BEFORE: Getting closer to the end of the romance chain, however I just noticed a film running on premium cable which is one that I've been avoiding for years, and I think it may fit in thematically, and of course I also see a way that it can fit into my chain this week, since it shares two actors with tomorrow's film. I could just drop it into the mix very easily, however I just got my March line-up right where I want it, I'm even one film over, so as it is, I need to drop something from the last week of the month. If I add one more film this week, then I'll need to drop TWO films from the set line-up, or else double-up on a weekend day if I can find two short-ish films. I feel like I should lean toward being more inclusive, even if I have to watch 32 films during March instead of 31, because I thought of a good film to watch on April Fool's Day, and I don't want to mess with that - or getting the Hitler films to line up with April 20. There is a time for everything, after all.
Jon Rudnitsky carries over from "Home Again".
THE PLOT: Two corporate executive assistants hatch a plan to play matchmaker for their two workaholic bosses.
AFTER: And now I have the official name for the Hollywood technique of getting two people to fall in love by sending them phony notes - here the assistants, Charlie and Harper, call it getting "Cyrano'd". It's a modern version, where they communicate with each other by text message, phone, etc. to exchange information about each other's bosses, and make sure that the two potential lovers end up together on a stuck elevator, sitting near each other at Yankee Stadium, etc.
Only it's NOT really being "Cyrano'd", is it? The Cyrano de Bergerac character wrote lines for his friend to say to profess his love for Roxanne, and Cyrano really was in love with her, too, only he didn't think he could land her, so he was willing to settle for love by proxy. It's a little more correct when Charlie calls it "parent trapping", based on a 1961 movie with Hayley Mills (Lindsay Lohan was in the remake) about two separated twins who find each other at camp, and scheme to get their parents back together. It's not completely correct, either, because this is more of a "Boss trap" - by the way, what kind of horrible bastard parents separate a set of twins and decide to each raise one of their daughters when they split up? That does not seem fair to either twin, to let them grow up without knowing they have a twin sister in another city.
What we need, instead, is the correct term for two people working together toward a common goal, usually solving a love-related dilemma, who then realize, through working together and spending time together, that they are perfect for each other - just this February alone, I've seen this formula repeating in the films "What's Your Number?", "Before We Go", "The Ugly Truth", "Some Kind of Wonderful", and to a lesser extent, "How Do You Know" and "Just Like Heaven". I don't even know how to Google this or look it up in the urban dictionary to see if such a term already exists. I'll ask on Twitter and update here if anyone supplies the proper term. (Is it worth noting that the female lead in today's film, Zoey Deutch, is the daughter of the star (Lea Thompson) and director of the film "Some Kind of Wonderful", which also has two people falling in love while trying to make another love match happen?)
Anyway, the plan is put into motion here because both assistants believe they have the "boss from hell" - her boss is very demanding and always in a bad mood, while his boss is also demanding, and very jealous that his ex-wife filed for divorce suddenly and is already getting remarried. They both figure, if they can just get these two to keep bumping into each other, maybe sparks will fly, and they'll both end up in better moods, plus they may stop spending so much time in the office, making their assistant's lives hell. It's a nice theory, but I'm not sure the logic is completely there, because if both bosses are Type A people, then they have tremendous drives to be successful - being in a relationship isn't necessarily going to change how much time they spend in the office, or for that matter, how nice they are to their assistants. But I'll admit that if their bosses are dating, that's probably at least a few nights per week where they'll be out on dates and not working late.
Surprisingly, the plan works, umm, until it doesn't. There's a date at a Korean BBQ that goes horribly wrong (I agree, it shouldn't be up to the customer to grill their own meat, too much can go wrong. My wife and I got that same vibe from a certain fondue restaurant that wanted us to cook our own chicken. So, umm, what exactly are we paying the restaurant for?) During the good dates, though, our two stalwart assistants found some spare time for Harper to start a new relationship with "mini-golf guy" and Charlie got to reconnect with his hot Brazilian girlfriend, only to find out that he's her "back-up", her go-to when she's not seeing anyone else. And then when "golf guy" stops calling, it's not too hard to see that the writers have been planning to get Harper and Charlie together this whole time...
Perhaps there's a better analogy to be found somewhere in the works of Shakespeare, some comedy like "Twelfth Night" or "Measure for Measure", only my knowledge of the Bard is still somewhat limited, I didn't get too far past "Romeo & Juliet" and "Hamlet", though there are plenty of plays I'm sort of familiar with, like "The Tempest" and "The Taming of the Shrew". Again, I don't know what the term is, but at some point in a farcical rom-com, all of the plans are revealed, and the truth comes out. Charlie and Harper's plan works a little TOO well when their bosses get engaged, and guess who gets stuck doing all the work for the last-minute elopement? Guess who has to pick out the ring, make the travel arrangements, etc. Honestly, this is probably where the assistants should have scrapped the whole plan, because the whole point of this exercise was to REDUCE their workload, not increase it. The film then gives them another reason to stop the wedding, which seemed a bit like overkill to me, because a reason to stop it already existed.
At the very end, Charlie's boss comes to his apartment, to ask for the folder of information that he's collected over the years about the boss's ex-wife. Apparently at least the boss learned to start paying more attention to what his lovers like and don't like, so one good thing came out of it. But here Charlie has something that his (ex-)boss wants and needs, why he didn't use this as leverage is also beyond me, this doesn't seem to make much sense at this point in the story, for him to just hand it over.
NITPICK POINT: Harper can't collect her boss's dinner which she ordered from a delivery service, because she doesn't have any cash on her. Really? This film was released in 2018, when most delivery services (GrubHub, Seamless, DoorDash) would all take credit cards as a primary source of payment, and this would happen at the time of the order, not at the time of delivery. Charlie is able to then use his cash to buy the dinner for HIS boss, but how was the ordering completed without any payment being made? The trend in NYC restaurants has been AWAY from "cash only" in the last few years, and more towards "credit cards only".
There's a bit near the end where struggling writer Harper finally forces herself to FINISH writing something, and unlike the usual Hollywood (false) depiction of writer's block - why directors love to make audiences watch writers staring at a blank piece of paper or a blank screen is just beyond my understanding - but here Harper's inability to finish one article, over the course of months, has a valid excuse, because she's always too busy running errands for her demanding boss. But then she finds that, even given the time, she can't write something GOOD because she's put too much pressure on herself to write something good. Her friend's solution is to just write something, even if it's bad, and then fix that up later. (Similar advice was given in the film "Under the Tuscan Sun", I believe.) But here is what I've learned, after writing over 11 years of short essays about movies - the best thing that can make you write, blocked or not, is a deadline. Maybe that's why Harper couldn't finish an article before, because there was no set deadline. A ticking clock is a great motivator, I've found - and I never let myself watch the next movie (umm, unless I'm saving a review for later in the chain) until I finish writing the review of the one before. The chain, and my life, simply can't progress because I haven't finished making a (hopefully) coherent thought about the last film I've seen. And each review doesn't have to be great, I get that - but the self-imposed deadline always manages to do the trick, at least so far.
Also starring Zoey Deutch (last seen in "The Disaster Artist"), Glen Powell (last seen in "Everybody Wants Some!!"), Lucy Liu (last heard in "Mulan II"), Taye Diggs (last seen in "Chicago"), Joan Smalls, Meredith Hagner (last seen in "Going the Distance"), Pete Davidson (last seen in "Trainwreck"), Tituss Burgess (last heard in "The Angry Birds Movie"), Jake Robinson, Noah Robbins, Ralph Byers (last seen in "Regarding Henry"), Leonard Ouzts, Jaboukie Young-White, (last heard in "Ralph Breaks the Internet") Jeff Hiller (last seen in "Adam"), Wai Ching Ho (last seen in "Hustlers").
RATING: 5 out of 10 slices of New York pizza
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