BEFORE: Tony Hale carries over from "Love, Simon", where he played a school principal. Here he plays a school gym teacher, and I've also been watching him during this whole pandemic in "Arrested Development", at least one episode per night, if I can. Sometimes two, sometimes I don't have time for any, but at least I'm working my way through this series on Netflix, and I just finished season 3, so two more seasons to go.
I just recently noticed the similarities to the Trump family - with a father, George Bluth, who's been involved with real-estate scams, then constantly wanted by the law for one thing or another, plus the family structure of him having three sons (Don Jr., Eric and Barron) and one adult daughter (Ivanka). OK, so maybe Trump has an extra daughter and a few more wives than George Bluth, but still, a lot of stuff sort of lines up once you start looking for overlap. So Tony Hale as Buster Bluth (the dumb one - OK, that's not specific enough - the really nervous, mama's boy dumb one) is probably the analog for Eric Trump.
Of course, after realizing this I jumped online only to discover that I certainly wasn't the first to notice the connections between the two families, and this has already been discussed at length in some forums. Just like I said yesterday, this is sort of how I lead my life, always just a bit late for every party.
THE PLOT: Americans discover a terrorist plot on a Paris-bound train.
AFTER: Never, ever, in my wildest, darkest imagination, could I have envisioned the state of our world today. Sure, after the 2016 election I figured the you-know-what would hit the fan in some fashion, but nobody had predicted a pandemic, racial protests, rampant unemployment, political corruption, rioting, looting, (and don't forget the murder hornets, I sure haven't) all hitting at the same time. The end result of all this is that we can now look back at films made during the before-times with some newfound degree of fondness - and yes, this all puts me in the position where a film about an international terrorism incident can now be labelled as "the good old days". Hey, remember terrorism? Guys with C-4 in their shoes, their underwear, the inconveniences of TSA screenings, people on TV waiving ISIS flags and shouting "Death to America"? We need a new word for terrible things that we don't miss, yet still seem better than our current situation - how about NOT-stalgia?
At one point during the development of this film, there were actors attached, and most likely then real footage of the three American heroes would have been used during the closing credits, which is a common practice in biopics these days. But the choice was then made, right or wrong, to have the real people, who are not professional actors, play themselves. It's a bold move, but also a risky one - I can get that director Clint Eastwood was striving for authenticity, and of course who would know better about what happened and what was said between these three men before, during and after the incident than these three men themselves? The problem then becomes, however, that we're all conditioned to accept professional actors playing roles, pretending to be the real people on screen, and by "professional actors" I mean people who have studied, who have experience in expressing certain emotions in front of a camera. Most "real" people don't have this ability, and tend to come off as either stiff or nonchalant when the camera starts rolling. You can even see it in some interviews, people who are not relaxed, not comfortable being themselves just because they know they're being recorded. News anchors just starting out probably experience some form of this ("the on-screen jitters"), and it could take them months or years to be relaxed enough to deliver the news authentically.
Yep, that's the problem here, big time, with the three leads in the story playing themselves. I even know that they are who they're pretending to be (or pretending to be who they are, whichever) and I had a hard time believing what they said. Yes, I'm prepared to suggest that in this case, actors could have done a better job playing these three men than they themselves could - at least as far as the perception of the viewing audience goes, again because we've been conditioned to expect a certain range of emotions in an acting performance, and actors have been trained on how to use these emotions to create a false reality, they can fake authenticity - the good ones, anyway. This is also why so many child actors come off as unbelievable - they're very good at being honest and being themselves, but it's more difficult for them to believably pretend to be someone else.
But this one reached me emotionally, especially at the end. Time-jumping aside - there was a super-strong story here, but it only kicks in during the last third of the film. The first whole hour is build-up, and what strikes me is that this would have happened even if the director had chosen to present the events in a linear fashion, one timeline instead of two, with limited flashbacks instead of an excessive amount. The first hour (the men as kids in school, the tribulations of military service, then the fateful European vacation) would have dragged no matter what, because we all came to see what happened on that train. So the main reason to run a split-narrative would have been to cover up or eliminate this long, boring build-up to the train incident, but yet that's where we ended up anyway, even with the bouncing around between their childhood and adulthood experiences.
Ideally, when a film is edited like this, in the split-timeline fashion, the goal is to show how the events of the past directly influenced the ones in the present or future, by juxtaposing them we're supposed to notice certain similarities, or how something somebody said in the past had a different or more important meaning in consideation of those future events. But here there's almost no correlation between the two timelines, because these boys had a childhood that was so similar to everyone else's. For example, so much time is spent on showing the mothers of two of the boys meeting with a teacher and a principal at their school over their sons' difficulties in class - what purpose, exactly, do these scenes serve? None, really, not in either timeline - there's no direct point to be made, and nothing that later gives us insight to their heroic behavior on the train.
It's like we're watching two different movies, and the one set in their teen years could be about almost anybody, including the kids seen in "Good Boys". And the few correlations that are there are ones I don't want to acknowledge, like the scenes with the boys studying World War II battle plans and playing war games with toy guns, because knowing that director Clint Eastwood supports the NRA, I think I see the conclusion that he WANTS me to draw, that kids who play with guns grow up to take down terrorists and save lives, and I reject that overly-simplistic suggestion.
A co-worker recently pointed out to me (after I gave "Knives Out" a "6") that the vast majority of my ratings are in the 4 to 6 range, and she's right. I believe that most films are 4's, 5's or 6's - simply because so many aren't bad enough to be 2's or 3's, and not great enough to be 8's or 9's. And so far this year, my highest score to any film has been a "7". You could say it's an off-year, especially with no movies being released on the big-screen, but honestly, nothing's impressed me that much in my 2020 viewing year - not even "Joker", though perhaps I'm due for a re-watch there, now that I know nothing's really likely to surpass it, not even a superhero movie, not until "Wonder Woman 1984" or "Black Widow" get released, anyway.
So what am I supposed to do with this one, then, in the end? It's a powerful TRUE story about three young men who stopped a terrorist and saved a lot of lives, preventing a massacre on this French train. They should be commended, and their story should be told and the men should be celebrated as heroes. But their story is buried here under the mess of a non-linear split timeline presentation, and I still maintain that their story could have been stronger if depicted through the use of professional actors. And that's how I arrived at the score below, which is based on my enjoyment of the film, and not the importance of the story. I was emotionally affected by their heroism, because in many ways this was the movie that I needed to see right now, but the score stands. If anything, I think I might be going easy on this one.
For the details on this real event from 2015, just search on "2015 Thalys train attack".
Also starring Spencer Stone, Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos, Mark Moogalian, Isabelle Risacher Moogalian, Judy Greer (last seen in "Love Happens"), Jenna Fischer, Ray Corasani, Chris Norman, P.J. Byrne (last seen in "Bombshell"), Sinqua Walls, Thomas Lennon (last seen in "What's Your Number?"), Jaleel White, Irene White, Gary Weeks (last seen in "Rampage"), Steve Coulter (last seen in "Just Mercy"), Robert Pralgo (last seen in "The Blind Side"), Paul-Mikel Williams, Bryce Gheisar, Cole Eichenberger, William Jennings.
RATING: 6 out of 10
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