BEFORE: I'm sure I must have railed against Daylight Saving Time many times in this space, so I'll try to refrain from repeating myself, but it's an abhorrent practice that needs to be abolished. We're only fooling ourselves by changing the clocks, the earth and the sun know what time it REALLY is because time is an imaginary construct, but also based on a very real thing - the relative position of the sun and the earth, where the sun appears in our sky, and that's not going to change just because we move the digits on our devices. So why live out of harmony with the planet, aren't we all supposed to be trying to do exactly that? Why try, impossibly, to impose man's will on the turning of the earth? I can call today the first day of Summer, that doesn't make it so.
Plus, there's no financial or health benefit achieved by arbitrarily moving the clock - longer days with more sunlight are coming, but that was going to happen ANYWAY for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, there's no need to rush things. If anything, more accidents are caused the day AFTER the switch-over to DST, just because everyone's exhausted, probably falling asleep at the wheel. Stop the insanity, save some lives, let's abolish the practice once and for all. There's NOTHING wrong with staying on good old standard time all 12 months of the year. I was getting ready to support Andrew Yang, the only candidate willing to get rid of changing the clocks, but then I found out that he was in favor of staying on DST all year long - no, no, NO! That's exactly the wrong solution, that's like trying to improve your credit rating by paying all your bills late on purpose - if it's wrong, it's wrong, and extending the practice won't help, but getting rid of it might.
I thought about abstaining from DST this year, keeping all my clocks set to Standard Time, but then I realized that I'm already usually like an hour late for everything, and then I'd be two hours late, but at least I'd be able to say I was late because of my principles and not because I just stay up too late and like sleeping a little longer. This year I got hit HARD because I realized that I hadn't yet pulled my DVDs out from my storage cases that would get me through the rest of March - yes, I'm watching more films via streaming and not all of my channels will still let me dub movies to DVD, but there were still 7 or 8 films that I had on hard copy that were going to round out the month and get me to April 1.
Now, what I've tended to do over the years is put two or three films on each DVD disc, to keep the collection at a (somewhat) manageable size. Often that means putting a film on a disc with its sequel, or with another film with the same actor, or on a similar topic, and if that's not possible, then things get a little more random. So if I'm looking through my collection for the remake of "The War of the Worlds", it's probably on a disc with the original film from the 1950's, so I go right to the "W" section. Other times a franchise film came along much later than its prequels, so while I might have "Mad Max" and "The Road Warrior" together on one disc, where is "Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome"? It's not under "M", so I have to think about when I added it to my collection, and what other similar film I might have put it on a disc with. "Mad Max: Fury Road" - same problem. Ideally I'd have both of those sequels on the same disc, but frankly, it's not an ideal set-up. So one could be or a disc with "Dune" or any of a number of other sci-fi films.
So, even though I was only looking for 7 or 8 films, that means flipping through ALL the pages in the book-like DVD cases until I stumble on what I'm looking for - if the film isn't where it should be alphabetically, then it's the 2nd film on a disc and I need to scan all of the labels until I (possibly) see it. At the same time, last night I needed to re-alphabetize and work 52 new titles into the cases, and that meant shifting every disc down the appropriate number of spaces to preserve my radical somewhat-alphabetized system (All Frankenstein movies are filed under "F", all James Bond movies filed under "J", all "Planet of the Apes" movies filed under "P", regardless of exact title). It's still not perfect, I'd love to have all the Marx Brothers movies together, all the Hitchcocks, but I eventually find everything.
So just before midnight, I started shifting discs down, starting at "Z" and working my way back up to "A", through 7 cases of DVDs, working in the newer discs while at the same time looking for the 8 DVDs I need to finish March. I got about halfway through by 1:00, but then I had to stop and watch my movie, plus I knew that 2 am was going to turn into 3 am, so even if I started my movie at 1, I wouldn't finish until the new 3:30 am, even though the movie was just 90 minutes long. So yeah, I picked the absolute worst night of the year to re-organize the collection. That's on me, but if we could just abolish DST, then this would never happen again. I could have the time NOW to do the things I need to do in the wee hours of the morning. (Forget all this "SAVING", when is Daylight SPENDING Time? And what the hell are we saving it FOR?)
A couple of years ago, I thought of a work-around solution - just make a spreadsheet on my computer of what films are on each DVD, one disc per row, one title per column. Then in a few short minutes each month, I could realize that to find the movie "Office Christmas Party", I need to look under "D" because it's on a disc with "Daddy's Home 2". That would sure be quicker than flipping through EVERY book, looking for that title on EVERY disc. It's a great idea, but how would I find the time to type up the whole spreadsheet? The original problem was that I don't have time to scan through the cases, so I certainly don't have time to type up the spreadsheet! Right? What would that take, days? Weeks? Is that worth it to save an hour or so every month?
Well, I'm finally going to find out. It turns out that I'm a very fast typist (another skill I acquired over the years, typing up these blog entries, plus blogs for TWO bosses, plus countless screenplays that need to be typed AND properly formatted for arbitrary deadlines, PLUS two books on animation that I ghost-edited and never got proper credit for.) So I've finally started the process to make my collection more searchable at the start of each month - I'm already up to the letter "D". Re-alphabetizing will still be a nightmare, but after I get this all typed up (in a few days, ideally, end of this week, tops) I should be able to drastically reduce the time it takes me to FIND any particular movie. Or, if I wanted to confirm that I have copies of all the films in the "Kung Fu Panda" franchise, for example, that should now be a breeze, even if they're spread out over 3 discs and none of them are filed under "K".
Scarlett Johansson carries over from "In Good Company", setting me up for "Marriage Story" tomorrow.
THE PLOT: A 1930's American socialite creates a scandal in the expatriate high society of the Amalfi Coast of Italy when she forms a secretive relationship with a wealthy American unbeknownst to his young wife.
AFTER: This film is based on an Oscar Wilde story, which I figured out about halfway through when one of the characters said this line: "There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it." Look, HOW I know that Oscar Wilde wrote that line is not important (I play the mobile game "The Simpsons: Tapped Out" and the ghost of Oscar Wilde is a character there...) but like with most trivia, it's only important that I know it. After that I realized that one of the characters is named Meg Windermere, and that sparked the memory that Wilde wrote a play (or short story, whatever) named "Lady Windermere's Fan". So either she was going to own a fan at some point or have a notable admirer, I wasn't sure.
Oscar Wilde was apparently very quotable - this film also features characters saying the lines "Bigamy is having one wife too many. So is monogamy." and "I find the best way to keep my word is never to give it." And then there's "If everyone knew what everyone said about each other, there wouldn't be four friends in the world." So Oscar Wilde was a bit like the Yogi Berra of his day, these witty lines always seem a little contradictory, with a little zinger at the end, like "Nobody goes there any more, it's too crowded." I bet if you put a list of Wilde-isms and Berra-isms together it would get hard to figure out who said which ones.
But wait, I thought, this film is set in the 1930's, and Oscar Wilde died in (just a sec...) 1900. So did he set this story in the future (our past, but his future)? Nah, I think the filmmakers just moved the setting ahead a few decades to have more appeal for modern audiences - because some people out there might watch something set in the 1900's, but something set in the 1800's would feel positively ancient? At least if it's Depression-era it's akin to "The Great Gatsby" and other books they made us read in high school, and not some dusty old Victorian-era tale. That's the theory, anyway.
The story concerns several Americans and Brits who are living in exile (or perhaps just vacationing) on Italy's Amalfi Coast. Now it seems with the time-shift maybe they're waiting out the Depression? Escaping Prohibition? Not sure. But they're there, and young Mrs. Windermere has been married to her husband for a year, but this relationship gets called into question when he's seen paying frequent visits to the villa of Mrs. Erlynne, and gossip starts to circulate. Meanwhile, Lord Darlington is befriending Lady Windermere, and is quite honest about his intentions, he's standing by to catch her if and when her marriage falls apart. We the audience know what type of woman Mrs. Erlynne is from the opening scene when she's talked about by all the women in New York whose husbands she's slept with, so when Darlington creates a situation where Lady Windermere will look through her husband's checkbook and see all the payments to Mrs. Erlynne, she'll conclude what we (and everyone else) has come to believe, that her husband is having a long-term affair, or had a short one and is now paying off the woman to keep her quiet.
Ah, but there's more to the story, and all is not what it seems. No spoilers here, but like many of this year's romances, fate and coincidence have an effect, even if some of the connections may be less than believable. Boy, when you boil all of this year's romances down, you might conclude that everything is rooted in the classics - what is "Some Kind of Wonderful" but a gender-flipped Cyrano de Bergerac, and "Rent" of course comes straight from "La Boheme", and now this turns out to be an adaptation of "Lady Windermere's Fan". Of course there's really nothing new under the sun, so if you told me that "You, Me and Dupree" could be traced back to Shakespeare's "All's Well that Ends Well" I'd at least be inclined to listen.
So there you go, this one's a true classic, even though they changed a few things, like moved the original play from London to Italy, the boats became planes, there were two checkbooks instead of one, and the Windemere's had a small child in Wilde's version. But the essence remains the same, people are going to lie and cheat and have complicated relationships while saying pithy things, because things like that never go out of style. And at least Scarlett Johansson wasn't smiling uncomfortably through the whole film, so her acting was marginally better here, even though this was released the same year as "In Good Company".
Also starring Helen Hunt (last seen in "I Love You, Daddy"), Mark Umbers (last seen in "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword"), Stephen Campbell Moore (last seen in "Goodbye Christopher Robin"), Tom Wilkinson (last seen in "The Catcher Was a Spy"), Milena Vukotic, Roger Hammond (last seen in "Around the World in 80 Days"), John Standing (last seen in "The Elephant Man"), Diana Hardcastle (last seen in "Jenny's Wedding"), Giorgia Massetti, Jane How (last seen in "Miss Potter")
RATING: 5 out of 10 pieces of pawned jewelry
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