BEFORE: Well, this is the point I talked about before, where I was planning to watch "The Call of the Wild", with Karen Gillan carrying over from "The Circle". That film is not yet available to me unless I want to pay $15.99 on iTunes, so like most everything else this year, it's being postponed. Not cancelled, just postponed - until next year, which is when we're all going to have to do two or three years' worth of partying and other fun activities to make up for this year. If you're out partying now, you're exempt from that process because, well, you may not be with us any longer. Sorry.
So now Patton Oswalt carries over from "The Circle" instead - which I'm totally fine with, because this ensures he'll make my year-end countdown, and that's always a good thing. Heck, it's usually a good thing when Patton is in a TV show or a movie or has a new comedy special out. I have not met the man, but I did mail him a check when he did a voice-over for an animated short my boss made, and made sure his check was properly processed through SAG-AFTRA with all of their deductions and pension payments and such. I did see him once, walking through the San Diego Convention Center after hours, alongside Brian Posehn, but I chose not to bother him and act like a total fanboy. I think I made the right call.
Also, this film has something to do with "Star Trek", and this week I'm finally going to watch my first episode of "Star Trek: Discovery" when it airs on TV, as all shows should, not just on a streaming service. You can't blackmail me to get CBS AllAccess by using "Star Trek" shows as a lure - see, something good did come out of this pandemic, CBS was so desperate for new fall shows that they're dipping in to their streaming shows, and I get to see new "Star Trek". I admit, the pandemic has been full of really, really bad things across the board, this is just one teeny tiny little consolation prize - I'm not comparing the two things in terms of relative importance.
THE PLOT: A young autistic woman runs away from her caregiver in an attempt to submit her 500-page manuscript to a "Star Trek" writing competition in Hollywood. On her journey there, she must conquer an unknown world full of challenges.
AFTER: This turned out to be the perfect role for Patton Oswalt, late in the film he plays an L.A. cop who spots this missing woman, and based on what he knows about her, he speaks to her in Klingon to prove that he's honorable and means her no harm. Then, later at the police station, he listens to her recount her proposed "Star Trek" script and is blown away by its complexity. This is 100% right in his pocket, umm, except the being an L.A. cop thing. I'm not sure he'd pass their fitness requirements, but hey, it's only a movie.
I'll admit I still don't understand much about autism, the only documentary I've seen on it was that "Life, Animated" one I watched - jeez, last year, but since that was in the before-times it feels like 10 years ago - and that one was about a father reaching his autistic son through their shared love of Disney movies. So I get that autistic people can focus on some things if they want to, but the rest of the disorder is mysterious to me. Wendy here has a similar focus on "Star Trek" TV shows and movies (this film is based on a play from 2008, so they mention "Deep Space Nine", but not the newer J.J. Abrams movies, and certainly not the newer TV shows like "Discovery" and "Picard") and she's written a script to enter into a competition. I know there are fan-made films, and other fan fiction, but I'm not aware of Paramount opening up the writing duties on any "Star Trek" series or movie to the fans. But whatever, this is just the engine driving today's plot forward.
When Wendy realizes that she's missed the deadline for mailing the script, and since the post office doesn't accept mail on Sundays (which is a bit weird, because we're supposed to have a separation of church and state in the U.S.) she suddenly realizes her package won't arrive by Tuesday's deadline. OK, a couple of NITPICK POINTS here - first off, there IS next-day service offered by the mail, or at least there was back in 2017 - I've noticed recently that 2-day/3-day Priority Mail is taking about 4 days. And she's in San Francisco, so next-day service (which used to be called Express Mail, but is now Priority Mail Ultra or something) seems quite possible, IF she mails first thing Monday morning. Secondly, most contests and competitions I'm familiar with all have postmark deadlines, meaning as long as she gets it in the mail by a certain time on a certain day, her entry will count. This is usually done so a contest doesn't favor people who live closer to the delivery address.
But let's assume that somebody at Paramount was having a bad day and decided to be a hard-ass about the contest rules. And let's assume that Wendy isn't aware of Express Mail, because she's something of an unreliable narrator, in that she has trouble understanding how the world around her works sometimes - but she does take a lot of notes about things, and does have some cognitive ability to figure things out on her own. Still, her life is very structured and she has to maintain a strict memorized schedule so nothing will be out of place, not her daily hygiene or walking her dog or remembering to wait for the "Walk" signal before crossing the street.
I guess it's the visit from her older sister that sets her world upside-down, she'd been hoping that her sister would take her out of the group home and let her move in with her. However, her sister just had a baby and she's concerned about how Wendy might act around the baby. After this disappointment, and the one where she realizes that it's too late to mail in her script (even though it isn't), Wendy sets out to take the bus down to L.A. and hand in her script in person. OK, a couple more N.P.'s here, to do this she has to break several of the rules that she's been living by, and the film JUST got finished telling us that she needs to follow these rules in order to function. On the other hand, this story still needs to keep moving forward, and that's only going to happen if Wendy crosses Market St. and makes it to the other bus station.
Her dog (or is it the group home's dog?) has followed her, and she realizes that pets aren't allowed on these intercity buses, so she tries to hide the dog. But once again, this is Wendy breaking the rules, and she's spent the last few years learning to not break the rules in order to fit in to society better. So with every rule that she breaks, I found the story a little less likely to believe - from what little I know of autism, it seems like someone with the condition caught in a moral quandary like this would be more likely to shut down than to quickly devise a way around the rules. But again, I'm not an expert, and again, these decisions have to be made a certain way to keep the story moving. At some point it's just a fait accompli because we've come so far, that we can't just have her turn around and head home, or call her caregiver for a pick-up.
Her caregiver is a woman nick-named Scottie, which is very convenient for a Star Trek fan. And her older sister is played by Alice Eve, who was in one of the "Star Trek" movies from the re-booted movie series. (If there are other Easter eggs here, I guess I missed them.). Once Scottie realizes that Wendy is missing, she and Wendy's sister set out separately to search the highways between San Francisco and L.A. Meanwhile, Wendy, having learned the hard way that strangers on the road aren't all friendly, is involved in a bus accident and is taken to a hospital. Still, she manages to not freak out, get herself out of there and continue on her journey, though she keeps losing companions, possessions and portions of her script.
What's redeeming about this story is that I've seen plenty of films where writing is depicted as hard, and in every single one of them, that novelist or screenwriter persists, and ends up with either a best-selling novel, or the genius script (often for the movie with the same title as the one you're watching - ugh, I hate that so much...). And you have to figure that's imbalanced, for everyone in the real world who writes a successful book or script, there should be at least 99 who either don't finish it, or do finish it, and it's garbage. You just never see those stories told in Hollywood movies, obviously. I'd love to see that sometime - the writer in a movie spends hours, days, working on his masterpiece, comes out of his writer's room and announces, "I'm finished! And it's terrible!"
Wendy gets some very positive feedback about her script, not only from her caregiver's son, and that L.A. cop, but from the people at Paramount. But winning the competition would perhaps be too simple, plus we're well aware that her script, while complex and intricate and involving time travel through several different "Trek" franchises, could very well be unfilmable. That's actually refreshing, when compared with the inevitable success of writers in nearly every other Hollywood movie about writing. But she's learned more about herself and what she's capable of, and that somehow feels more important in the long run. Kudos for that - but points off for falling back on the very, very tired and overused "My script has been knocked out of my hands, and it's flying around the parking lot!" trope. So essentially, that's a wash.
EDIT: I've just learned that the production teams working on "The Next Generation", "Deep Space Nine" and "Voyager" did allow amateur fan writers to submit scripts for consideration, some of which got turned into actual episodes. But, they never ran a formal contest for submissions.
One more NITPICK POINT: When she makes it to Paramount, Wendy is able to walk right on to the lot. But we all know that most companies and especially movie studios have strict security. While she's seen evading security when she sneaks on to a bus, I have a feeling the Paramount lot would have been a tougher nut to crack. OK, OK, two more: What the heck happened to all of the senior citizens who were on that bus? For that matter, who took care of the other people in the group home when Scottie drove off to look for Wendy?
Also starring Dakota Fanning (last seen in "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood"), Toni Collette (last seen in "Knives Out"), Alice Eve (last seen in "The Con Is On"), River Alexander, Michael Stahl-David (last seen in "Cloverfield"), Jessica Rothe (last seen in "La La Land"), Tony Revolori (last seen in "Spider-Man: Far from Home"), Jacob Wysocki (last seen in "Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising"), Stephanie Allynne (last seen in "Pacific Rim: Uprising"), Robin Weigert (last seen in "Bombshell"), Denise Dowse, Matty Cardarople (last seen in "Drillbit Taylor"), Bill Kottkamp (last seen in "Fist Fight"), Edward Hong, Heath McGough, Shawn Roe, John Prosky (last seen in "Straight Outta Compton"), Joseph A. Nunez, with cameos from Marla Gibbs (last seen in "Lemon"), Laura Innes.
RATING: 6 out of 10 fun-size Snickers bars
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