BEFORE: Yes, I know it's a special day in the sports world, and I'll probably fast-forward through the game just to watch the commercials for old time's sake, and the halftime show so I can pretend that I'm aware of what music the kids are listening to these days. And we made sure to have a lot of snacks on hand, and we also made sure to not invite anyone else over, so there will be more snacks for us while we watch the Puppy Bowl. Hey, when you get to a be a bit older and you want different things - now the day isn't about getting together with friends to drink beer and eat like a pig, it's about staying home and doing that. Well, this way nobody has to drink and drive, get it? Or share food from big communal bowls like animals.
But here I am, a day late but ready to start the romance chain. You may well ask, why start it HERE, with THIS film? Well, I put my romance films together in a document and moved them around until I achieved what I determined to be maximum linkage, with what I think is the smallest amount of mortar (films on Netflix & Hulu) to connect the bricks that I already had on hand (cable & DVD). There's no way to be sure, there could have been a "better" way to put them together, but usually if I get to a point where everything seems to connect and that leaves me with a chain that I know I can connect TO and lead away FROM, that's probably a good time to stop messing with it. At that point my eyes are probably weary from staring at a computer screen, anyway. So all I had to do in January was to come up with 31 (OK, it became 34) films in a chain whose last film linked to THIS one, and I did - therefore Charlie Day carries over again from "Hotel Artemis".
No problem - and all I have to do now is come up with a 35-film that starts at the end of the romance chain that will get me to Hitler's birthday on April 20. With luck, from there I can link to something for Mother's Day, and so on. It's a sickness, I know, but I think earlier today I cracked the code and put together a chain with the right number of links - I've got to live with it for a while to make sure it's really the direction I want to go in, and if it leaves me in a good place, with a lot of options to make the next chain. I'll have until mid-March to confirm it, or if it's good, maybe fine-tune it a little.
In the meantime, the reason this one makes the list is that I'm intensely curious about it - more on that in a minute, first let me post tomorrow's "31 Days of Oscar" schedule on TCM so you can make your own plans and play along at home. Una Merkel links from "42nd Street" to tomorrow's first film, can you fill in the other links? Answers below.
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 3 on TCM (31 Days of Oscar, Day 3)
6:30 am "Born to Dance" (1936) with _____________ linking to:
8:30 am "Broadway Melody of 1936" (1936) with _____________ linking to:
10:45 am "Lady Be Good" (1941) with _____________ linking to:
12:45 pm "Neptune's Daughter" (1949) with _____________ linking to:
2:30 pm "On the Town" (1949) with _____________ linking to:
4:15 pm "The Tender Trap" (1955) with _____________ linking to:
6:15 pm "The Bachelor Party" (1957) with _____________ linking to:
8:00 pm "Bus Stop" (1956) with _____________ linking to:
9:45 pm "Some Like It Hot" (1959) with _____________ linking to:
12:00 am "The Great Race" (1965) with _____________ linking to:
2:45 am "Pocketful of Miracles" (1961) with _____________ linking to:
5:15 am "Cimarron" (1960)
I've seen "On the Town", "The Tender Trap", "Bus Stop", "Some Like It Hot" and "The Great Race", so another 5 out of 12 seen brings me up to 12 out of 34, or just over 35%. I wish I had time to watch more of these, but I don't right now - anyway, it's not the "Cimarron" that won the Best Picture Oscar, it's the 1960 remake.
THE PLOT: When a successful television writer's daughter becomes the interest of an aging filmmaker with an appalling past, he becomes worried about how to handle the situation.
AFTER: Perhaps you've heard about this film, or maybe you haven't, considering that it's not available on any of the popular streaming services. Louis C.K., its star and director, was the subject of news stories about sexual misconduct that broke a week or so before this film was scheduled to be released in November 2017. It had a promising screening at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2017, where the distribution rights were sold, and then after the distributor cancelled the premiere due to "unforeseen circumstances", namely all the negative publicity surrounding Louis C.K., he bought back the rights from The Orchard and took a loss on the whole deal. This is what made me so curious to watch it - which I was able to do by borrowing an Academy screener, one that was apparently mailed out before all distribution plans were scrapped. (You might find a posting of it online, but flipped or sped-up, or maybe in a torrent somewhere, but that's it. Proceed with caution.)
But you know how when someone tells you that you can't watch something, you want to see it even more? So I've been dying to know, like, what's IN this film? What does Louis C.K. say or do in it that's so bad that the film got pulled? As a comedian, he's a bit like the U.S. version of Steve Coogan, since he usually plays a fictional version of himself on his TV shows, and the audience has to figure out just how close that fiction is coming to his real-life life. Since he plays a divorced dad in this film, one who works as a TV writer, which all describes him IRL, I figured there might be some insight here on what went down behind-the-scenes during his scandal. I know, like others caught up in the sexual harassment scandals of 2017/2018, he's been lying low, and we're all supposed to boycott his films, or something. But I was just so damn curious - I've met the comedian in person once or twice, watched all of his cable and Netflix stand-up specials, even saw him live once, performing at the Wang Center in Boston on New Year's Eve.
If you don't remember the charges made against the comedian, you can Google them or look him up on Wikipedia on your own time. I run a clean shop here, so I won't list the accusations, but I can't stop you from doing research either. Did he act inappropriately? For sure, but it's a little complicated, because he claims to have always asked permission, no one's accused him of rape or touching anyone (umm, except himself) and he later admitted everything, apologized, and basically put himself in career jail. The length of the sentence has yet to be determined, but I've noticed that accused rapist Kobe Bryant has pretty much been exonerated in the press, and all he had to do was die in a helicopter crash. How long a man accused of bad behavior has to spend in career jail is perhaps proportionate to how bad his behavior was, and comedians like Aziz Ansari are working again, so there is hope for redemption, I guess. It's not really for me to say.
Anyway, "I Love You, Daddy" isn't really about HIS bad behavior, in this film he plays Glen, a divorced dad with a 17-year-old daughter. (In real life, C.K.'s oldest daughter would have been 15 at the time of the film's release, but she's 17 or 18 now.) Glen is engaged in a sort of competition with his ex-wife, as his daughter, China, wants to live with him, because he's rich and has a nicer apartment, access to a private plane, and he basically spoils her and lets her do whatever she wants. He offers her no sense of discipline, she's in the last term of her senior year of high-school, went on spring break in Florida and Glen's already authorized a "gap year" for her, so she's not even working on applying to colleges. All of this produces a very dangerous environment for a teenager - she's the kind that never would have made it through Wonka's chocolate factory in one piece.
Glen finds that he can't say "no" to his daughter, because whenever he agrees to let her off the hook or gives her what she wants, he gets an "I love you, Daddy". He should be training her to face the world, but instead, she's training him - and she knows enough to throw him that little emotional bone so his brain gives him a little chemical stimulus, and he's therefore fallen into the trap of thinking that being the more permissive parent is the same as being the "nicer" parent, when she probably needs tough love more than any other kind.
His TV work brings him into contact with an actress who's a potential lead for his upcoming show (and a potential love interest for himself) and going to one of her parties in the Hamptons brings Glen's daughter into contact with Leslie Goodwin, a veteran film director and personal hero of Glen's, but also an older man with a reputation for chasing young girls. You can probably think of a couple real-life film directors with a similar reputation, I thought of two, both of whom are still making movies in their 80's and are not retired or blacklisted (yet). The 68-year-old Goodwin strikes up a conversation with China, and before long they're hanging out together, he buys her clothes and she models them for him, which is creepy enough, but then China wants to go off to France with him. Of course, Glen says "No, absolutely not," at first but eventually gives in.
This would have been a perfect time to finally grow a backbone and put his foot down, cutting off the relationship between the old man and the teenager, so a viewer might scratch their head and wonder why Glen allows his daughter to run off to Paris as part of this older man's entourage (several other people are traveling with him as a group). First off, Glen isn't completely sure what the director's intentions are, but also Glen himself is starting to date a (presumably) younger actress, so it would seem hypocritical of him to say his daughter couldn't befriend or date an older man. Also, when you factor in the psychology of teenagers, it's very possible that forbidding China from doing something will make her want to do that thing even more. So yes, some discipline is required here, but too much discipline could have the opposite effect. Parents tell teenagers all the time not to drink, smoke or fool around, but most of them keep right on doing all that - at some point you just have to let them make mistakes and get hurt, because that builds up emotional scar tissue, and they'll be stronger for it in the long run.
As a society we've determined, quite arbitrarily, that an 18-year-old is an adult, but someone who's 17 years and 364 days old is still a child. This is pretty ridiculous, someone doesn't mature overnight just because they've been alive for 18 of Earth's revolutions around the sun, it's a gradual process. I moved away to college while still 17 and I was by myself in New York City (OK, my sister was attending the same college...) and yeah, I drank and smoked a little weed (this was back in 1986-87) and if I could have gotten laid then, I probably would have done that, too. But that took me another three years, because I had zero dating game.
My point here is, these are all complicated issues. As his character Glen, Louis C.K. confides in his younger girlfriend with his internal debate over watching his daughter (potentially) dating a much older man. It's wrong because of the math, but to him it's also wrong to cast judgement on another person's relationship. Anxiety upon anxiety follows - he didn't instill enough discipline, so he's beating himself up for not being a better father. Then whatever happens to his daughter as a result is also his fault, and so on down the line. But again, if he steps in to try to put an end to the situation, he could drive her right into the older man's arms, and then he's caused the very situation he's been trying to prevent.
To the story's credit, we never really know if the older director scored with Glen's daughter - maybe he did, maybe he didn't. Was the old man so cool that he won her love by pretending not to NEED her love, or did he set her up with a younger boyfriend so when that relationship crashed and burned, she'd come running to him for consolation, instead of her own father? It's all debatable, and maybe that's a good thing. Every father eventually has to come to terms with his daughter as an adult, and dealing with that first boyfriend, when forced to think of his daughter as a sexual being, that's probably tough for any man. I don't envy a father when that happens, but it's part of life.
Outside of all that, this film plays like sort of an homage to Woody Allen - it's in black and white, the main character is in the entertainment business, and there are complicated relationship issues and all the anxieties that come with them. But the average Woody Allen film also manages to be FUNNY, and I'm a little disappointed that Louis C.K. seemed to have forgotten to do that. Parts here are slice-of-life amusing, but nothing's laugh-out-loud funny. But then, if the director really wanted to do a tribute to Woody, he would have had Glen dating his own daughter, am I right? Talk about complicated relationship issues...let's not forget that Woody married his longtime ex-girlfriend's adopted daughter, so his ex is now his mother-in-law.
Also starring Louis C.K. (last seen in "The Last Laugh"), Chloë Grace Moretz (last seen in "Let Me In"), John Malkovich (last seen in "The Portrait of a Lady"), Rose Byrne (last seen in "Sunshine"), Edie Falco (last seen in "The Comedian"), Pamela Adlon, Helen Hunt (last seen in "Bob Roberts"), Ebonee Noel, Dan Puck, Lucca De Oliveira, the voice of Albert Brooks (last seen in "A Most Violent Year"), with a cameo from Rich Vos (last seen in "Top Five").
RATING: 5 out of 10 Emmy awards in the background
ANSWERS: The missing TCM "360 Degrees of Oscar" links are Buddy Ebsen, Eleanor Powell, Red Skelton, Betty Garrett, Frank Sinatra, Carolyn Jones, Don Murray, Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Arthur O'Connell, and Glenn Ford.
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