BEFORE: I'm in a position where I can see what damage the Covid-19 virus is causing, because at work we're getting more e-mails each day with announcements regarding what film festivals have cancelled or postponed their events, the latest is the SXSW Festival in Austin, which is a major deal. (The Cleveland Film Festival too, but who cares about that? JK.) I'm hoping against hope that the situation in Europe is going to eventually abate, because the Annecy Festival in France in June is a really big deal, like the most major animation festival of all, and one of my bosses has a ticket to attend Annecy, and she's going to present her upcoming feature there as a work-in-progress, and that's crucial to raising more money to finish the film. Plus I work hard to find her a decent plane fare on Iceland Air, with a stop in Rekjavik on the way to Geneva, and that ticket is non-refundable.
It's a little weird to move around New York City now - while it's hardly a ghost town, you can tell that there are fewer people working in the city than usual. There was no line in the post office today, and I go to the James Farley post office, usually one of the busiest in the whole city. Other people who commute during rush hour (I can't be bothered to get up early) have told me that the subways are not very crowded, and also that they've seen crews cleaning the cars and the stations, which for many is an unusual sight, an anomaly at the very least. I saw photos today of empty sites around the world, usually busy places like the canals of Venice and the Ginza in Tokyo, and it's not too much of a leap from there to envision a post-humanity world, it's very chilling. This makes me want to travel so I can feel like Charlton Heston in "The Omega Man", like I'm the last man alive.
My wife and I are planning a short trip to Atlantic City in a couple weeks, and then in May we're off to Florida for five days. We were thinking of hitting Epcot Center or maybe Busch Gardens, but who the hell knows what things are going to be like then, or what the theme parks' response to the viral outbreak will be. I guess we'll see how the casinos in N.J. are handling things, and then go from there.
Mary Steenburgen carries over from "Book Club", and now that I've shifted things around a little, another actor does, too. Here in the closing days of the 2020 romance chain, there are so many Steenburgen, Diane Keaton and Kevin Kline appearances scheduled that I probably could have watch the films in just about any order I wanted. We're getting close to the end of the March Marriage Madness tournament, this one should fit right into place, right? Just three match-ups left over the next five days and then I can announce the winning film.
AFTER: This premise somehow managed to be both clever and stupid, what year was this released? 2009? OK, at least they gender-flipped it so the pushy boss was female and the executive assistant who agrees to pose as her fake spouse was male. If it were a male boss pressuring his female secretary to marry him, that would be all kinds of wrong. (Umm, so if that's wrong, how is this right?)
Plus, it's an overly simplistic depiction of our nation's immigration policies, even the ones from 2009. For years we've seen the "Hollywood" version of how green cards work, and I'm willing to bet that the process we've seen in films bears little resemblance to the real one. According to movies like this, you can just pick some random person to marry, memorize some key details about their life, family, how you met and fell in love, plus who sleeps on which side of the bed, and once you pass that little pop quiz, that's it, you're a citizen. It just can't be that easy. Plus, marriage is a legal contract, one that should not be entered into lightly, even if you're not desperate to stay in the U.S.
And on top of all THAT, something tells me that the laws we have in place (or had, back in 2009) are there for specific reasons that are political, cultural and therefore are probably very biased against certain countries, if you know what I mean. I suspect that high-profile book editors from Canada are not that high on the INS's list of people to target. Is this professional book editor really jeopardizing the U.S. economy by taking a prominent publishing position away from a hard-working American? Because I'm in a creative industry, I happen to know that exceptions are made for people who can demonstrate extraordinary abilities, and that includes talents in the creative arts. I think that probably a case could be made for publishing being a creative art, and that means that if our publishing executive here has a proven track record for finding and nurturing talented authors, having a hand in producing a couple of best-sellers, it would be easier to plead her case as an "alien with extraordinary ability" rather than to move ahead with a sham marriage and have to memorize a ton of her assistant's personal details. This is called the O-1 non-immigrant visa, and I know several people who have applied for it and received one - any decent immigration attorney would have brought this to their client's attention.
Come to think of it, there's another NITPICK POINT - at no time do we ever see Margaret Tate consult with an attorney of any kind. This is very basic stuff for someone not born in the U.S. who is also working in the U.S. - I know some people in their twenties who know all the ins and outs of immigration law, what they're eligible for and what type of visa they want to apply for next, and it's because they have a decent immigration lawyer. For this character to have a publishing job, a visa and NO lawyer? That makes no sense.
But for the purposes of comedy, she has to be very smart as a book editor, but very dumb as an immigrant, I guess. Here is where they had to fall back on the old "Well, I guess I gotta get married to stay in the U.S." trope, which is sad. And it just so happens that she has no steady boyfriend, and the Type A sort of personality that would prevent her from getting one. As I also saw in "Set It Up", it's the boss's executive assistant who knows them the best, also that's someone who's a doormat that the Type A boss can take advantage of, because a comedy film just wouldn't know what to do with a boss that's fair, kind to their employees and not a complete hard-nosed stereotype of a boss.
It's all designed to get her to Alaska (actually, coastal Massachusetts subbing in for Alaska) where Andrew, her assistant is from, so they can work a "fish out of water" routine into the "fake marriage to fool immigration" plot. Andrew's grandmother is about to turn 90, and the plan is for her to come along as his fake fiancée for appearance's sake, while at the same time she can learn details about his family for that pop quiz thing. She learns that Andrew comes from a wealthy Alaskan family, he's on the outs with his father, and that it's hard to get to sleep when the sun never sets.
Speaking of that, I was going to call another N.P. on the fact that Sitka is in the southern part of Alaska, so I doubt that they have days during the summer where the sun never sets - I thought that only occured above the Arctic Circle. However I found some web-sites that explained that there are parts of Alaska that don't fall into 24-hour darkness during the winter, but also enjoy prolonged periods of daylight during the summer. Hence the nickname "The Land of the Midnight Sun". I stand corrected. (Maybe not - the IMDB lists this as a mistake, stating that in Sitka, there are never days where the sun doesn't set...)
The family is overjoyed when Andrew announces his engagement - which originally he wasn't planning to do, but it seems he was looking for leverage against his father, who couldn't quite understand why Andrew preferred to move to New York to work in publishing, rather than stay in Alaska and take over one of his many family businesses. So the party for Grandma instead turns into a hastily-planned wedding (Can you plan a whole wedding over a weekend? I'm not sure.)
Anyway, it seems that Andrew has just as many reasons to participate in the phony marriage scam as Margaret does - in addition to sticking it to his father, he also gets his ex-girlfriend to notice him again. However, she seems very unaware of the strongest rule of all in these rom-coms - the person who's helping the other person through their situation is destined to be the person they're really supposed to be with, right? I'm not sure I follow all the logic near the end about who's really making a sacrifice for whom, and whether or not these two people belong together, but if you think about it this way - they were both willing to make a sacrifice, and they were both willing to get fake-married because it benefitted them to do so. Andrew was demanding a promotion and a raise in return, and Margaret was doing it for a green card - so maybe these do actually DO deserve each other. Marriage is not only an expression of love and a social construct, it's also a business arrangement, no matter who you are.
It's kind of funny when you think about it - but Ryan Reynolds and Scarlett Johansson used to be married in real life. The film "Book Club" has neither one of them in it, but it served as the connecting film between three Scarlett Johansson films and two Ryan Reynolds films.
Also starring Sandra Bullock (last seen in "Bird Box"), Ryan Reynolds (last seen in "Waiting..."), Craig T. Nelson (also carrying over from "Book Club"), Betty White (last heard in "Toy Story 4"), Denis O'Hare (last seen in "Private Life"), Oscar Nunez (last seen in "Baywatch"), Malin Akerman (last seen in "Rampage"), Michael Nouri (last seen in "The Terminal"), Aasif Mandvi (last seen in "Movie 43"), Michael Mosley (last seen in "27 Dresses"), Lee Wesley, with a cameo from Niecy Nash (last seen in "Downsizing").
RATING: 5 out of 10 Native American chants
No comments:
Post a Comment