BEFORE: I had to pull another film from future February romance chains, and sort of re-purpose it for linking use, to get me through August. I'll have to re-assess next year's romance chain, hopefully there are enough extra linking opportunities to allow me to reorganize it and still make it through that month somehow.
I sort of had an unspoken moratorium on body-switching comedies, no "Freaky Friday", no "Vice Versa", no "17 Again" and it should go without saying, no "The Change-Up" or "The Hot Chick". But never say never, I guess, and what good are rules if I can't break them here and there? Besides, I once said I would never watch "The Hunger Games" or the "Twilight" movies, and when I needed to, I caved on "The Hunger Games" and I'm planning on hitting the "Twilight" series this October, if plans stay the same.
But at this point, what movies or franchises remain unwatched for me? I've still never watched any of the "Rambo" movies, and so far I've stayed away from the "Fast and the Furious" and "Transformers" franchises. I know there are plenty of horror franchises I've never watched, like "Friday the 13th" and "Nightmare on Elm Street" movies, never seen any of the "Child's Play" or "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" films, either. That's really what I'm intentionally staying away from, everything else is more or less fair game, unless it seems stupid like "The Boss Baby" or just randomly doesn't interest me at all. I'm still avoiding "Cats" but eventually I may be curious enough to watch that, just to see how terrible it is.
Judy Greer carries over from "Where'd You Go, Bernadette". It doesn't really matter if today's film is good or bad, at the moment it's necessary to keep the chain alive.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past" (Movie #3,131)
THE PLOT: A girl makes a wish on her thirteenth birthday, and wakes up the next day as a thirty-year-old woman.
AFTER: OK, technically this is a body-switching movie, but thankfully it's also a time-travel movie. A 13-year old girl travels forward to when she is 30, and sees her future, as a projection of her life if it stays on its current course. But the only reason for someone to see their future would rightfully be to make them aware of their ability to change it, based on what they see as being "wrong" in the future.
(You may notice I posted no movie for Friday, August 14 - that's because I was watching the 2-hour series finale of "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.", and their team has been time-traveling all season, visiting the 1950's, 60's, 70's and 80's, trying to keep the timeline intact, but of course accidentally altering it for the apparent worse, and then futilely trying to fix it, only to find out that in the Marvel Universe, changing the timeline just creates an alternate timeline, and they didn't even have to go back to the point of divergence to fix things, they merely just side-stepped back to the original timeline they belonged in.)
So what Jenna sees is just a projected future, like a very long dream or something, but it's based on her subconscious fears about the person that she wants to become, but also is afraid of becoming, and the divergent point is when she befriends Tom-Tom and rejects her male friend Matt as a potential love interest. Deep down, she must know that these are the wrong moves to make, because in the vision of the future, she's still best friends and co-workers with Tom-Tom (now Lucy) and Matt's not even in the picture. The next hour is spent figuring out who the adult Jenna is, and it's painfully slow, and she ignores many of the available clues. 30-year old Jenna is a designer for that magazine that she liked when she was 13, she's got a boyfriend who plays hockey for the NY Rangers, and at the office she's a ruthless bitch who might be having an affair with another staffer's husband. She doesn't even take phone calls from her parents, for God's sake, and she skipped last Christmas with them!
Obviously she's very naive, since she's got the mind of a teenager in an adult's body - so it's a long road toward figuring out how to succeed in an adult world - or is it? She quickly reads a book called "Magazine Editing for Dummies", that's got to be a joke, right? Because if it was that easy, then wouldn't everyone do that? But I guess anything can happen in a dream, if that's in fact what this is. But it feels so disjointed here, is that just because it takes Jenna so damn long to figure out why she's been given this glimpse of her future?
In a way, this is just a reversed and gender-swapped version of "A Christmas Carol", right? (Five years later, Jennifer Garner was also in another take on the classic Dickens tale, called "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past", and the same actress playing her character as a 13-year-old here played her character there as a teen.). The difference, of course, is that Scrooge was shown visions of his past to learn how he got to be the way he was, and essentially he had no future. Here Jenna sees her future, to learn how she might end up, and was able to use that knowledge to go back to the divergent point and change it. But at its essence, it's the same story - introspection about mistakes made, ways that things could have been done better, in order to make the most of whatever time is left.
(I know, it's more likely that somebody was doing a riff on "Big", but there's a key difference - it that film, Tom Hanks' character became an adult overnight, but the timestream was unaffected by whatever magic took place, only he aged. This film uses a different format, where everyone gets older, the timestream/dream has skipped ahead 17 years, so it's along the same lines as "Big", but really, it's a whole different game here.)
But that's also a bit simplistic, because like many Hollywood romances, there's the suggestion that there's only ONE perfect mate for each person, and if you miss the boat on that one, man, you're screwed. How can this be true for an every-woman character, when it's so often not the case in real life? Most people have, or are at least capable of having, several meaningful romantic relationships over the course of a lifetime. There are more favorable pairings, sure, but to reduce someone's life to "There's just ONE perfect match out there" seems ridiculous. With most people it's a clumsy process of trial and error, you find somebody, try to live with them, it doesn't work for any of a number of reasons (his fault, her fault, does it even really matter?) and then you take what you've learned, pick yourself up, dust yourself off and try again. And maybe next time you're smarter about things, or you've lowered your expectations, whatever makes the new relationship work, or seem to work.
It's a lot like having a career - some people have just one career for their whole lives, others have several, or they bounce around from job to job. Whatever gets you through the night, it's all right, it's all right. It's not like you get to the end of your life, and when you get to the afterlife (if there is one), you can say, "OK, I give up, who was my ideal mate and what was the job I was supposed to have?" And then whoever's in control of reality (assuming anyone is) will say, "Oh, you would have been the happiest if you'd become a plumber and married Jessica. Sorry, you messed up and you don't get to play again." It just doesn't work like that (umm, probably) and I think the vast majority of people would be better served if they just learned how to make the most out of the opportunities that come their way. Or some combination of making things happen and letting things happen to them, whatever feels comfortable and seems to lead to happiness, or at least contentment.
Anyway, I think about who I was when I was 13 - 8th grade? There's no way that kid could have been shown a glimpse of my life when I was 30, not without his head exploding. I don't want to misquote Patton Oswalt here, but I remember he had a funny bit about being an adult, and having a conversation with his younger self, and all the kid Patton could focus on in the conversation was finding out that in the future, he got to have sex with a woman. People have different priorities at different ages, and as we see here, 13-year-old Jenna has a different set of hopes and dreams then future Jenna does. Why can't we just let her be a normal 13-year-old, and not put so much pressure on teen Jenna to start forming that permanent bond with her best friend and eventual soul-mate? Is she even equipped to handle that sort of thing, because when she's rocketed into her future, it really doesn't seem that way.
I also don't think that many people would know the whole "Thriller" dance 17 years later - some of those people would have been too young to have learned it at the time, right? Wouldn't they have been infants when the "Thriller" album came out? Guess that's a NITPICK POINT. I don't know, it's a cute little piece of fluff but I don't think I could possibly take this movie seriously at all. No regrets, but it's just not my cup of tea - it's mortar between the bricks.
Also starring Jennifer Garner (last seen in "Love, Simon"), Mark Ruffalo (last seen in "Just Like Heaven"), Andy Serkis (last seen in "Long Shot"), Christa B. Allen (last seen in "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past"), Sean Marquette, Alexandra Kyle, Kathy Baker (last seen in "The Age of Adeline"), Phil Reeves (last seen in "Central Intelligence"), Lynn Collins, Samuel Ball (last seen in "The Last Castle"), Marcia DeBonis (last seen in "Uncut Gems"), Kiersten Warren, Susan Egan, Alex Black, Ashley Benson (last seen in "Elvis & Nixon"), Brittany Curran, Brie Larson (last seen in "Between Two Ferns: The Movie"), Megan Lusk, Julia Roth (last seen in "Drillbit Taylor"), Renee Olstead, Maz Jobrani, with cameos from Jim Gaffigan (last seen in "Going the Distance"), Mary Pat Gleason (also last seen in "Drillbit Taylor"), Joe Grifasi and archive footage of Pat Benatar, Michael Jackson (last seen in "Whitney"), Rick Springfield (last seen in "Sound City"), Burt Lancaster (last seen in "Life Itself").
RATING 5 out of 10 yearbook photos
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