BEFORE: Uma Thurman carries over from "The Con Is On", and it looks like I've hit on the Mother's Day topic a couple of weeks too early. First off, it's never too early to highlight how important mother's are, so this can serve as a good reminder that Mother's Day is coming up, I'm building up to something perhaps. (Go buy or order your Mother's Day cards and gifts now, so they'll arrive on time. I always manage to send my Mom's card late, so it arrives the Monday or Tuesday after, I should try to stop doing that.)
The truth is, I had two paths set up, one shorter one because we were planning to take a few days in Florida next week, and I had a longer one in case the trip got cancelled, which it did. This chain was set up before the virus lockdown, when I wasn't sure if I was going to join my wife on her trip, and then my having two paths served another function after we bought our tickets, since we didn't know if airplanes would even be flying, or if we'd be quarantined for two weeks after arriving in Florida, which would also effectively cancel the five-day trip. So the shorter movie path is out, and the longer movie path is in, so this film is not landing on Mother's Day, but another mother-centric film will instead, OK? And this is why I have back-ups, to maintain some flexibility in the chain so it can remain unbroken. Thankfully there's usually more than one way for me to get somewhere - once I've established a holiday-themed goal, which is a key step in the process.
THE PLOT: In Manhattan, a mother of two preparing for her daughter's sixth birthday party has no idea of the challenges she's about to face in order to pull off the event.
AFTER: Clearly another film from the before times, because it's all about somebody running around town doing errands, standing in line with other people at Party City or at the bakery to pick up a cake, and nobody's wearing a mask or standing six feet apart from each other - so maybe this can remind you of happier, simple times, even though the tasks themselves are anything but simple. In fact, it feels like the script went out of its way to make things more complicated than they should have been. (See, if you order the party supplies EARLY, then you don't have to run around like a crazy person on the day OF the party. Just saying.)
I've got an odd connection to this film, I'm working (well, not right now, but I've BEEN working) for an animator who had a short film that played at Sundance in 2009, and it was screened right before this one, because both films were female-centric. But while the feature was about motherhood (duh) the animated short was more about sex from a woman's P.O.V., and let's just say it was a bit graphic. So my boss was sitting on a panel afterwards, with Uma Thurman, or so the story goes, and had to field some pretty graphic questions from the audience about certain sexual practices. I wasn't there, but I heard that the conversation got a little out of hand, just because my boss is very open and honest when she talks about sex. I should check to see if there's a video somewhere of this panel conversation, because I'd love to watch it.
But back to those complications - right off the bat, at the start of the film, we see a mother get out of bed to take a photo of her sleeping daughter, then she leaves her apartment to go down the hall to a different apartment, where she's got a copy of the printed photo and she writes on the photo with a marker, so she'll remember it was taken on the morning of the last day her daughter was five years old. Wait, another apartment? Suddenly I was wondering if this woman has two families that live on the same floor, or was cheating on her spouse with a neighbor, and now has to sneak back into bed with her husband. The simpler explanation is that the family rents two non-adjoining apartments on the same floor of the same building, but how is that simple in any way, plus who does that? Why not just have a larger apartment somewhere else? OK, maybe after having kids this couple found out they needed more space, but this means they have two kitchens, pay double rent, it doesn't make any sense from any angle, and it leads me to suspect other motives that aren't part of the plot, so why? Later Eliza explains "They're rent stabilized..." but that's not an explanation by any means, it just leads me to think the director doesn't understand how apartments work. Would you want to have a second set of apartment keys just to go from your bedroom to your living room?
OK, maybe the second apartment is her (or his) work space - but then why not just get a studio with a loft, which would be larger and maybe even cheaper? Besides, later, when she's writing on her laptop, she asks her husband to go play with their son in the other apartment, so she can finish something. But it's a laptop, the whole point is that it's portable, and it would be so much easier for one person with a laptop to move instead of two people. They tried their best to portray the husband as inconsiderate, but with situations like this, I'm thinking the mother was the more inconsiderate, selfish one. Sure, I agree she worked hard taking care of her family, and barely had any time for herself, but she also made sure that EVERYONE around her knew how hard she was working, and that she never had any time for herself. Again, these were the before times, but after the "ME" generation grew up, so there's a huge sense of entitlement among the "non-working" mother, forced to be the primary caregiver. Get over yourself, honey. Your husband's job somehow manages to pay the extra rent so you can have a second apartment just to work in, or to banish him to when he gets on your nerves.
Another complication is this film shoot that's taken over the couple's West Village block, only they put up the notice about the street closing too late, so she didn't find out about it until after they towed her car to a lot a few blocks away. There was some line of dialogue about using the car to stash the supplies for her daughter's birthday party, so apparently she had to go out and shop AGAIN for the party supplies, and pick up the cake, all without a car, on a bike with a flat tire. So why not just GET THE CAR from the lot, or at least go to the car to get the party supplies, then the only thing left to do would be pick up the cake, that's two trips max, instead of the four or five we see her trying to do on the bike. There's a simpler solution that's completely ignored, or out of the realm of possibility, and I suspect maybe she was making things more difficult so she could trot our her martyr complex yet again, and whine about how hard she works for the family to make everything right, without anybody noticing. God, I'd set the house on fire to get away from someone so entitled.
This is the kind of woman who goes out to move her car just before the street-sweeper comes by, because she wants to keep her car in the space for as long as possible. While I've never been able to figure out the vagaries of NYC alternate-side parking rules, I know that it doesn't make sense to keep the car in the parking spot for so long, because even if the street cleaning vehicle comes by, and you SEE it go by, the spot still needs to be kept empty between certain times of day. So leaving it there in the spot until the last minute solves nothing, and then when she finally pulls the car out of the spot, she doesn't circle the block with it, she just blocks traffic, even though the street sweeper is three vehicles behind her, and now can't continue cleaning the street, because she's blocking traffic. "I don't want to lose my parking space!" ceases to become a valid argument the moment she pulls out of the space, and continuing to block traffic to get the space back means she's just an asshole, and the other drivers are correct to call her this, or worse. Then when she finally agrees to circle the block, she's upset that she didn't get the same space back. Well, it's public parking, it belongs to everyone, sorry. This was filmed back before the new NYC meters were installed, but the principles are the same, you just can't "save" a spot on the street.
Eliza is a blogger-mom, and even though she's got a cutesy name for her blog, she's still probably one of thousands, and has to resort to revealing intimate details of her best friend's love life (or lack thereof) just to stand out in a crowded field. She wants to submit a writing sample to a contest to hire a mom as a professional paid blogger, but I don't even think this was a lifestyle choice back in 2009. Nobody was being PAID to blog back then, right? Now we have influencers and trend-spotters in the blogging world, but back then I don't think anyone was doing it for money, I sure wasn't. And it's another chance for her to complain about not having any time to just sit down and write - well, maybe if she had gotten all the party supplies out of the car, which would have been faster, and not spent so much time at the Barney's sample sale, she might have found an hour to think about what to write. Yes, it's another (non-)fascinating look at the struggles of a wanna-be writer, who's convinced that their life spent thinking about what to write about is somehow going to be fascinating to the readers or viewers. Spoiler alert, it's just not.
Why can't she write about her failures in time-management, think of a better way to have planned herr day, and then she might learn from her own mistakes? OR maybe write about the messenger who delivered the envelope to her husband, who she conned into helping her carry the party supplies up six flights of stairs, and then she only gave him a drink of water, when he probably would have preferred a $5 bill for his trouble? OK, she did dance with him to some music, but this was a bad idea, he probably then thought she was really into him and he was going to get some sexual favor from her while her husband wasn't home. This was another overly complicated bad story idea that just ended up going nowhere.
The ending also seemed very contrived, since the husband got a big check for selling a rare book that he found, in a sense justifying both collecting/hoarding and dumpster-diving. He gives the money to her so they can get a dishwasher (how romantic!) or school for their son so that she can have more time to complain. I mean, to write. This is a double-edged sword, though, because he's going to have to declare that money as income, and it didn't seem like any taxes were taken out of it, so if they spend that money on other things, it's just going to bite them in the butt come April 15. Or maybe he doesn't want to declare that as income, which is illegal, and they'll get penalized after an audit - either way, it's not a solution, it's more trouble than it's worth. Just like this whole film.
I've been itching to get back into Manhattan to work, but now after being reminded what some of the people who live in Manhattan are like, I'm fine with staying home for at least another week. No need to rush things. I mean, maybe there's a silver lining about people staying home, learning to re-connect with their families and get by on less, and then maybe the entitled people will learn to be a little less entitled, but I kind of doubt it. With all the people who want the country to re-open sooner rather than later, just so they can get their hair done, or go to the beach, mainly selfish reasons, some people haven't learned a damn thing. I mean, I want to go eat at restaurants and gamble in casinos and sit in a movie theater, but please, when it's safe to do so. All in good time.
Also starring Minnie Driver (last seen in "I Give It a Year"), Anthony Edwards (last seen in "Pet Sematary II"), Clea Lewis (last seen in "Perfect Stranger"), Jake M. Smith (last seen in "Holes"), Betsy Aidem (last seen in "Winter Passing"), Dale Soules, Daisy Than, Alice Drummond (last seen in "I.Q."), Aunjanue Ellis (last seen in "If Beale Street Could Talk"), Arjun Gupta (last seen in "Stand Up Guys"), Stephanie Szostak, James Lecesne, with cameos from Jodie Foster (last seen in "Hotel Artemis"), Samantha Bee (last seen in "Sisters").
RATING: 3 out of 10 loud cell phone talkers
No comments:
Post a Comment