BEFORE: Gerard Butler carries over from "The Ugly Truth". A couple of other actors who were seen before in the romance chain but were NOT used as links are back tonight, and then a couple more are coming back tomorrow - it turned out to be an intricate grouping of 42 films that was connected to itself in many different ways, so that's what enabled me to switch around the order at the 11th hour and put out a more coherent month-plus of programming (according to my judgment) that still also kept the chain going.
Tomorrow on Turner Classic Movies, Herman Bing links from "The Guardsman" to the day's first film, can you fill in the other links? Answers below.
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 28 on TCM (31 Days of Oscar, Day 28)
6:00 am "The Great Ziegfeld" (1936) with _____________ linking to:
9:00 am "Mrs. Miniver" (1942) with _____________ linking to:
11:30 am "The Actress (1953) with _____________ linking to:
1:15 pm "The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean" (1972) with _____________ linking to:
3:30 pm "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (1958) with _____________ linking to:
5:45 pm "East of Eden" (1955) with _____________ linking to:
8:00 pm "Rebel Without a Cause" (1955) with _____________ linking to:
10:00 pm "Splendor in the Grass" (1961) with _____________ linking to:
12:15 am "Shampoo" (1975) with _____________ linking to:
2:15 am "Best Friends" (1982) with _____________ linking to:
4:15 am "The Seventh Cross" (1944)
Ah, I'm doing much better with tomorrow's line-up than I've done for quite a while - I've seen "Mrs. Miniver", "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof", "East of Eden", "Rebel Without a Cause", "Splendor in the Grass", "Shampoo" and "Best Friends". So another 7 out of 11 gets me to 104 seen out of 325, so I'm back up to 32%. I may finish where I wanted to after all. 3 days left.
THE PLOT: A bounty hunter learns that his next target is his ex-wife, a reporter working on a murder cover-up. Soon after their reunion, the always-at-odds duo find themselves on an adventure, running for their lives.
AFTER: Let's get some of the weirdness out of the way first - parts of this film were shot in two places that I know very well - Atlantic City and Sunset Park, Brooklyn. My wife and I drive down to A.C. two or three times a year, and we do the Sunday-to-Tuesday thing because the hotel rooms are cheaper (shhh, that's our little secret) and what's the point of going away if you can't take a Monday off from work now and again? Geez, everybody goes away for the weekend, the real travel experts go somewhere off-peak, right? Anyway, Jennifer Aniston's character's mother is performing at the Borgata, a place we've been to several times, and stayed at once (it's slightly off the main strip, in another section of town with Golden Nugget and Harrah's nearby). Then both lead characters end up getting a room at the (Trump) Taj Mahal, a hotel we never stayed at, with good reason. When we started going to Atlantic City regulary several years ago, people were picketing that hotel for unfair labor practices, and this was a couple years before anybody really knew how terrible Trump was. But I think at the time he'd sold the casino, and there was still a dispute about the timetable for getting his name off the casino signs. Then the casino closed - but ironically if they'd stayed open past 2016, the current owners probably couldn't have taken his name off the signs quickly enough. Anyway, that building is now the Hard Rock Casino, and we went there last year to see a Pentatonix concert.
The other place I recognized was Sunset Park - I'm out in Brooklyn 2 days a week working at an animation studio there, and I recognized the BQE overpass on Third Avenue, and I often stop at that EXACT same Dunkin Donuts (at 3rd Ave. and 35th St.) to get a dunkaccino on cold days, before heading home. I never would have guessed that Jennifer Aniston was in that Dunkin parking lot about 10 years ago filming exteriors - that's where her character, Nicole, finds her contact's car after he goes missing. I was just there today, but they were out of the special February Brownie Batter heart-shaped donuts, so I just got a coffee.
Unfortunately, I found the rest of the suicide/murder cover-up case very hard to follow. This plot ran concurrently with the "bounty hunter has to bring in his ex-wife" storyline, and in my defense, it's hard to track a case that a reporter's working on when every few minutes her ex-husband is throwing her in a car trunk or handcuffing her to something. It's very obvious that this plot was conceived to get these two exec to spend time together again, and they're forced to work together to get back to NYC and also solve this case or whatever, so nobody will be that surprised when they start to have feelings for each other again. OK, at first maybe one or both of them is just pretending to have feelings, but before long they'll be genuine, I guarantee it.
I didn't know we had any bounty hunters in the NYC area - I also didn't know that it's somehow OK to send one out to catch his ex-wife when she doesn't show up for her bond hearing. Isn't this some huge kind of conflict of interest? Bounty hunters aren't supposed to get personally involved, and that's probably impossible when he's been previously married to the target. OK, so maybe he'll enjoy this, but then again, he's not supposed to enjoy his work this much. Anyway, this film is outdated now because NYC's drastically reduced the use of bail for most non-violent offenders, so the news has been full of cases where people keep committing dozens and dozens of petty crimes, and just keep getting released back out on the street to do it again. That pendulum just keeps swinging too far in each direction until we (never) land on a happy medium, doesn't it?
Somehow their investigative journey back from Atlantic City to Manhattan takes them to a golf course, the bed and breakfast where they spent their honeymoon, a tattoo parlor and then a strip club, but by this time I'd lost most of my interest in connecting the dots of the case, plus there were too many criminal parties looking for our wayward couple, and I also lost track of who was working for who, and what everyone was trying to accomplish. I'm glad these two solved the case and were able to reconcile, but by that point I'd already tuned out.
Also starring Jennifer Aniston (last seen in "Love Happens"), Jason Sudeikis (last seen in "Going the Distance"), Jeff Garlin (last seen in "Lemon"), Christine Baranski (last heard in "Trolls"), Cathy Moriarty (last seen in "Another Stakeout"), Ritchie Coster (last seen in "Let Me In"), Joel Marsh Garland (last seen in "The Week Of"), Siobhan Fallon Hogan (last seen in "Dogville"), Peter Greene (last seen in "Permanent Midnight"), Dorian Missick, Carol Kane (last seen in "The Sisters Brothers"), Adam LeFevre (last seen in "Adam"), Adam Rose (last seen in "The Squid and the Whale"), David Costabile (last seen in "13 Hours"), Matt Malloy (last seen in "Battle of the Sexes"), Jason Kolotouros, Charlie Hewson (also last seen in "Going the Distance")
RATING: 5 out of 10 horses racing at Monmouth Park
ANSWERS: The missing TCM "360 Degrees of Oscar" links are Reginald Owen, Teresa Wright, Anthony Perkins, Paul Newman, Burl Ives, James Dean, Natalie Wood, Warren Beatty, Goldie Hawn, and Jessica Tandy.
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