BEFORE: It started a little over a week ago, that noise every night that lets you know that somebody, somewhere, is setting off fireworks. Not firecrackers, these are like real, professional-grade fireworks, sounding very similar to mortars when they launch. And it starts about 8 or 9 pm, and lasts until 2 or 3 am some nights. Why?? We've still got a few weeks to go before July 4, and that's usually bad enough where home-grown illegal fireworks are concerned (the theory is that police in NYC are usually so busy controlling the crowds at the official Macy's July 4 fireworks suck-tacular that they don't have the manpower to patrol neighborhoods cracking down on public use of fireworks, and sad to say, this usually holds up) but I can't understand why this practice has now extended to mid-June. It makes me want to put my pants and sneakers back on and go on patrol, walking as many blocks as I have to toward the sound of warfare until I find the culprit(s) and give them a stern talking-to, or at least gather video evidence to snitch with. But then I remind myself that whoever these people are, they also have access to explosives, so it's probably not a good idea to argue with them or turn them in. Still, I wish it didn't feel like I was living in the DMZ for three full weeks out of the year - I'm going to get PTSD from this, I'm sure.
Doesn't it make more sense to SAVE your fireworks for July 4? If you keep setting them off every night, aren't you likely to run out on the big holiday? Can't I get one night of peace and quiet with the windows open before I have to close them and turn on the A.C. because it's too freakin' hot? It seems like as soon as the noise from the protests and riots went away, it got replaced by the annual testing of the fireworks, and I firmly believe that there's no comparison between the two in terms of which one matters, which one is necessary - fireworks are completely useless. Yes, even the big professional ones. And if the little personal ones are illegal in my state, why am I hearing them every night? We should ban them all, even the big ones, because we're sending the wrong message by allowing some people to use them in larger celebrations, and we can't publicly gather to "enjoy" them this year, anyway, so why is anyone still making them, and a lot of them, by the sound of things?
Sticking with the Father's Day theme until we get there on Sunday, and then probably even a few days after that. Tea Leoni carries over from "The Family Man".
THE PLOT: By working through problems stemming from his past, Tom Warsaw, an American artist living in Paris, begins to discover who he really is and returns to his home to reconcile with his family and friends.
AFTER: See, I could have easily connected from one of my Mother's Day films - "We Don't Belong Here" - to this one, via Anton Yelchin. But that would have gotten me here too soon, and I instead fit about 40 films in-between, so maybe I was right to do this the way I did it. But this film is also about the relationship between a boy growing up with his mother, which I didn't realize from the synopsis. So this could have been either a Mother's Day film OR a Father's Day film, since it's also (allegedly) about the boy becoming an adult and telling his story to his son. I'm glad, though, that I programmed it for Father's Day because it provided the linking I needed to connect the other father-related titles on my list.
I don't know about this one, though, it's a weird one, but not weird in the usual way, it's just so gosh-darn specific, perhaps too specific. Often when we see a film about a kid in school or a group of kids, their experiences feel kind of universal - I mean, we all went to school and we all had friends or struggled with math or overcame difficulties or worried about how to get that other person to like us, or even love us, and therein lies the appeal of a lot of films set in someone's teen years.
But this film gets so into this one particular kid's set of particular problems, it seems like it might be hard for anybody to relate to it, unless they also grew up in THAT neighborhood or encountered similar things during their own teen years. Do you know what I mean? Not everybody leaves the city or town they grew up in when they're 13 for another country, and then lives anonymously or under another name in Europe for 30 years or so. It seems so odd to do that, and to portray that in a movie that's intended to have some kind of universal appeal. That's what movies are supposed to do, right, find the things that we all have in common, or show us people that aren't us, but in other ways are also just like us, so that we can feel their stories on a personal level. Here it just felt like I didn't have anything in common with the lead character, and that just really got in the way.
It's one thing to show the struggles of a kid in a parochial school, I think maybe if you didn't attend a religious school maybe you knew someone who did, or were aware that those schools were out there as an alternative. But then the boy's living in a small NYC apartment with his mother, about a year after his father died - getting a little more specific here, but hey, a lot of people live in NYC, a lot of people live in small apartments, and a lot of people have to deal with the death of a family member, or the fear of losing a family member, so we're still kind of in the ballpark of commonality. But then all the stuff with working as a delivery boy for a butcher, paired with a mentally challenged adult who also happens to be a janitor at his school, saving up to buy a new bicycle and stashing his money in a cigar box under a manhole cover right next to the women's detention center on 10th St. That all seems VERY specific, as if it could only come from a writer's own childhood.
Now, I've been down this road several times already this year - not just with "Little Women" but also "Beautiful Boy", "Obvious Child", "Other People", "Chuck & Buck", and "The Tree of Life" - sometimes there are so many details about a character's life that all seem to come from way out of left field, and that makes me think someone's drawing details from their own life as sort of a cheat, essentially making a ficitionalized version of their own autobiography. Since David Duchovny both wrote and directed this, he's the most likely candidate here for the Tom Warshaw inspirational template.
Duchovny was born in New York City, and attended the Grace Church School in the East Village, but that's about as much as I can confirm from Wikipedia, little information is available about his time as a delivery boy, or any friendship with mentally challenged adults or incarcerated women. I'll check the trivia section on IMDB too for any other similarities between Duchovny and Warshaw, but it's notable that he cast his own wife to play Tommy's mother, I wonder if there's anything sort of Freudian about that. Considering how poorly this film did at the box office, though, it wouldn't be surprising to find out that nobody's really even looked into this that much.
Because I found it so difficult to connect with the lead character - the film's way too specific on the life and thoughts of the younger version, while the older version remains as much of a blank as a man who's been hiding from his past for 30 years would be expected to be. OK, so the adult Tommy is an artist, so what? And in all his time with his wife he never told her that he came from New York, or anything about his mother, his father, his friends? That shit never came up, not even once, in over 13 years? If you live with somebody for 10 years I would expect you to know everything about them, and if they're still not sharing their personal background with you after a decade, that should be a huge warning sign, no? Sorry, but I find that very hard to believe - I realize there might be a few people out there who don't like to talk about themselves, but this seems ridiculous.
NITPICK POINT: What was up with all those kids tearing out pages from their Bibles and throwing them out the window? I mean, yeah, I get that it was to send them to Pappass, but WHY? Not all of the kids were friends with him the way that Tommy was - and the Bible teacher, Rev. Duncan, never noticed this, not once? Was he blind or did he just not care? I would think that a priest would have a big problem with kids ripping up their Bibles. Again, this just feels like one incident from someone's childhood that means something to him, but as a plot point in a movie for everyone, it just doesn't go anywhere. And there were a lot of other plot points just like it, unfortunately.
(EDIT: This was unintentional, but I watched this film on the fourth anniversary of the death of Anton Yelchin. Take that as a tribute if you want, or just a coincidence if you don't.)
Also starring David Duchovny (last seen in "Kalifornia"), Anton Yelchin (last seen in "We Don't Belong Here"), Robin Williams (last seen in "Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic"), Erykah Badu (last seen in "The Cider House Rules"), Frank Langella (last seen in "The Box"), Zelda Williams, Orlando Jones (last seen in "I Think I Love My Wife"), Magali Amadei (last seen in "The Wedding Planner"), Olga Sosnovska (last seen in "Ocean's Thirteen"), Bernie Sheredy, Alice Drummond (last seen in "Motherhood"), Harold Cartier, Mark Margolis (last seen in "Stand Up Guys"), Claire Lautier, Adam LeFevre (last seen in "The Bounty Hunter"), Willie Garson (last seen in "Just Like Heaven"), Andrée Damant.
RATING: 4 out of 10 pounds of ground chuck
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