BEFORE: This is another one of those films that's slipped by me over the years, I probably had several opportunities to watch it, but have passed them up over and over. Finally I think last year I was feeling like I was running out of material, or perhaps I was thinking ahead in July or August about needing more material for February, so I recorded this one and several others. Now I have to clear several films off of my DVR, just in case it dies again, forcing me to rent all those films separately, which could get expensive. Clearing my Netflix queue is important, but making space on the DVR is even more important.
Lisa Kudrow carries over from "Long Shot" -
Over on Turner Classic Movies, Edna May Oliver links from "Pride and Prejudice" to tomorrow's first film, can you fill in the other links? Answers below.
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 13 on TCM (31 Days of Oscar, Day 13)
7:45 am "David Copperfield" (1935) with _____________ linking to:
10:15 am "A Tale of Two Cities" (1935) with _____________ linking to:
12:30 pm "Five Star Final" (1931) with _____________ linking to:
2:15 pm "Little Caesar" (1930) with _____________ linking to:
4:00 pm "I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang" (1932) with _____________ linking to:
6:00 pm "The Commandos Strike at Dawn" (1942) with _____________ linking to:
8:00 pm "When Worlds Collide" (1951) with _____________ linking to:
9:45 pm "The Young Philadelphians" (1959) with _____________ linking to:
12:15 am "Night and Day" (1946) with _____________ linking to:
2:45 am "Destination Tokyo" (1943) with _____________ linking to:
5:15 am "Pride of the Marines" (1945)
I thought I was looking at another goose-egg today, but then I remembered that I watched just about every Cary Grant movie ever made - so I'm 1 for 11 today, having seen only "Destination Tokyo", bringing me up to 42 seen out of 150, just 28%. I may enjoy the linking format better than others, but it's wreaking havoc on my stats this year.
THE PLOT: Multiple stories woven together creates a witty look at love, family and the sheer unpredictability of life itself.
AFTER: I've been aware of this film for some time - it played at Sundance back in 2005, only I stopped going to that festival in 2004 (I think I was also there in 1998, the year of "Montana" and "Next Stop Wonderland" and 2001, the year of "Memento", "Donnie Darko", "Double Whammy" and "Super Troopers", if memory serves...) This just FEELS like a Sundance film, because everything's so complicated, much more so than it has to be - that's the kind of stuff a festival programmer goes for, especially if they have a mandate to challenge the audience or push the narrative boundaries.
With these intersective narratives, sometimes it's very easy to get lost - the IMDB synopsis says that there are 10 stories here that share characters, but I think if you break it down another way to look at it is that there are three main stories, but each one has several characters. Because it's really difficult for me to think of this as 10 individual stories, for some reason I feel more comfortable grouping them together - and anyway, I think even if it is 10 not every character gets a fully fleshed-out story, that just wouldn't be possible, so I think counting them that way does the film some kind of disservice.
SPOILER ALERT, because it's really impossible to talk about this film without breaking down the complicated plot.
One story/group of stories is about Mamie, a grown-up woman who had sex with her step-brother when they were teenagers, and though she was sent to get an abortion she secretly gave up the baby for adoption instead, and then 20 years later, she's contacted by a young man who claims to know the identity of her son (though the son has never contacted her, despite the fact that he could have) and in exchange for giving her his information, he wants to make a film about the anticipated reunion, which would be guaranteed to get him into some filmmaking class at the AFI.
The second story/group of stories concerns that woman's step-brother, Charley, now a restaurant owner who's in a relationship with another man, and his boyfriend is best friends with a lesbian who tried to use his sperm to conceive a child, only it didn't work and they adopted. However Charley now notices that the child looks a lot like his boyfriend, so he suspects that the lesbian couple lied about the conception not working because they don't want to share any parental rights.
The third story/group of stories is about a young man, Otis, who works in Charley's restaurant and is also in a band, he meets Jude on Karaoke Night at the restaurant and asks her to replace the lead singer in his band, and Otis and Jude fool around, though most people believe that Otis is gay. Complications set in when Jude decides she'd rather date Otis' rich father, Frank, instead.
And all that is just the SET-UP for the film, I've really only given away the first 10 or 15 minutes, because each segmented third gets more complicated still - and the film jumps rather liberally between all three stories, but thankfully the time is mostly linear, except for the opening scene, which then snaps back to tell the back story of how the opening shocking event came to be. The film then jumps back 20 years to detail how the step-siblings came together, then back to the (near-)present. If this film were made today, however, probably all of the scenes would be in random order, and we wouldn't know how any of the characters in the different stories were connected to each other until the very end, thus forcing you to watch the movie a second time with those relationships in mind. The revelation of the child being alive, therefore, would occur in Act 5 of the script, rather than in Act 2, for maximum shock value.
The film is only 15 years old, but that's a world of difference in filmmaking, also in political correctness. Speaking of Sundance, when I was there in 1998 one of the most controversial films was "High Art", which was about lesbian relationships. By 2006 it seems like it was more "OK" to have multiple gay characters, as this film does, but yet there are still instances where gay characters here are seen as somehow imperfect, Otis for example is afraid to tell his father that he's gay, and Jude calls him a "faggot" once or twice and makes fun of him. Really? We were still back there then? I'd like to think you couldn't put that sort of thing in a movie now, it feels more dated than those giant 80's haircuts in "Some Kind of Wonderful".
There's also a technique used here of an omniscient narrator of sorts, at certain times half of the screen gets filled with white lettering on a black background, informing us of certain details of a characters past, or even future. It's a little creepy to read something like, "Frank would only sleep with two women after her..." - why, is he sick? Is he going to die in a car crash or something? Who's telling me this, and how do they know what they know? It leads me to feel like all of these characters are sort of circling the drain, and it's just a matter of time - everybody's got a limited amount of time on this planet, sure, but if we think of everyone as already doomed but just not aware of it, we're all going to be too depressed to get through our day. Plus, I thought this was supposed to be a comedy, and now I'm not laughing.
But the biggest problem seems to be characters acting in inconsistent or unlikely ways. If somebody wants to become a filmmaker, for example, I'll support that dream. But how many filmmakers do you know who got their start by blackmailing someone into being the subject of a documentary? None, right, because it just doesn't happen. The young filmmaker then gets convinced that Mamie's lover, a massage therapist, would make a better subject for his film because he claims to be a "sex worker". But, is he? Sometimes he says he gives many clients the titular "happy ending", but at other times he admits that Mamie is his only client that gets this special treatment. So, umm, which is true, and why would he lie about it, just to be in a short film?
Similarly, the gay couple that's friends with the lesbian couple - I can see this friendship occuring in real life, sure, but the way that Charley handles the confrontation over their son's parentage - who the HELL would choose to do it that way? And then the lesbian couple's reaction is simultaneously too big AND too small of a reaction. It's something like, "We're having dinner with you tonight, to tell you that we don't want to hang out with you any more." Umm, she realizes that they're hanging out RIGHT at that moment, right? Something tells me that if a friendship went south that quickly, there wouldn't be that one last hangout - you don't ask friends out to break up with them, you just stop doing things with them. Then there's another revelation that seems particularly cruel, even for ex-friends.
Every relationship is doomed here, everybody's clock is ticking, even if they don't realize it. Oh, so the title of the film is meant to be ironic? Great, thanks for the heads-up. And if everybody really knew their partners, truly knew them and all their little secrets, nobody would be together any more and everybody would just realize the futility of relationships and be single for the rest of their lives. Do I need to hear this, just two days before Valentine's Day? No, I do not. I stand on my viewing record, though, and break-ups are part of relationships, so the film stands, but my dissatisfaction will be noted in the rating.
Also starring Steve Coogan (last seen in "Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story"), Tom Arnold (last seen in "The Great Buck Howard"), Jason Ritter (last seen in "The Meddler"), Maggie Gyllenhaal (last seen in "Mona Lisa Smile"), Bobby Cannavale (last seen in "The Irishman"), Jesse Bradford (last seen in "W."), David Sutcliffe (last seen in "Under the Tuscan Sun"), Laura Dern (last seen in "October Sky"), Sarah Clarke, Hallee Hirsh (last seen in "You've Got Mail"), Eric Jungmann, Amanda Foreman (last seen in "Super 8"), with cameos from Johnny Galecki (last seen in "Bounce"), Peter Horton.
RATING: 4 out of 10 moving boxes
ANSWERS: The missing TCM "360 Degrees of Oscar" links are Basil Rathbone, H.B. Warner, Edward G. Robinson, Glenda Farrell, Paul Muni, Richard Derr, Barbara Rush, Alexis Smith, Alan Hale, Dane Clark.
No comments:
Post a Comment