post a Comment