BEFORE: Valentine's Day is in the rearview, but I've still got more films about romance and relationships to go - today's film is the halfway point, I think, and now I've got to work my way out of it. Some of the upcoming films are more relationship-oriented than romance-based, but that's OK, that feels sort of appropriate if I want to make some kind of transition, I can't just suddenly stop on a dime and pivot over to an action film or a sci-fi horror film, you know? Though I probably have in the past...
Eugenio Derbez carries over from "Overboard". Anna Faris will be back in just a couple of days.
Tomorrow on Turner Classic Movies, Keenan Wynn links from "Kind Lady" to the day's first film, can you fill in the other links? Answers below.
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 23 on TCM (31 Days of Oscar, Day 23)
6:15 am "Annie Get Your Gun" (1950) with _____________ linking to:
8:30 am "The Perils of Pauline" (1947) with _____________ linking to:
10:15 am "Wee Willie Winkie" (1937) with _____________ linking to:
12:00 pm "The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer" (1947) with _____________ linking to:
1:45 pm "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" (1939) with _____________ linking to:
4:00 pm "Suspicion" (1941) with _____________ linking to:
6:00 pm "Ivanhoe" (1952) with _____________ linking to:
8:00 pm "Waterloo Bridge" (1940) with _____________ linking to:
10:00 pm "Gone With the Wind" (1939) with _____________ linking to:
2:00 am "Mogambo" (1953) with _____________ linking to:
4:15 am "Knights of the Round Table" (1953)
Wow, they sure went to a lot of trouble just to get "Gone With the Wind" to air during prime-time. I guess that was worth it? I'm hitting for another 5 tomorrow: "Annie Get Your Gun", "The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer", "Suspicion", "Gone With the Wind", and "Knights of the Round Table" (which I watched last year on my King Arthur jag). So I'm up to 92 out of 266, or 34.5%, and I feel that may be my high score for the whole month, because I'm pulling a goose egg the next day - looks like I'll be limping to the finish line during the last week.
THE PLOT: Finding himself dumped after 25 years of marriage, a man who made a career of seducing rich older women must move in with his estranged sister, where he begins to learn the value of family.
AFTER: Again, I'm really out of my depth here, I have no firsthand knowledge of Latino culture - having characters speak Spanish for half of the movie is not a problem for me, because I tend to keep the captions on all the time these days, even during movies in English, so reading subtitles is no big deal. And thankfully somebody smart worked things out so that when characters start speaking in Spanish and the English subtitles come up, the English captions toggle off, which is great because nobody wants to see one set of captions blocking another, or worse, to have two sets of captions at the same time that say slightly different things.
I was expecting much worse out of this plot, which is basically about Maximo, a Mexican himbo who, as a young man, targeted the richest, oldest American woman he could find, had sex with her and moved to America as her husband, so he could be rich in America without working hard at all, as long as he stayed with his rich wife and satisfies her. Thankfully, the plot takes a twist after he's been with this wife for 25 years, basically waiting for her to die, only she takes up with a younger man and he's out of the picture because he signed a pre-nup. It's a very interesting gender-flip of the stereotypical situation of an older rich man dumping his faithful wife so he can be with a younger woman. Only when you flip it around, what happens to the slightly older husband, who no longer has a place to live, or a meal ticket?
Maximo's an interesting character because he has no clue how the world works - how to get a job, how to pay for things, how to cook or eat dinner like a normal person. So it's a classic fish-out-of-water idea, but in a way that I've never seen before. Umm, except for the fact that this actor played nearly the same character yesterday in "Overboard", only he was a rich person with amnesia. This time he's very conscious of the fact that he once HAD money, a mansion, servants taking care of him, and now it's gone. He tries crashing with his best friend (also a rich woman's boy-toy) by sleeping in a little girl's playhouse - which is a tiny mansion and bigger than most NYC apartments - only that goes badly when the little girl finds him there. He's then forced to track down his sister, who he hasn't seen in 20 years, and try to stay with her.
He meets his 10-year-old nephew, Hugo, and tries to teach him how to talk to girls. (Hey, I wish I'd known someone like that, I couldn't talk to girls until I was 19 or 20.). He gets into a lot of trouble with his sister, like earning money by having wrap-around ads placed on her car, then gets into more trouble when his sister makes him remove the ads, and the guys who paid him want their money back. He targets an older rich woman with a dead husband - coincidentally the grandmother of the girl that his nephew likes - and things don't go as planned there, either. On one level this is all pretty standard "things spiral out of control" stuff, but the interplay between Maximo, his sister and his nephew is thankfully charming enough to help me forgive a lot. Other characters are so over-the-top that they're essentially live-action cartoon characters, like the tough-guy car ad guys or the yogurt-store manager who rescues stray cats.
I may have an issue with the ending, because if you want to gauge Maximo's personal growth through the movie as some kind of learning experience, the way things get settled at the end doesn't really demonstrate that he's learned very much along the way, other than the importance of being with family. Other than that, the solution to everyone's problems is a bit too pat, and involves returning to his old habits, rather than any positive development or change. But it's not a film to be taken that seriously, I suppose.
Also starring Salma Hayek (last seen in "Tale of Tales"), Raphael Alejandro, Rob Lowe (last seen in "Super Troopers 2"), Kristen Bell (last heard in "Teen Titans GO! to the Movies"), Raquel Welch (last seen in "100 Rifles"), Linda Lavin (last seen in "The Intern"), Renee Taylor (last seen in "The Do-Over"), Rob Riggle (last seen in "Killers"), Rob Huebel (last seen in "Baywatch"), Rob Corddry (last seen in "Shimmer Lake"), McKenna Grace (last seen in "Captain Marvel"), Mather Zickel (last seen in "Suburbicon"), Michaela Watkins (last seen in "Thanks for Sharing"), Michael Cera (last seen in "Lemon"), Ben Schwartz (last seen in "Everybody's Fine"), Jeffrey Scott Basham, Omar Chaparro (also carrying over from "Overboard"), Noel Calabaza, Vadhir Derbez, Manelly Zepeda, Jose Eduardo Derbez, with a cameo from "Weird Al" Yankovic (last seen in "Tapeheads").
RATING: 5 out of 10 hoverboards
ANSWERS: The missing TCM "360 Degrees of Oscar" links are Betty Hutton, Constance Collier, Shirley Temple, Harry Davenport, Cedric Hardwicke, Joan Fontaine, Robert Taylor, Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable, Ava Gardner.
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