BEFORE: So I kind of dove in on the romance chain, knowing that in a few days, the chain has a fairly big scheduling problem - since I flipped the whole chain around at some point, so I could link in from "Hotel Artemis" in January (I figured I'd stick the other end in mid-March, and figure out that outro linking later, which I did last week) - I was scheduled to watch a film's sequel before the original film itself. Not too much of a problem, I could just watch the movies in the correct order, and then just post the review of the 2nd film first - but still, it's been eating at me as a less than ideal situation as it draws closer.
But I worked HARD on getting all 41 films in a linkable chain, and I don't want to tear it all apart, especially since I've already started. If I start moving things around now, there's no guarantee that I can get to the same ending point in the same amount of steps - and since I already worked out the paths to future calendar points, the whole plan could unravel. Still, last night I looked at JUST the 38 films left in the chain, and noticed there are dozens of connections everywhere that I'm not using. Jeff Garlin from "Laggies" is back two days later, for example, and I think he's also in another film later in the chain. He's not the only one either, the Rob Riggle films are split up, so are the Michael Ceras, Ryan Reynolds is in three films that aren't next to each other, same goes for Justin Long, Jason Sudeikis, Candice Bergen and several other notable people.
That's my hidden secret, how I make this linking thing look easy - because I only need ONE link to get me to the next movie, and each movie has a couple dozen people in it, at least. The linking possibilities in a chain increase exponentially when I look at the big picture, so in fact sometimes it's hard to know which way to go, simply because there are so many possible paths. So I went through JUST the cast lists of the romance chain and found every connection I wasn't using, and colored those names green, so I could see all the possible exits from the path I'm on - all I needed was two green names in the same film to have a chance of flipping a small section around. And then I saw it, a section of just 8 films that included the films that were "out of order", which could be flipped around and link back up with the chain on both ends. So that's what I'm going to do, and it fixes the chain without destroying the other linking work I've already done. There are still going to be missed connections all over the place, but that's normal, as I can only follow ONE connection out of each film.
Now, this changes which film I'm going to watch on February 14, and I'm not crazy about which film landed on Valentine's Day, but I have to think that's the lesser of two evils, compared to watching or reviewing a sequel before the first film in a series. This happened last year with both the documentary and the horror chains, with enough alternate connections I was able to find new paths to get me to the end of the chains by using the same exact films. A neat, tidy, little solution, and I'm glad I found it now before the opportunity passed by.
Martin Starr carries over from "Save the Date".
Meanwhile, over on Turner Classic Movies, Robert Vaughn links from "The Magnificent Seven" to tomorrow's first film, can you fill in the other links? Answers below.
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 6 on TCM (31 Days of Oscar, Day 6)
7:15 am "The Caretakers" (1963) with _____________ linking to:
9:15 am "Caged" (1950) with _____________ linking to:
11:00 am "Above and Beyond" (1952) with _____________ linking to:
1:15 pm "All the Brothers Were Valiant" (1953) with _____________ linking to:
3:00 pm "King Solomon's Mines" (1950) with _____________ linking to:
4:45 pm "Back Street" (1941) with _____________ linking to:
6:15 pm "Three Comrades" (1938) with _____________ linking to:
8:00 pm "The Lives of a Bengal Lancer" (1935) with _____________ linking to:
10:00 pm "A Farewell to Arms" (1932) with _____________ linking to:
11:45 pm "The Sin of Madelon Claudet" (1931) with _____________ linking to:
1:15 am "Crossfire" (1947) with _____________ linking to:
3:00 am "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" (1944) with _____________ linking to:
5:30 am "None Shall Escape" (1944)
Wow, what a bunch of stinkers - what a difference a day makes, huh? I don't know how you can follow up a day with "North by Northwest", "The Apartment", "The Caine Mutiny" and "The Dirty Dozen" with this line-up. That's linking for you, it's a fickle mistress. I've seen NONE of these films, like crossing "The Lives of a Bengal Lancer" off my to-do list just hasn't been top priorty for me, sorry. Going 0 for 13 today puts me in the hole, I'm now at 21 out of 70, or 30%. This feels like the line-up TCM should have run on Super Bowl Sunday, since almost nobody was going to be tuning in anyway - and since the whole chain is a giant circle, that should have been possible.
THE PLOT: A man watches his life unravel after he is left by his girlfriend of 10 years.
AFTER: What the hell is this? It seems like some people make movies just to be "challenging", but that really just pisses me off. Or maybe they were going for "quirky", but ened up with something that's reminiscent of an adult "Napoleon Dynamite" minus all the humor and charm. All I could think was that this is a bit like a Wes Anderson film if he were recovering from some kind of head injury.
There's a reason why the tagline on IMDB and the plot on Wikipedia are so short and vague, because if you knew the details of the film, you might decide not to watch it at all. It's about a loser guy who is an acting teacher in the L.A. area, and he's so repulsive that his blind girlfriend of 10 years recoils at his touch. She works for a medical company and is frequently traveling out of town, and kudos for portraying a blind person as the more "together" person in a couple, she doesn't need her boyfriend to pick her up at the airport or do anything for her, maybe things were different 10 years ago when they got together. But slowly we realize that she's moved on emotionally, and may even have a lover on the side - that's something I haven't seen before in a film, and I think the classification of the "handicapped" person as the more capable, being the breaker-upper rather than the breakee is the best plot element here. That's maybe the only reason I won't score this film any lower.
Break-ups suck, for sure, I've been there and I remember a few days where I didn't want to go anywhere or do anything, and my workday basically consisted of watching the clock move because I had no motivation at all. That's the FEELING that this film is trying to represent, I think, but it should be a wake-up call for a person or character to change their ways, fix what went wrong or at least dust himself off and keep moving forward. But this film wants to stay right there and wallow in its main character's loser-ness, and it's practically painful to watch.
In his acting class, Isaac really favors one young actor, again and again, while telling his female scene partner that she's doing NOTHING with the "great gifts" that her male counterpart keeps giving her. After class, the actor (the teacher's pet) talks to Isaac about getting booked for some film that shoots in Europe for six months, and later we see Isaac's agent booking him for some national commercials, only with his look it ends up being for a medical campaign telling people of the dangers of hepatitis, and he plays the sick guy. Later still in the film he auditions for an adult diapers commercial, which seems a bit on the nose because he also apparently wears them throughout the film, but this I think was a little unclear.
I didn't pick up on the meaning of the scene that we keep seeing over and over in the acting class - it's a scene from Chekhov's "The Seagull", but I'm not up on Chekhov (dumb it down!) so I didn't know this is an important part of the play where Nina and Konstantin reunite after Nina spends time away from him. I guess this is supposed to contrast with the scenes where Isaac's girlfriend is always traveling, and set us up for the big moment where she finally comes back to him, not just physically but also emotionally, and then it's more shocking when she returns, just to tell him that she's moving out. Yeah, I see what you did there with the play-within-the-play, but I'm just not impressed.
When the actor from class comes over for dinner, Isaac sort of grabs him after giving him a tour of the house, and I honestly couldn't tell if he was fighting with him, or trying to put romantic moves on him. Perhaps this is best left ambiguous, but why was it staged so poorly that I couldn't tell what was going on?
We do get some insight when Isaac attends a seder meal at his parents' house. The casting of the actors, along with their portrayals of his mother and father as similarly neurotic, constantly arguing (some might say stereotypical) older Jews may explain a bit about why Isaac is the way he is, only that's something of an excuse, and it's a bit too pat. He's clearly the most screwed-up person in the film, by intent, and you get the feeling that there just wasn't enough time to do a deep dive into just how much of a mess he is, and the true reasons why.
The whole family is there - this is where Martin Starr shows up again as Isaac's brother (and he'll be back later in the romance chain, too, but not tomorrow, for reasons explained above) and Isaac's pregnant (lesbian?) sister, plus for some reason, the family's psychiatrist who feels the need to explain that he is separated from Nessa (but I had no idea who Nessa was or why this was important) and those twin mean girls from "The Shining" seem to be there, too. Plus there's someone helping with the cooking, and I couldn't tell if this was a live-in maid or cook or somebody's wife, no, no, don't bother to explain it, that would be too much work. But the weirdest of all is Isaac's sister-in-law (I think), the mother of those twin girls (I guess) who doesn't talk at all, which is very creepy. During the seder meal she holds up her empty plate for some reason, but I don't think that's part of the ceremony, and at another point she's seen outside in the yard, walking around in a circle, backwards.
There's so much weirdness in the end that I found it hard to keep track of it all. I didn't even pick up on the fact that Cleo, the woman he fantasizes about and then dates at the end of the film, was also the make-up artist he met at the photo shoot, and made a terribly clumsy pass at. But after they eat at a Chinese restaurant together, Isaac volunteers himself to come to her family's BBQ as her date. Similarly, so many lingering questions, like why did the birds die?
Also, what was up with Marla Gibbs at this party near the end? Don't get me wrong, it's great to see her still working, though casting her as an older relative, someone who's had a few strokes, is an enormous waste of her talents. The best thing about some of those old episodes of "The Jeffersons" was her verbal sparring matches with her boss, George - and here her character can barely even talk, and even then she's saying some kind of backwards nonsense. Isaac can apparently understand her, and with subtitles we can see what he THINKS she is telling him, but at this point, he's an unreliable narrator at best, and possibly insane as well. Forget what I said before about Wes Anderson with a head injury, with people walking and talking backwards, it's more like David Lynch made a family-based sitcom out of "Twin Peaks".
So this party situation then unfolds like some weird, racially-reversed version "Get Out" and I'm left wondering if that was in fact the intent. Isaac then removes the older woman in a wheelchair from the party and goes running down the street with her, forgetting that he drove a car to get there. WTF? And then at the end, Isaac is seen getting his car towed away over the closing credits, because it won't start. What does it all mean in the end, it's very frustrating. What's that line about life being a tale of sound and fury, told by an idiot, signifying nothing? This film could go a long way toward proving that point.
Also starring Brett Gelman (last seen in "Wilson"), Judy Greer (last seen in Our Souls at Night"), Michael Cera (last seen in "Molly's Game"), Nia Long (last seen in "Boiler Room"), Shiri Appleby (last seen in "The Meddler"), Fred Melamed (last seen in "Adult Beginners"), Gillian Jacobs (last seen in "Life of the Party"), Rhea Perlman (last seen in "Matilda"), Megan Mullally (last seen in "The Disaster Artist"), Jeff Garlin (last seen in "Laggies"), Marla Gibbs, Rex Lee, Jon Daly (last seen in "A Futile and Stupid Gesture"), Elizabeth De Razzo, Ashley Silverman, Hank Chen, David Paymer (last seen in "Bounce").
RATING: 3 out of 10 verses of "One Million Matzo Balls" (is this a real Jewish party song? This was the only other not-bad thing in the film...)
ANSWERS: The missing TCM "360 Degrees of Oscar" links are Ellen Corby, Eleanor Parker, James Whitmore, Stewart Granger, Richard Carlson, Margaret Sullivan, Franchot Tone, Gary Cooper, Helen Hayes, Robert Young, Robert Mitchum and Dorothy Morris.
No comments:
Post a Comment