BEFORE: Yesterday we drove to a REAL restaurant, not one that was only doing take-out and delivery! I remembered hearing that Long Island was in Phase II of re-opening, which means some restaurants, as long as they conform to social distancing rules, so I started checking out places we've been to and enjoyed that might be doing outdoor dining, and I remembered a German restaurant out there that has a huge beer garden. Checked their web-page, and they said they were open for table service outside, with all the tables spaced far from each other, and as long as we wore a mask when entering and exiting, agreed to a temperature check, used hand sanitizer, and were willing to use disposable tableware, we could sit down to a fine German meal, with waiter service even! That's the first time we've had a sit-down meal at a restaurant since March, and I hope we can get that in our part of NYC sometime soon - we've got a list of places we want to patronize, some of them are doing take-out, but it's just not the same. If you want a good steakhouse meal or some soup dumplings, you really need to be in a restaurant.
Leslie Mann carries over from "Drillbit Taylor" - this is another film that's been very tough for me to link to, so it's been on the list at least two years, possibly longer. I recorded it to put on a DVD with the first "Goosebumps" movie, which probably aired in 2017. By now there's a "Goosebumps" sequel, and also the kids who were kids in this movie grew up, they've probably all aged out of being in various Disney Channel shows by now. Sometimes I feel I should pay more attention to child actors, some of them do pop up everywhere and make my connections easier, but not this time - there were really only two members of this film's cast, both adults, that I could work with. And rather than wait for another film with, say William H. Macy to pop up, scheduling this film between two other Leslie Mann films finally clears it off my watchlist.
THE PLOT: A boy's discovery of a colorful, wish-granting rock causes chaos in the suburban town of Black Falls when jealous kids and scheming adults alike set out to get their hands on it.
AFTER: I'm getting off this topic tomorrow and heading in a new direction, partly because I'm going to squeeze in some crime and war-based movies before heading back to the Father's Day topic, but also, I've had more than enough of pre-teen kids who just can't act. It's not completely their fault, most kids just don't have the capacity to be believable, so they fall back on doing whatever the director tells them to do, which just doesn't come close to acting, it's more like just DOING. Like the kids here playing a brother and sister (who I guess are twins, because they're in the same class at school, but the brother looks much older, so that just doesn't work) who have a staring contest. Did I believe for one second that these two kids could spend 35 hours locked in eye contact without blinking? Not one bit - now maybe part of my disbelief comes from knowing that their feat was impossible - you kind of have to blink eventually, or your eyeballs will totally dry out - but these kids also just didn't know how to "sell it".
Some of the other child actors here have the opposite problem, they're too "over the top". Part of this is a writing problem, because the characters were created to be stereotypes - this one's an evil goth girl (think Wednesday Addams), that one's the good-natured chubby kid (think Chunk from "The Goonies") and so on. And of course, there are bullies, which has been a running theme here for a couple of days. That evil goth girl is named Helvetica, and she, along with her brother Cole, torments the lead geeky kid, Toby (or more commonly, "Toe", ewww). Helvetica and Cole dump Toe in a trash-can at the start of every school day, and I thought Toe was being very clever when he opined to Helvetica that she must like him, but can't confront her feelings, so she acts out and bullies him instead. Boom, he nailed it. But then, according to that logic, if the bullying was just a romantic feeling turned around, you'd think that she would then AVOID bullying him because to continue to do so would be an admission of that romantic feeling. Nope, didn't work, Toe gets a beat-down anyway, so either he was wrong, or she admits to liking him and bullying him, and doesn't care who knows about the connection.
Everything changes, however, when Toe finds a wishing rock, or, rather, Cole and some bullies throw rocks at him, and the wishing rock is among them. He knows it's a wishing rock because when he holds it, he hears a voice conveniently whisper "Make a wish..." inside his head. Sure, because if rocks could grant wishes, why stop there? They can also communicate telepathically, and in English, of course. Toe makes a wish to have interesting friends, and they appear in the form of tiny aliens flying colored spaceships, who become his friends, protectors, and orthodontists. (The aliens apparently possess technology that can remove his braces and his need for braces, somehow.). The aliens come to school with him to help protect him from bullies - naturally, they'd probably do a better job than Drillbit Taylor did - but instead chaos ensues in the chemistry lab, and he ends up falling out of a window with Helvetica and they both break their arms.
At this point, the story flashes back to show us another story, revealing where the rock came from, and who had it right before Toe did. This kid named Loogie and his brothers (last name Short, I think, so is the movie really about them, the Shorts?) found it at the end (or perhaps the beginning) of a rainbow, and they also immediately knew it was a wishing rock, so Loogie wished for an endless supply of candy bars and a cool fortress before things got out of hand and alligators gained the ability to walk on two legs. Eventually the brothers realize that they're not mature enough to possess this power (yet somehow, mature enough to be aware of this fact, which is something of a contradiction) and they launch it in a catapult to land in better hands, ideally.
Meanwhile (or not, or as "meanwhile" as things can be when a movie keeps jumping around in time) Toe's parents work for the same tech company, which is working on a "black box" device that wants to be a combination cell phone, iPad, music player, remote control and dog groomer. Nearly everyone in town works for Carbon Black (Helvetica + Cole's dad) and Black Box Industries, but Toe's mother works for Team A and his father works for Team B, and the winning marketing team that solves all the marketing problems for the device and eliminates the competition gets a bonus, and the losing team gets fired and has to move out of town. This appears to be another logical paradox, because no matter which team wins, the couple gets to stay employed and forced to leave town at the same time. But hey, that's just how adults do the business, right?
Mrs. Thomson inadvertently takes the rock with her to a costume party (which is where all legitimate companies discuss their business plans, at costume parties, right?) but while holding her purse with the rock, she accidentally wishes that she and her husband could "be closer", so the rock merges them both into one person, like conjoined twins sharing a pair of legs. Conveniently everyone at the party just thinks this is a great costume, so also conveniently, nobody asks too many questions about how this costume works, or what's going on down below the belt when a man and woman merge into the same body. By now several other people have figured out what the rock can do, like Helvetica uses it to turn her brother into a giant beetle, and then Mr. Black accidentally holds it, thinking it's an hors d'oeuvre, and wishes that his employees would be more ruthless and "at each other's throats", so the party turns into a wild free-for-all. In the confusion, Toe grabs the rock and hurls it back into town, just to get it away from power-hungry people who want to exploit it.
That's three of the film's five "shorts", the fourth involves a germophobic scientist who accidentally creates a booger monster, and then there's the big wrap-up where the rock falls back into the wrong hands. It's a good thing that evil people can only imagine using the wishing rock to become more powerful, because that enabled some writer here to basically rip off the ending from "Aladdin" - hey, a wishing rock is just a genie's magic lamp, just in another form, right? It technically solves all the problems, but it's an unoriginal ending. For that matter, any time that someone can't really think of something to wish for, it's a demonstration of a lack of imagination on the part of the screenwriter, not just the characters.
Once upon a time, I was the associate producer of a film that used a similar story device, it was an animated feature called "I Married a Strange Person". In that film a guy who watched too much TV got some bad radiation from a satellite dish aimed at the back of his neck, and he developed a lobe that gave him the power to turn his thoughts into reality. The whole last half of the film was a giant chase scene, because the leader of SmileCorp. (a thinly-veiled poke at Disney) wanted it to help him take over the world - he just needed to surgically remove the lobe from the young newlywed and have it implanted into his own brain-stem. So everybody chased this guy around, and every evil character took a turn with the lobe, and every wish they had turned out bad, and they each blew up or got killed in typical cartoon fashion. I couldn't help but think of that film while watching this one.
We had some success with that film, directed by Bill Plympton, and it had a good run on the festival circuit, played at the Toronto International Film Festival and then in the Dramatic Competition at Sundance, of all places. It was released theatrically by Lions Gate (the old one, not the new one) and we still sell copies of it on DVD at conventions. You can watch it now on many of the streaming services, including Tubi, which is free, so you can easily judge it for yourself.
Bottom line, this is a very weird movie. But it's been a weird year, already more weird movies than I can keep track of - and of course, it's a weird year in the news as well. All I can say is that my 2020 year-end re-cap is going to be SO all over the place. Still, I'll give a few props to this film, for correctly predicting the use of universal gadgets (like Alexa, Echo, Siri, Google Home) and the desire among tech companies to have all their employees living in little communities near the office. Also, I couldn't help but see the connection between the scientist/germophobe character disinfecting everything that comes into his house and our recent pandemic adventures, where we had to clean all our groceries and wear face-masks everywhere. Mr. Noseworthy was just ahead of his time!
Today's lesson - don't just be careful what you wish for, also be careful how you wish for it.
Also starring Jon Cryer (last seen in "Pretty in Pink"), James Spader (last seen in "Bob Roberts"), William H. Macy (last heard in "Ernest & Celestine"), Kat Dennings (last seen in "Thor: The Dark World"), Jimmy Bennett (last seen in "Movie 43"), Jolie Vanier, Trevor Gagnon, Jake Short, Rebel Rodriguez (last seen in "Planet Terror"), Leo Howard, Devon Gearhart (last seen in "Changeling"), Angela Lanza, Alejandro Rose-Garcia (last seen in "Sin City: A Dame to Kill For"), Racer Rodriguez, Rocket Rodriguez, Cambell Westmoreland (last seen in "Boyhood"), Zoe Webb, Jonathan Breck (last seen in "Everybody Wants Some!!"), Bianca Rodriguez and the voice of Elizabeth Avellan.
RATING: 3 out of 10 boxes of Great White Bites cereal
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