BEFORE: Chris Evans carries over again from "Before We Go".
Tomorrow on Turner Classic Movies, Joan Crawford links from "Torch Song" to the day's first film, can you fill in the other links? Answers below.
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 21 on TCM (31 Days of Oscar, Day 21)
6:00 am "Grand Hotel" (1932) with _____________ linking to:
8:00 am "Suzy" (1936) with _____________ linking to:
10:00 am "Libeled Lady" (1936) with _____________ linking to:
12:00 pm "It Happened One Night" (1934) with _____________ linking to:
2:00 pm "Drums Along the Mohawk" (1939) with _____________ linking to:
4:00 pm "Jezebel" (1938) with _____________ linking to:
6:00 pm "The Children's Hour" (1961) with _____________ linking to:
8:00 pm "Terms of Endearment" (1983) with _____________ linking to:
10:30 pm "The Hours" (2002) with _____________ linking to:
12:45 am "Manhattan" (1979) with _____________ linking to:
2:30 am "My Favorite Year" (1982) with _____________ linking to:
4:15 am "Pennies From Heaven" (1981)
Wow, look at TCM, really spanning the timeline tomorrow, there's a 70-year difference between the oldest movie and the most recent - and showing a film from THIS millennium, that's unusual for them, but hey, good get. I've seen a whopping 8 of these: "Grand Hotel", "It Happened One Night", "The Children's Hour", "Terms of Endearment", 'The Hours", "Manhattan", "My Favorite Year" and "Pennies from Heaven" so I'll be having a good day, now with 82 of 243 seen I'm up to 33.7%
THE PLOT: A woman looks back at the past nineteen men she's had relationships with in her life and wonders if one of them might be her true love.
AFTER: Oh, boy, I don't even know where to start with this one. First off, I'm just about to the halfway point in the romance chain, and I feel very much like each screenplay, though technically different from the last, got its start by some screenwriter filling in a sort of "Mad Libs" form. In other words, there's definitely a formula for most Hollywood rom-coms, they just change a couple little details here and there and hope that nobody notices how much it's like the last one they saw. First is the writer/musician thing, and today I'm back on musicians (Chris Evans played trumpet in the last film, here he plays guitar in a band). Meanwhile the lead female character is in "marketing", whatever that means, but loses her job very early in the film, which frees her up for the mate search, when she really should be doing a new job search.
But here's the formula, at least for the three Chris Evans films, and probably many others like them - two people meet by basically random chance (in Grand Central, at a party or because they live in the same building) and have to work together to solve a problem (getting the woman home, or saving the tree frogs or here, tracking down her old exes) but even though there's some conflict, working ont he problem and spending time together brings them both to realize that the perfect person MIGHT be right next to them. Sure, that's a little pat and it sounds like almost any movie, but it's a pattern for sure and I've already grown tired of it.
The films have also been bouncing back and forth between NYC and L.A., tonight's film is set in Boston, which is a welcome change. (Ally also visits a couple other cities in her quest for Mr. Right, even though she says at the start that she will only travel by car, not plane, then proceeds to break her own rules for no good reason.) I recently learned (via that Super Bowl commercial he did) that Chris Evans, Mr. Captain America, grew up in Boston. He, John Krasinski and Rachel Dratch all did their best authentic Boston accents in a Hyundai commercial for the "Smart Park" (aka "Smaht Pahk") feature. (Sample line: Did you pahk in Dahchester, or by the hahbah? Genius stuff.) Anyway, it was great to see the old Red Line T train in a movie, and people jumping into Boston Harbor for fun (you couldn't do that when I was a kid, the pollution was much worse back then.)
But the crux of the film concerns Ally's dating history, how she's dated a bunch of terrible guys over the years, and then finds out via a magazine article that the average person has had 10.5 sexual partners, and after making a list, she realizes that she's nearly double that. But there's an appalling lack of understanding here about how math works, specifically averages, or "means". (Let's assume that the magazine article knows the difference between "means" and "medians", but I doubt that Ally does...). For the average to be 10.5, that means there HAVE to be people surveyed with lower numbers, and others with higher numbers - and some could be very higher, and some just a little higher. So, what's the big deal? She is where she is on the curve, there's no need for slut-shaming when it comes to math. I don't think the magazine even took task with people's numbers, so it appears that in this film, Ally sort of slut-shames herself, which isn't helping the cause of feminism. Did she not get the memo that it's OK for women to be sexual beings, with multiple partners over time? Why stay shackled to the mental constructs of the past when they don't apply any more?
Anyway, for whatever reason, dum-dum self-slut shaming Ally figures that her number is way too high, and that she won't sleep with another man until she's found "the one". I guess this makes sense, although it's not a very logical progression - neither is the inspiration that one of her previous sexual partners might have straightened his life out, and over time could have become a better partner for her NOW than he was at the time. Supposedly one of her previous partners, "Disgusting Donald" got himself thin and cleaned up, so therefore hope springs eternal for the rest of the loser brigade. If you follow the logic here, she could marry one of these past partners, or hook up with him, without adding to her overall total and pushing her number into the (very arbitrary) danger zone, which is 21, by her count.
And so she enlists the help of her neighbor, because Googling her exes is too much work (all of their names are common ones) and she's not very good at navigating Facebook either, not without falling asleep (?) and just by coincidence, her neighbor is an expert at tracking people down because he comes from a "cop family" (umm, my father was a truck driver, does that mean I should know how to drive a tractor-trailer? Because that's not how things work.) Also, quite conveniently, he's something of a notorious "ladies man" and also needs a place to hide in the morning, after a date, which is a not-so-subtle way of telling his sexual partners to GTFO. Very not classy.
So let's be clear, a woman sleeping with double-digit partners over the course of years, not OK. But cyber-stalking her exes? Somehow THAT'S OK? And the man across the hall having HUNDREDS of sex partners in the same time-frame, that's OK too? If slut-shaming is enforced, it needs to be enforced on both genders equally, if you ask me. These two failure piles deserve each other, so that's one more sign that this is where the plot is going to be heading in the end. But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself.
One of Ally's exes is from the richest family in the Boston area, another is a gynecologist in Florida, and yet another is a senatorial aide in Washington D.C. with eyes on being the next Barack Obama. This is where Ally goes traveling, and eliminates the men in Florida and DC for various reasons that I won't get into here. It's nice, though, that the guy in D.C. was African-American and THAT was not the reason that she couldn't get back together with him. Kudos, umm, I guess? It's too bad Ally was so particular about her potential partner's proclivities, maybe she could have become first lady? That could have had some nice benefits.
Anyway, they sort of save the "least worst" guy for last, when she finally connects with the rich guy from the family in Boston. This man ticks off all the boxes, even goes with Ally to her sister's wedding, and he's a big hit - with Ally's mother. This forces a tough decision, does she want to be with the man that will make her mother happy, or the guy that will make HER happy? This is probably the only thing close to a reasonable, logical argument that the film ever gets around to making.
Yep, the "perfect" guy for her is the one she's been hanging around with for the whole movie, who helped her track down all the OTHER, less-perfect guys. Only I learned in yesterday's movie that there's no such thing as a perfect mate, it's always going to be a struggle, it only matters who you want to spend time struggling with. So I guess we sort of ended up with a similar lesson here, when Ally ultimately realizes that she wants to struggle with the guy who is also the best friend, and thankfully he's an even bigger slut than she is. Wow, that's a weird message to send out to the kids. Hey, teens, just look for somebody who's more messed-up than you are, then all your sins will be forgiven!
Plus, it's OK to steal somebody's car or bicycle if you need to race across town to find out which wedding somebody you care for is at? NITPICK POINT, that's another bad message. Grand theft auto is FINE if it's done in the name of love, apparently.
Also starring Anna Faris (last seen in "Movie 43"), Ari Graynor (last seen in "The Front Runner"), Blythe Danner (last seen in "Sylvia"), Ed Begley Jr. (last seen in "Streets of Fire"), Oliver Jackson-Cohen (last seen in "The Raven"), Dave Annable, Heather Burns (last seen in "You've Got Mail"), Eliza Coupe (last seen in "I Think I Love My Wife"), Tika Sumpter (last seen in "The Old Man & The Gun"), Joel McHale (last seen in "The Happytime Murders"), Chris Pratt (last seen in "The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part"), Denise Vasi, Zachary Quinto (last seen in "Hotel Artemis"), Mike Vogel (last seen in "Rumor Has It..."), Martin Freeman (last seen in "Black Panther"), Andy Samberg (last heard in "Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation"), Thomas Lennon (last seen in "Pottersville"), Anthony Mackie (last seen in "Playing It Cool"), Ivana Milicevic (last seen in "Aloha"), Jason Bowen, Tyler Peck, Kate Simses, Sondra James (last seen in "Joker"), Nadine Jacobsen (last seen in "Perfect Stranger"), Colby Parsons, with the voice of Aziz Ansari (last seen in "This Is the End").
RATING: 3 out of 10 booked-up harpists
ANSWERS: The missing TCM "360 Degrees of Oscar" links are Lewis Stone, Jean Harlow, Walter Connolly, Claudette Colbert, Henry Fonda, Fay Bainter, Shirley MacLaine, Jeff Daniels, Meryl Streep, Mark Linn-Baker, Jessica Harper.
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