Some Kind of Wonderful

Year 12, Day 39 - 2/8/20 - Movie #3,441

BEFORE: OK, I've chosen my new path through the February films, I had to shift a couple of things around, but there were so many extra links that I wasn't using that it's really no big deal - except a couple of films are gone from the chain now, one is "The Layover", but that's on Hulu and it links to the romance films that will be left over after I'm done here, so that film could re-surface next year.  Also gone is "The Perfect Score", which was always a bit suspect as a romance film - I just dubbed it to DVD and I didn't see anyone making out, so it's not a romance film, it's a high-school/heist film, one that was only in the chain to connect the Chris Evans movies and the Scarlett Johansson movies. It's been tabled for later this year, either for back-to-school time or to link to "Black Widow", possibly both, we'll see.

Added to the chain now, very last-minute, are today's film, which is another high-school film, but one that seems to fit better in the romance chain, and tomorrow's film, which I'll reveal tomorrow.  Both aired recently on a good channel (one I can dub from) and have been put on DVD already.  And about that, I'm having trouble with my cable DVR again, it keeps rebooting itself - when this happened two years ago I lost the contents of a full DVR, because all the cable company knows to do is to swap out the box, despite the fact that I PAID them for those movies, then I don't get to see them.  Why oh why don't they have the ability to just put THAT drive into another DVR, and I can keep what I paid them for?  Anyway, I'm hoping that this is a signal problem in my neighborhood and not a DVR problem, or else I'll lose about 60 movies stored on it, 25 of which are not currently running, so I'll have to track them all down again and possibly pay for them.  Once again, I'm wishing there was a viable alternative to paying for premium cable, but I'm at their mercy.

Maddie Corman carries over from "Private Life".  Hey, if TCM can link back 47 years from "The Player" to when Dean Stockwell was a child actor, then I can link back 31 years from 2018 to 1987, to when she was a child actor, playing the lead character's little sister.  I was trying to figure out who she was in yesterday's film by Googling "Maddie Corman Private Life", but what I got instead was background on the actress' husband, who was involved in a scandal a couple years ago, which she then turned into an Off-Broadway one-woman show.  Hey, when life gives you lemons... but then an IMDB search told me she was in "Some Kind of Wonderful", a film that I had trouble fitting in to this chain, so I was going to save it for next year.  But nope, I'm packing the romance chain tight with films this year, even if that leaves me no linking opportunities next time - I can always do a half Black History Month instead.

Meanwhile, over on Turner Classic Movies, Marshall Thompson links from "The Valley of Decision" to tomorrow's first film, can you fill in the other links?  Answers below.

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 9 on TCM (31 Days of Oscar, Day 9)
6:45 am "Mystery Street" (1950) with _____________ linking to:
8:45 am "Battleground" (1949) with _____________ linking to:
11:00 am "The Harvey Girls" (1946) with _____________ linking to:
1:00 pm "Friendly Persuasion" (1956) with _____________ linking to:
3:30 pm "Gentleman's Agreement" (1947) with _____________ linking to:
5:45 pm "National Velvet" (1944) with _____________ linking to:
8:00 pm "Strike Up the Band" (1940) with _____________ linking to:
10:15 pm "A Star Is Born" (1954) with _____________ linking to:
1:30 am "Julius Caesar" (1953) with _____________ linking to:
3:45 am "On the Waterfront" (1954) with _____________ linking to:
5:45 am "The Sandpiper" (1965)

I've seen another 4 of these: "A Star Is Born", "Julius Caesar", "On the Waterfront" and "The Sandpiper".  It occurs to me that TCM will be playing "A Star Is Born" on Oscar night, possibly at the same time they'll be giving out the Best Actress award, and someone happens to be nominated for playing the star of that film.  Does this mean TCM thinks Renee Zellweger will win?  Another 4 films seen out of 11 brings me to 35 out of 104, or 33.6%.

THE PLOT: When Keith goes out with Amanda, the girl of his dreams, Amanda's ex-boyfriend plans to get back at Keith.  Meanwhile, Keith's best friend, tomboy Watts, realizes she has feelings for him.

AFTER: I made it a point a few years ago to see all the John Hughes-directed films that I hadn't seen already, like "She's Having a Baby" and "Sixteen Candles", and I got to them all, except for "Curly Sue".  But then there are the films only written by Hughes, and "Some Kind of Wonderful" is one of those.  I'm still missing a few others like "Dutch", "Baby's Day Out" and most of the "Beethoven" franchise (which he wrote under the pseudonym of Edmond Dantes, nice)  Oh, and "Drillbit Taylor", but you know what, I think I've already dug deep enough into his lesser works.

I'm just not sure that this film from 1987 aged very well, even though it was a more progressive time in the 80's, high-school girls with short hair could still be called lesbians in a derogatory manner.  MTV was bringing Boy George, Elton John and Freddie Mercury into America's homes, but apparently at school, attitudes weren't changing quickly enough.  I know, Watts isn't really a lesbian in this film, she's attracted to Keith, but she also watches Amanda in her underwear in the locker room.  Plus she's a drummer, has a boyish figure, the signs are all there - give her a couple years to figure things out and she'll probably be listening to the Indigo Girls and marching in Pride parades.

But until that day comes, she's happy hanging out at the garage with Keith (mmm hmm, nothing to see here, just a girl who's interested in fixing car engines, move along...).  She's Keith's best friend, but wants to upgrade to girlfriend status, which sets up the third leg of the classic love triangle.  And believe me, after a week of failed proposals, slacking teens, self-help gurus in need of help and a bunch of in-vitro fertilizations, a love triangle story in a high-school is a refreshing change of pace.  (Hey, some actual romance as we kick off Valentine's Week!).

So Keith confides in Watts about how he thinks Amanda is attractive - classic rookie mistake, never talk to one girl about your feelings for another.  Amanda even proposes a practice kissing session, so Keith will be ready for his date with Amanda.  Geez, Keith, do we have to draw you a diagram here, or hit you over the head so you'll notice the girl right in front of you?  She's already your best friend, you've already laid the groundwork for a solid relationship, instead of chasing some girl who's WAY out of your league, why not just settle?  You can at least have a couple years of hot action with Watts before she figures out that she's really into girls.  (Umm, I may be projecting here, sorry.).

Plus Amanda just broke up with Hardy, and her girlfriends all want her to get back together with him, despite the fact that he was also chasing every other girl in school while dating Amanda.  He's super rich I guess, and dresses well (with those cool 80's jackets, what is that, Members Only?) but he also treated Amanda like she was his property, which is so gnarly, dude.  He even walks right into the girls' locker room to confront Amanda, despite the protests of the female gym teacher, because watching all the girls undress is HER job.

The rest is sort of by-the-numbers, Hardy pretends to be over Amanda but he's not, he invites them both to a party where he's planning to have his whole crew beat Keith up.  Thankfully Keith's sister is a mall rat and overhears the plan, cluing Keith in that Amanda's only playing him to get him to the party and his beating.  But Keith's got a plan to take down the socs, after all he didn't befriend those skinheads in detention for no reason...

I just have to ask, why is the Grand Funk Railroad song "Some Kind of Wonderful" not anywhere in this film?  Was it just too 1970's for a film released in 1987?  Why not have some 80's synth band cover it?  Could they only afford the rights to the song's title, but not the song itself?  It's conspicuous in its absence here.  Meanwhile, there are a couple songs by the Psychedelic Furs listed as being on the soundtrack, which is odd because they had a guitarist named John Ashton, with the same name as the actor who played Keith's father (the guy from "Beverly Hills Cop" and "Midnight Run").  Yes, they are two different people with the same name, it's just an odd coincidence that they were involved with the same film in two different capacities.

Speaking of names, the soundtrack also features a Rolling Stones song called "Amanda Jones", which is also the name of Lea Thompson's character.  Another coincidence, or was the character just simply named for her parents' favorite Stones album cut?  Or were the filmmakers able to clear this song and then re-named the character so it would have a purpose?  As a high-school kid, if I had looked at an album from a major band like the Stones and saw a track with my name as the title, that would probably have freaked me out - so why is it no big deal that Keith listens to this song in the shower?

There are a few other things that just felt "off" here - I don't know if a writer and director who were both born in 1950 were the right people to capture the high-school experience of 1987, when they both would have been 37.  When I was 37, I couldn't possibly have told you what it was like to attend high-school then, in 2005.  This is one reason that Hollywood films often feel just a bit behind the times.  John Hughes and director Howard Deutch would have attended high-school from 1964 to 1968 or so, and so that's what they knew.  I'm thinking of scenes where a character's car is either broken-down or out of gas, so she has a male student push her car to the gas station, which feels like a 1950's thing.  Someone in the 1980's would be more likely to call a tow truck, or bring gas to the car, instead of the other way around.

And a high-school student spending his whole college fund on an extravagant date and a pair of earrings?  That doesn't sound very 1980's, either - kids in the 80's all knew how important college was, and probably would have known that business school (or even art school) was a better way to spend that money, by investing in themselves.  Is Keith planning to work at the garage for his whole life?  Clearly not, because his ambition is to be a painter.  How's he going to learn to improve his painting technique if he blows his art school tuition on jewelry?  If Keith is smart he'll sell those earrings back and go to art school, because girlfriends come and go, but putting together enough material for a gallery show could take him pretty far.  At least that will pay his rent down the line after Watts finally comes out.

Future generations will be looking for reasons why climate change got out of control, and they'll probably look back on the films of the 1980's and point to all the hairspray that was used during the decade as the main cause of all the CFC's in the atmosphere, that's my theory anyway.  Stoltz is sporting the Mark Hamill hair from 1977, but the other teens all sport those 1980's big hair poofs.

Also starring Eric Stoltz (last seen in "Kicking and Screaming"), Mary Stuart Masterson (last seen in "The Postman"), Lea Thompson (last seen in "Back in Time"), Craig Sheffer (last seen in "Stand Up Guys"), John Ashton (last seen in "Breaking Away"), Elias Koteas (last seen in "Let Me In"), Molly Hagan (last seen in "Sully"), Jane Elliot, Candace Cameron, Chynna Phillips (last seen in "Bridesmaids"), Scott Coffey (last seen in "Once Upon a Time in America"), Carmine Caridi (last seen in "The Cheap Detective"), Lee Garlington (last seen in "The Angriest Man in Brooklyn"), Kenneth Kimmins, with cameos from Pamela Anderson (last seen in "Baywatch"), Ike Eisenmann (last seen in "Race to Witch Mountain").

RATING: 5 out of 10 college pamphlets

ANSWERS: The missing TCM "360 Degrees of Oscar" links are Ricardo Montalban, John Hodiak, Marjorie Main, Dorothy McGuire, Anne Revere, Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, James Mason, Marlon Brando, Eva Marie Saint.

Private Life

Year 12, Day 38 - 2/7/20 - Movie #3,440

BEFORE: It turns out I lied, I can't stop messing around with the romance chain.  It seems like every night I move the remaining films around, looking for that magic combination that's going to put the "right" film on Valentine's Day.  For a while it was today's film, but I started to feel like that wasn't the best choice somehow - I mean it's about a married couple, so definitely relationship stuff will be found tonight, but is that good enough?  Then I flipped a piece of the chain around so that I'd get to this film sooner and that put "The Bounty Hunter" on V-Day - eh, I don't know if that's the way I want to go, either.  But at least that order had the advantage of putting a film before its sequel, rather than after.

There are so many options, so many ways to organize the same films that it's maddening - I've got one other scenario to consider, it adds two new films that recently came into my possession (I just spotted a way to link to them), and takes away one that's available on Hulu, so it's one film LONGER in the end, but I think it's a bit more elegant and it puts more appropriate films on and around Valentine's Day - so maybe I'll go with that one, but then I really REALLY have to stop fine tuning this chain and just pick one order that gets me to the same end point and stick with it.

John Carroll Lynch carries over from "Love Happens".

Meanwhile, over on Turner Classic Movies, Louis Calhern links from "The Red Danube" to tomorrow's first film, can you fill in the other links?  Answers below.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 8 on TCM (31 Days of Oscar, Day 8)
7:15 am "Juarez" (1939) with _____________ linking to:
9:30 am "Now, Voyager" (1942) with _____________ linking to:
11:30 am "The Spanish Main" (1945) with _____________ linking to:
1:30 pm "This Land Is Mine" (1943) with _____________ linking to:
3:30 pm "The Picture of Dorian Gray" (1945) with _____________ linking to:
5:45 pm "From Here to Eternity" (1953) with _____________ linking to:
8:00 pm "Separate Tables" (1958) with _____________ linking to:
10:00 pm "Atlantic City" (1980) with _____________ linking to:
12:00 am "Bull Durham" (1988) with _____________ linking to:
2:00 am "The Player" (1992) with _____________ linking to:
4:30 am "The Valley of Decision" (1945)

I can tell you there's some first-class linking going on here - there's a 22-year jump forward between two films, and a 47-year jump backwards between two others. How many actors have careers with nearly 5 decades in between two of their roles?  Since I've used that actor as a link, I happen to know he was a noted child actor who stuck with it, and worked pretty steadily in the 1980's and 1990's.  If you need to link between the 1940's and the 1980's, that's the kind of actor you need to look for.  And a film like "The Player" has such a large cast, that's a film you can put almost anywhere to help yourself out of a linking jam - I've been there, too.  Anyway, I've seen four of tomorrow's films - "Now, Voyager", "From Here to Eternity", "Bull Durham" and "The Player".  I probably should have seen "Atlantic City" at some point but it somehow never came up.  But 4 out of 11 brings me to 31 seen out of 93, a perfect 33.33%.

THE PLOT: An author is undergoing multiple fertility therapies to get pregnant, putting her relationship with her husband on edge.

AFTER: This is the kind of film that feels like it was definitely based on one person's relationship experiences, as opposed to being based on a book or a New Yorker article, and the IMDB confirms that it's based on the director's (Tamara Jenkins') own experiences receiving fertility treatments.  There are just too many details in the ups and downs this couple goes through for it to not be based on real life - someone who hadn't been through all this would most likely skip over a lot of the specifics.  But still we might have cause to wonder what details here might be fictional - infertility is a very personal subject, as are many of the physical and emotional changes that two people might go through on the road to conception.

And as one might expect, the personal nature and the perceived failings (of both parties here) to be fertile eventually sets up a form of the blame game, during which the husband and wife, Richard and Rachel, both reflect on their life choices - they kept waiting to have a baby, did they wait too long?  Whose fault is it if the husband's sperm isn't viable, or if the wife isn't producing enough eggs?  When they both agree to adopt a baby from a pregnant teen in another part of the country, whose fault is it when that mother-to-be suddenly breaks off communications?  Was she ever even pregnant at all, or did she catfish them?  What's the proper etiquette for when you scroll through a list of potential egg donors and recognize the waitress from that café down the block?  And can you imagine her carrying your child without your wife getting jealous?

Into this mix comes Sadie, the stepdaughter of Richard's brother, so not a blood relative, but she thinks of Richard as her "cool uncle" - she's crashing in their East Village apartment after clashing with her mother about not finishing her senior year of college, and after spending time with her not-really uncle and aunt, they start to ask her about her eggs.  Confusion naturally occurs when you ask a woman about her eggs as she's sitting at the breakfast table.  Umm, no, not those eggs. When they finally straighten things out and ask the proper question, Sadie is eager to go through the medical treatments and become an egg donor, in fact she's a little too eager to help, and screws up the delicate act of telling her mother about it over Thanksgiving.

An odd little threesome develops in this small apartment, three people who will all be parents to this future child in some way, two genetic donors and the third who will carry the child.  It's not sexual, and thank god the egg donor's not a blood relative because that would be incestuous and wrong, but then nothing really feels 100% right or natural once you start mixing genetic materials and re-implanting embryos into another body.  By the end of all these processes, IVF and failed adoptions and then egg donors and implantation, and sex isn't even part of the formula any more, the couple doesn't even know which end is up any more, or what sort of relationship they have any more.  But at least they're still together at the end, ready to go down the next road together.

But that's TWO films this week with a genuine non-ending, cutting the story short before we learn whether their latest venture bears fruit.  "Save the Date" cut to black before we could learn what Sarah said to Jonathan, and in both cases that just feels very lazy - like the directors didn't want to alienate the part of the audience that would have preferred a happy or a sad ending, and hedged their bets - by closing up shop early you might think you can satisfy everyone, but I'll suggest that the opposite is true, any resolution is really better than none.

This is not my world, I don't have kids, I've been married to two women who don't want kids, so it looks like they're not in my future - I can take comfort in the fact that I don't have to go through these fertility treatments with anyone, it seems like a horrible hassle, even harder than raising a kid, which is a nightmare of its own, if you ask me.  The better way to win this game is to not play it at all.  And now I'm also glad I changed up the schedule and didn't keep this as my Valentine's Day film.

Also starring Paul Giamatti (last seen in "The Catcher Was a Spy"), Kathryn Hahn (last heard in "Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation"), Molly Shannon (ditto), Kayli Carter, Denis O'Hare (last seen in "The Anniversary Party"), Emily Robinson, Desmin Borges (last seen in "Compliance"), Francesca Root-Dodson (last seen in "Rebel in the Rye"), Fenton Lawless, Samantha Buck, Maddie Corman (last seen in "Wonder Wheel") with archive footage of Phil Spector.

RATING: 5 out of 10 Halloween parade drummers

ANSWERS: The missing TCM "360 Degrees of Oscar" links are Claude Rains, Paul Henreid, Maureen O'Hara, George Sanders, Donna Reed, Deborah Kerr, Burt Lancaster, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Dean Stockwell.

Love Happens

Year 12, Day 37 - 2/6/20 - Movie #3,439

BEFORE: After a couple of films using failed proposals as a jumping-off point, it seems I've scheduled several films about loss - that's OK, as I've said I try to be fair and feature all sides of the romance/relationship experience, and you can't really discuss romance without at least thinking about loss.  Last night a man lost his blind girlfriend after 10 years together, and tonight the central character is a widower looking for love again.  And I've still got "Marriage Story" waiting in the wings, I'll get to that after Valentine's Day, and there may be some other odd break-up stories left in the chain, too - who can tell, as I haven't seen them yet?

Judy Greer carries over from "Lemon".

Meanwhile, over on Turner Classic Movies, Marsha Hunt links from "None Shall Escape" to tomorrow's first film, can you fill in the other links?  Answers below.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 7 on TCM (31 Days of Oscar, Day 7)
7:00 am "Blossoms in the Dust" (1941) with _____________ linking to:
8:45 am "Madame Curie" (1943) with _____________ linking to:
11:00 am "Sunrise at Campobello" (1960) with _____________ linking to:
1:30 pm "Singin' in the Rain" (1952) with _____________ linking to:
3:30 pm "The Unsinkable Molly Brown" (1964) with _____________ linking to:
5:45 pm "Sweet Bird of Youth" (1962) with _____________ linking to:
8:00 pm "Interiors" (1978) with _____________ linking to:
10:00 pm "Annie Hall" (1977) with _____________ linking to:
11:45 pm "The Front" (1976) with _____________ linking to:
1:30 am "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" (1966) with _____________ linking to:
3:30 am "Mister Buddwing" (1966) with _____________ linking to:
5:15 am "The Red Danube" (1949)

Ah, it's good to see that TCM has dragged their programming out of the 1930's and is featuring some movies from the 1960's and 70's today.  We're back in my wheelhouse, and even hitting some Woody Allen films - once you hit those all kinds of links become much easier, I know.  So I've seen 6 out of these 12: "Singin' in the Rain", "The Unsinkable Molly Brown", "Interiors", "Annie Hall", "The Front" and "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum".  Shout-outs to two wonderful but deceased comic actors.  Up to 27 out of 82, or just under 33%

THE PLOT: A widower whose best-selling book about coping with loss turns him into a self-help guru falls for the florist at the hotel where his seminar is given, only to learn that he hasn't yet truly confronted his wife's passing.

AFTER: It turns out you can't have a romance film without conflict, either - imagine a film where a couple meets, falls in love, and then everything goes very smoothly from then on.  That would be the most boring romance film ever, right?  So they kick off the conflict here by having the self-help guru and the Seattle florist meet very un-cute-like, with him hitting on her and her then pretending to be deaf to get rid of him.  Oh, I'd love to know just enough sign language to pull that on the subway, or get out of any conversation with a stranger that I don't want to have.  I could just point to my ears and give some kind of "No" signal, I suppose, but then you never know who else knows ASL and would persist in trying to maintain the conversation that way.

The second time they meet, he hears her talking to a hotel employee, so she clearly ISN'T deaf, and he goes over to tell her off.  She then follows him into the men's room to tell him off for telling her off, and hey, before you know it, they're having a conversation, which is strange because she tried so hard to avoid that.  But as I've learned, the opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference, so if she didn't like him just a little bit, I suppose she'd just walk away, right?  But when she realizes he's the big celebrity guest staying at the hotel (his cardboard cut-out is, like, everywhere) and learns about his deceased wife, I guess all that is sort of like catnip to a single woman.  It may be true, but I feel like the movie using that shortcut (along with me pointing it out) sort of sells the entire gender short.  Let's just say there may be women out there who wouldn't be wowed by a celebrity and also sympathetic to a widower at the same time, but Eloise isn't one of those women.

But to be fair, at first they're just "hanging out", because he's only in town for a short time, so even if they started something, it would only have to end at some point unless one of them relocated, plus neither one is sure if this relationship is really going anywhere, even though all of the signs seem promising.  Looks can be deceiving, however, because it turns out that Seattle is also where his late wife's parents reside, and her father has bought a ticket to Burke's seminar, just to tell him off, and tell him to "stop lying to himself".  OK, so I guess something in his story about his wife doesn't add up, or is rubbing his ex-in-laws the wrong way.  (When the truth finally comes out in the end, I didn't really see Burke's "lie" as that big of a deal, but you may disagree, IDK.).

Burke's got another quirk, he doesn't take elevators, only the stairs - which would only be a problem if his hotel room was on the 40th floor, right?  He may have a fear of elevators, nothing wrong with that considering that people HAVE been known to be crushed in them, stuck in them, or fall to their deaths in them - but as a personality trait in a movie, it's pretty weak sauce. (So is someone writing unusual words on hotel walls.). It's a poor substitute for character development when he finally conquers his fear in the end.  But I have to call a NITPICK POINT because during the seminar, he takes a bunch of his "students" out into the noisy, crowded, dirty street in front of the hotel, then up to the hotel's roof to show them how beautiful the view is.  This is to prove some lame point about how their personal problems can seem different if they just change their perspective, but if he didn't take an elevator, how did he get to the roof?  Did the students have to wait for him to climb all those stairs, which could have taken like an hour?  Plus, if he was too afraid to get in the elevator, then his secret would have been exposed to his students, and his reputation as a guru, the man telling them to face their own fears, would have been tarnished.

This is what Hollywood thinks happens at ALL self-help seminars - you show up at a hotel ballroom, you reveal your inner truths (when you're holding the candle of truth), and then you walk on hot coals for some reason.  This might have been true in the 1980's, but isn't the hot coals thing totally played out by now?  I mean, we know it's a trick, not even a "magic trick" because that would give it too much credit, but it's a trick to make people think they're capable of doing something difficult, when the truth is that the coals aren't usually that hot, and everyone has pretty tough skin on their feet thanks to evolution, so it shouldn't even be impressive any more.  But no, let's keep the stupid stereotype alive, even though most seminars have probably figured out new and more exciting ways to take money from the rubes.  I think now it's all about daytrading algorithms and flipping houses, no?

But you can probably guess where this all is going - after finally coming clean about the details of his wife's death, the teacher has to follow his own guidelines and face his fears, fulfill his final promise to his dead wife and make peace with his in-laws.  This involves stealing a parrot from their house so he can let it free in the wild, which is about as pathetically symbolic as it sounds like it would be.  He might be doing the wrong thing here, but it's for the right reasons.  Unfortunately, most of the film feels like it's set on accomplishing the reverse.  Because the universe doesn't OWE you happiness - you either have to create it yourself (do the work) or learn how to lower your expectations (make the best out of what you got).  There's your self-help guide if you really need it.  There, I just saved you from a therapy shopping session at Home Depot.

Also starring Aaron Eckhart (last seen in "The Core"), Jennifer Aniston (last seen in "Rumor Has It..."), Dan Fogler (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald"), Frances Conroy (last seen in "Superman: Unbound"), Martin Sheen (last seen in "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping"), Joe Anderson (last seen in "The Grey"), John Carroll Lynch (last seen in "The Highwaymen"), Sasha Alexander (last seen in "Yes Man"), Clyde Kusatsu (also last seen in "Rumor Has It..."), Darla Vandenbossche, Tom Pickett, Patricia Harras.

RATING: 5 out of 10 cauterized flower stems

ANSWERS: The missing TCM "360 Degrees of Oscar" links are Walter Pidgeon, Greer Garson, Jean Hagen, Debbie Reynolds, Ed Begley, Geraldine Page, Diane Keaton, Woody Allen, Zero Mostel, Jack Gilford, Angela Lansbury.

Lemon

Year 12, Day 36 - 2/5/20 - Movie #3,438

BEFORE: So I kind of dove in on the romance chain, knowing that in a few days, the chain has a fairly big scheduling problem - since I flipped the whole chain around at some point, so I could link in from "Hotel Artemis" in January (I figured I'd stick the other end in mid-March, and figure out that outro linking later, which I did last week) - I was scheduled to watch a film's sequel before the original film itself.  Not too much of a problem, I could just watch the movies in the correct order, and then just post the review of the 2nd film first - but still, it's been eating at me as a less than ideal situation as it draws closer.

But I worked HARD on getting all 41 films in a linkable chain, and I don't want to tear it all apart, especially since I've already started.  If I start moving things around now, there's no guarantee that I can get to the same ending point in the same amount of steps - and since I already worked out the paths to future calendar points, the whole plan could unravel.  Still, last night I looked at JUST the 38 films left in the chain, and noticed there are dozens of connections everywhere that I'm not using.  Jeff Garlin from "Laggies" is back two days later, for example, and I think he's also in another film later in the chain.  He's not the only one either, the Rob Riggle films are split up, so are the Michael Ceras, Ryan Reynolds is in three films that aren't next to each other, same goes for Justin Long, Jason Sudeikis, Candice Bergen and several other notable people.

That's my hidden secret, how I make this linking thing look easy - because I only need ONE link to get me to the next movie, and each movie has a couple dozen people in it, at least.  The linking possibilities in a chain increase exponentially when I look at the big picture, so in fact sometimes it's hard to know which way to go, simply because there are so many possible paths.  So I went through JUST the cast lists of the romance chain and found every connection I wasn't using, and colored those names green, so I could see all the possible exits from the path I'm on - all I needed was two green names in the same film to have a chance of flipping a small section around.  And then I saw it, a section of just 8 films that included the films that were "out of order", which could be flipped around and link back up with the chain on both ends.  So that's what I'm going to do, and it fixes the chain without destroying the other linking work I've already done.  There are still going to be missed connections all over the place, but that's normal, as I can only follow ONE connection out of each film.

Now, this changes which film I'm going to watch on February 14, and I'm not crazy about which film landed on Valentine's Day, but I have to think that's the lesser of two evils, compared to watching or reviewing a sequel before the first film in a series.  This happened last year with both the documentary and the horror chains, with enough alternate connections I was able to find new paths to get me to the end of the chains by using the same exact films.  A neat, tidy, little solution, and I'm glad I found it now before the opportunity passed by.

Martin Starr carries over from "Save the Date".

Meanwhile, over on Turner Classic Movies, Robert Vaughn links from "The Magnificent Seven" to tomorrow's first film, can you fill in the other links?  Answers below.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 6 on TCM (31 Days of Oscar, Day 6)
7:15 am "The Caretakers" (1963) with _____________ linking to:
9:15 am "Caged" (1950) with _____________ linking to:
11:00 am "Above and Beyond" (1952) with _____________ linking to:
1:15 pm "All the Brothers Were Valiant" (1953) with _____________ linking to:
3:00 pm "King Solomon's Mines" (1950) with _____________ linking to:
4:45 pm "Back Street" (1941) with _____________ linking to:
6:15 pm "Three Comrades" (1938) with _____________ linking to:
8:00 pm "The Lives of a Bengal Lancer" (1935) with _____________ linking to:
10:00 pm "A Farewell to Arms" (1932) with _____________ linking to:
11:45 pm "The Sin of Madelon Claudet" (1931) with _____________ linking to:
1:15 am "Crossfire" (1947) with _____________ linking to:
3:00 am "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" (1944) with _____________ linking to:
5:30 am "None Shall Escape" (1944)

Wow, what a bunch of stinkers - what a difference a day makes, huh?  I don't know how you can follow up a day with "North by Northwest", "The Apartment", "The Caine Mutiny" and "The Dirty Dozen" with this line-up.  That's linking for you, it's a fickle mistress.  I've seen NONE of these films, like crossing "The Lives of a Bengal Lancer" off my to-do list just hasn't been top priorty for me, sorry.  Going 0 for 13 today puts me in the hole, I'm now at 21 out of 70, or 30%.  This feels like the line-up TCM should have run on Super Bowl Sunday, since almost nobody was going to be tuning in anyway - and since the whole chain is a giant circle, that should have been possible.

THE PLOT: A man watches his life unravel after he is left by his girlfriend of 10 years.

AFTER: What the hell is this?  It seems like some people make movies just to be "challenging", but that really just pisses me off.  Or maybe they were going for "quirky", but ened up with something that's reminiscent of an adult "Napoleon Dynamite" minus all the humor and charm.  All I could think was that this is a bit like a Wes Anderson film if he were recovering from some kind of head injury.

There's a reason why the tagline on IMDB and the plot on Wikipedia are so short and vague, because if you knew the details of the film, you might decide not to watch it at all.  It's about a loser guy who is an acting teacher in the L.A. area, and he's so repulsive that his blind girlfriend of 10 years recoils at his touch.  She works for a medical company and is frequently traveling out of town, and kudos for portraying a blind person as the more "together" person in a couple, she doesn't need her boyfriend to pick her up at the airport or do anything for her, maybe things were different 10 years ago when they got together.  But slowly we realize that she's moved on emotionally, and may even have a lover on the side - that's something I haven't seen before in a film, and I think the classification of the "handicapped" person as the more capable, being the breaker-upper rather than the breakee is the best plot element here.  That's maybe the only reason I won't score this film any lower.

Break-ups suck, for sure, I've been there and I remember a few days where I didn't want to go anywhere or do anything, and my workday basically consisted of watching the clock move because I had no motivation at all.  That's the FEELING that this film is trying to represent, I think, but it should be a wake-up call for a person or character to change their ways, fix what went wrong or at least dust himself off and keep moving forward.  But this film wants to stay right there and wallow in its main character's loser-ness, and it's practically painful to watch.

In his acting class, Isaac really favors one young actor, again and again, while telling his female scene partner that she's doing NOTHING with the "great gifts" that her male counterpart keeps giving her.  After class, the actor (the teacher's pet) talks to Isaac about getting booked for some film that shoots in Europe for six months, and later we see Isaac's agent booking him for some national commercials, only with his look it ends up being for a medical campaign telling people of the dangers of hepatitis, and he plays the sick guy.  Later still in the film he auditions for an adult diapers commercial, which seems a bit on the nose because he also apparently wears them throughout the film, but this I think was a little unclear.

I didn't pick up on the meaning of the scene that we keep seeing over and over in the acting class - it's a scene from Chekhov's "The Seagull", but I'm not up on Chekhov (dumb it down!) so I didn't know this is an important part of the play where Nina and Konstantin reunite after Nina spends time away from him.  I guess this is supposed to contrast with the scenes where Isaac's girlfriend is always traveling, and set us up for the big moment where she finally comes back to him, not just physically but also emotionally, and then it's more shocking when she returns, just to tell him that she's moving out.  Yeah, I see what you did there with the play-within-the-play, but I'm just not impressed.

When the actor from class comes over for dinner, Isaac sort of grabs him after giving him a tour of the house, and I honestly couldn't tell if he was fighting with him, or trying to put romantic moves on him.  Perhaps this is best left ambiguous, but why was it staged so poorly that I couldn't tell what was going on?

We do get some insight when Isaac attends a seder meal at his parents' house.  The casting of the actors, along with their portrayals of his mother and father as similarly neurotic, constantly arguing (some might say stereotypical) older Jews may explain a bit about why Isaac is the way he is, only that's something of an excuse, and it's a bit too pat.  He's clearly the most screwed-up person in the film, by intent, and you get the feeling that there just wasn't enough time to do a deep dive into just how much of a mess he is, and the true reasons why.

The whole family is there - this is where Martin Starr shows up again as Isaac's brother (and he'll be back later in the romance chain, too, but not tomorrow, for reasons explained above) and Isaac's pregnant (lesbian?) sister, plus for some reason, the family's psychiatrist who feels the need to explain that he is separated from Nessa (but I had no idea who Nessa was or why this was important) and those twin mean girls from "The Shining" seem to be there, too.  Plus there's someone helping with the cooking, and I couldn't tell if this was a live-in maid or cook or somebody's wife, no, no, don't bother to explain it, that would be too much work.  But the weirdest of all is Isaac's sister-in-law (I think), the mother of those twin girls (I guess) who doesn't talk at all, which is very creepy.  During the seder meal she holds up her empty plate for some reason, but I don't think that's part of the ceremony, and at another point she's seen outside in the yard, walking around in a circle, backwards.

There's so much weirdness in the end that I found it hard to keep track of it all.  I didn't even pick up on the fact that Cleo, the woman he fantasizes about and then dates at the end of the film, was also the make-up artist he met at the photo shoot, and made a terribly clumsy pass at.  But after they eat at a Chinese restaurant together, Isaac volunteers himself to come to her family's BBQ as her date.  Similarly, so many lingering questions, like why did the birds die?

Also, what was up with Marla Gibbs at this party near the end?  Don't get me wrong, it's great to see her still working, though casting her as an older relative, someone who's had a few strokes, is an enormous waste of her talents.  The best thing about some of those old episodes of "The Jeffersons" was her verbal sparring matches with her boss, George - and here her character can barely even talk, and even then she's saying some kind of backwards nonsense.  Isaac can apparently understand her, and with subtitles we can see what he THINKS she is telling him, but at this point, he's an unreliable narrator at best, and possibly insane as well.  Forget what I said before about Wes Anderson with a head injury, with people walking and talking backwards, it's more like David Lynch made a family-based sitcom out of "Twin Peaks".

So this party situation then unfolds like some weird, racially-reversed version "Get Out" and I'm left wondering if that was in fact the intent.  Isaac then removes the older woman in a wheelchair from the party and goes running down the street with her, forgetting that he drove a car to get there.  WTF? And then at the end, Isaac is seen getting his car towed away over the closing credits, because it won't start. What does it all mean in the end, it's very frustrating.  What's that line about life being a tale of sound and fury, told by an idiot, signifying nothing?  This film could go a long way toward proving that point.

Also starring Brett Gelman (last seen in "Wilson"), Judy Greer (last seen in Our Souls at Night"), Michael Cera (last seen in "Molly's Game"), Nia Long (last seen in "Boiler Room"), Shiri Appleby (last seen in "The Meddler"), Fred Melamed (last seen in "Adult Beginners"), Gillian Jacobs (last seen in "Life of the Party"), Rhea Perlman (last seen in "Matilda"), Megan Mullally (last seen in "The Disaster Artist"), Jeff Garlin (last seen in "Laggies"), Marla Gibbs, Rex Lee, Jon Daly (last seen in "A Futile and Stupid Gesture"), Elizabeth De Razzo, Ashley Silverman, Hank Chen, David Paymer (last seen in "Bounce").

RATING: 3 out of 10 verses of "One Million Matzo Balls" (is this a real Jewish party song?  This was the only other not-bad thing in the film...)

ANSWERS: The missing TCM "360 Degrees of Oscar" links are Ellen Corby, Eleanor Parker, James Whitmore, Stewart Granger, Richard Carlson, Margaret Sullivan, Franchot Tone, Gary Cooper, Helen Hayes, Robert Young, Robert Mitchum and Dorothy Morris.

Save the Date

Year 12, Day 35 - 2/4/20 - Movie #3,437

BEFORE: Two down, 39 to go.  It was going to be 40 romance films total, but I think the last one in my chain is not readily available any more, so we'll have to see.  I could drop it, so once I get a little closer to the end I'll have to count the days out and see if I can fit it in, and then decide whether it's worth renting from iTunes.  I could have dropped today's film, too, because the one before it also links to the one after it, but I think I'll give it a go, I hope it's worth a $3.99 iTunes rental, because it's not free on any of the streaming services.

Mark Webber carries over from "Laggies".

Meanwhile, over on Turner Classic Movies, Pat O'Brien links from "Here Comes the Navy" to tomorrow's first film, can you fill in the other links?  Answers below.

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 5 on TCM (31 Days of Oscar, Day 5)
6:00 am "Flirtation Walk" (1934) with _____________ linking to:
7:45 am "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (1935) with _____________ linking to:
10:15 am "The Story of Louis Pasteur" (1936) with _____________ linking to:
11:45 am "North by Northwest" (1959) with _____________ linking to:
2:15 pm "The Greatest Story Ever Told" (1965) with _____________ linking to:
5:45 pm "The Caine Mutiny" (1954) with _____________ linking to:
8:00 pm "The Apartment" (1960) with _____________ linking to:
10:15 pm "The China syndrome" (1979) with _____________ linking to:
12:30 am "Cat Ballou" (1965) with _____________ linking to:
2:15 am "The Dirty Dozen" (1967) with _____________ linking to:
5:00 am "The Magnificent Seven" (1960)

I have not seen the first three films, but I've seen the rest - from "North by Northwest" all the way to "The Magnificent Seven", that's another 8 out of 11, bringing me up to 21 out of 57 overall, or 36.8%.   However, any gains made today are going to disappear tomorrow.

THE PLOT: Sarah begins to confront her shortcomings after she rejects her boyfriend's hasty proposal and soon finds herself in a rebound romance.  Meanwhile, her sister Beth is immersed in the details of her wedding.

AFTER: Writers are very cruel people, and screenwriters doubly so - they create these fictional worlds with characters that they may be very fond of, or may be based on people they know in real life, and then they go ahead and make the lives of those characters very difficult or complicated, because movies have to have conflict and tough situations, nobody wants to watch a movie where everything is easy for everybody and everything always works out for the best. Right? So you have to be cruel to be a screenwriter, put your characters through the emotional wringer, and tonight's film is like a textbook case.

For example, for the second film in a row, I've seen a live-in boyfriend propose to his girlfriend, and this forces her to first panic, and then totally re-examine her life plan.  Is this natural?  I guess there is always the possibility that this will be the reaction, so guys need to be REALLY REALLY sure when they propose that they're on the same page as their intended life partner, especially if that proposal is going to be made in a very public place.  Look, I don't know why some guys do this, I guess they figure that their girlfriend will enjoy a little extra attention, but I don't see it.  Some women are very private people, and this just isn't their style.  Others may not believe in marriage at all, like our lead female character tonight.  I guess what I'm saying, if you're going to propose, you've got to know your audience, and I mean your sweetheart, not the audience in the concert venue or ballpark.

I've proposed twice, once on the street and once in a restaurant, and both times I was like 99% sure that the answer was going to be yes.  And no, at that restaurant I didn't have the waiters hide the ring in her mashed potatoes or in her dessert, that's stupid.  That second time I did walk around with the ring on me for a few weeks, because January 1, 2000 didn't seem like the right time, what with everyone worrying about the Y2K bug, so I waited for Valentine's Day.  I'm still married, but the restaurant is no longer there...

The proposer here, Kevin, is in a band, and he proposed the night before leaving on a month-long concert tour.  Yeah, that's gonna be a downer of a trip now.  His bandmate, Andrew, is getting married to Beth, who is the sister of Sarah, she's the girl who Kevin proposed to.  Got it?  They had a nice little foursome of friendship/sisters/bandmates going on, before Kevin ruined everything by proposing to Sarah, despite multiple warnings from Andrew to not do that.  Sarah's also a bit at fault here, because if she was so anti-marriage she probably should have clued her boyfriend in on that.

Sarah moves out - geez, it feels like she just moved IN - and Kevin goes on tour with Andrew, while Beth keeps planning her wedding.  Sarah, a book-store manager, starts a relationship with Jonathan, one of her regular bookstore shoppers, who happens to live near her new apartment, conveniently.  Things go pretty well from there, except possibly not for Kevin, but you know what?  He got to write a very meaningful song about his heartbreak, so maybe something good did come out of it for him.

Sarah also gets to have a gallery showing of her cartoons, which are based on details from both relationships, the one with Kevin and the new one with Jonathan, meanwhile all is not perfect in the sisters' parents' relationship either (they don't call this guy "Dad" so I'm left wondering if he's their stepfather or what...) and eventually even the relationship between the sisters suffers because whenever Sarah has a new problem, Beth can only see how this is going to affect HER and her wedding plans.

So this is really a film about a lot of things - how engaged people become Bridezillas when they're planning their wedding, how all modern music is terrible (I agree, I don't listen to anything released after 1990), what it's like to work in an aquarium, plus there's a missing cat, and we learn reasons why you shouldn't drop in on your ex when you're drunk.  Be warned that you're going to have to sort of write your own ending, because some writer just couldn't be bothered.

Also starring Lizzy Caplan (last seen in "127 Hours"), Alison Brie (last seen in "The Little Hours"), Martin Starr (last seen in "Spider-Man: Far From Home"), Geoffrey Arend (last heard in "The Angry Birds Movie"), Timothy Busfield (last seen in "Striking Distance"), Gigi Bermingham, Melonie Diaz, Grant Harvey, Devin Barry, Jacob Womack, Ray Conchado, Kristin Slaysman (last seen in "Promised Land").

RATING: 5 out of 10 spilled drinks

ANSWERS: The missing TCM "360 Degrees of Oscar" links are Dick Powell, Anita Louise, Josephine Hutchinson, Martin Landau, Jose Ferrer, Fred MacMurray, Jack Lemmon, Jane Fonda, Lee Marvin and Charles Bronson.

Laggies

Year 12, Day 34 - 2/3/20 - Movie #3,436

BEFORE: Today is the SECOND day of my romance chain, but it's February THIRD, and I'm also listing the program for the FOURTH day of TCM's Oscar programming.  Is it any wonder I feel a little out of sync?  It's all good, because over the weekend I went on a linking frenzy, and I know now that I've got a clear path to hit April 20 (Hitler's birthday) right on the nose, and then Mother's Day after that.  We're talking about maybe going to Florida for 4 or 5 days at the beginning of May, so I even have an emergency back-up plan if that happens, a place where I can skip ahead 5 days on my list, saving that little block of films for later, so I can still land on a Mother's Day film on the right weekend.  Now that's planning.  Of course I can make little adjustments here and there if necessary, but it's a solid framework of a plan that can be tweaked if necessary - that's the best kind to have, in case of emergencies.

It helps when I break down a big gap of, say, 36 films in to smaller steps.  Another help is identifying what I call "nexus" films, those are ones with big casts and a LOT of linking possibilities - like "Avengers: Endgame" last year.  I know I can get to a film like that many different ways, so it just comes down to which way serves my needs the best, and then from there figure out the way to get to the next nexus film.  The recent film "Bombshell" has a huge cast, and so does "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood".  By using these two nexus films, I was able to figure out a path between the end of the romance chain and the Hitler-based material, which was about 36 steps.  And those two nexus films happen to link to each other, but that would be a waste of two large casts - fitting 8 or 9 films in-between them helped extend the chain to the size I needed it to be.  Now I can pretty much coast until Mother's Day, at which time I'll figure out a potential path to some Father's Day material.

Speaking of father-based films, Chloe Grace Moretz carries over from "I Love You, Daddy"

Anne Baxter links from "Cimarron" to tomorrow's first film, can you fill in the other links?  Answers below.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 4 on TCM (31 Days of Oscar, Day 4)
7:45 am "The North Star" (1943) with _____________ linking to:
9:30 am "When Ladies Meet" (1933) with _____________ linking to:
11:00 am "Emma" (1932) with _____________ linking to:
12:15 pm "Anna Christie" (1930) with _____________ linking to:
1:45 pm "Camille" (1937) with _____________ linking to:
3:45 pm "Rasputin and the Empress" (1932) with _____________ linking to:
6:00 pm "None But the Lonely Heart" (1944) with _____________ linking to:
8:00 pm "Going My Way" (1944) with _____________ linking to:
10:15 pm "Road to Morocco" (1942) with _____________ linking to:
12:00 am "The Princess and the Pirate" (1944) with _____________ linking to:
2:00 am "White Heat" (1949) with _____________ linking to:
4:00 am "Here Comes the Navy" (1934)

Damn, I've only seen one of these, "White Heat" - when they dip back into the 1930's my stats go way down.  They must be saving all the GOOD movies for later on.  Another 1 out of 12 brings me up to 13 out of 46, back down to 28%.  Believe me, I know this struggle - when you're linking movies sometimes you have to program a bunch of stinkers to get to the films you really want to see.

THE PLOT: During a quarter-life crisis, Megan panics when her boyfriend proposes, then hides out in the home of her new friend, 16-year-old Annika, who lives with her world-weary divorced dad.

AFTER: OK, relationships are complicated, I think we can all agree.  But if you want to see simplified versions of relationship stories, by all means schedule about 40 Hollywood romance stories in a row to watch.  Heck, I'm only on the 2nd film of this year's chain and already I'm spotting some trends.  Yesterday's film and today's both center on slackers, aka "laggies" in tonight's film, but yesterday's film was about a teen slacking off during senior year and sort of dating an older man, while tonight's film centers on a woman in her late 20's who can't get her life or engagement plans together, then she sort of dates an older man.

Back in my day we had lovable "slackers" like Ferris Bueller - maybe he took a few too many sick days, but who among us hasn't done that?  (If I have a cold, I should stay home, because I'm just one person, and if I go to work and infect everyone, suddenly the whole company is shut down, so err on the side of caution, I say...). Somehow you just knew that Ferris was going to do well in college, or in whatever career he'd choose, because he was both charming AND crafty.  (They really should have made a sequel, called "Ferris Bueller's Year Off", detailing what the character did during that "gap year" you just know he was going to take...)

But today's slackers are much more annoying, like Megan in this film, who has her degree in Social Work, but hasn't started any Social Working yet, because she doesn't know what KIND of social work she wants to do.  Are you kidding me?  Dive in and start somewhere, buttercup, for God's sake.  Maybe you'll learn what kind you want to do by actually DOING some, am I right?  Look, I feel you, I went to film school thinking I was going to be the next big hot director when I was done, but instead I learned how hard it is to be creative, and I revised my plans.  But I still wanted to work in that industry, so after graduating I took ANY job to build up experience while I looked for something more permanent.  (If I'd kept the job at the movie theater, I could have become a manager in 7 or 8 years...). I got very lucky - TWICE - when former co-workers took other jobs they really wanted and recommended me to replace them.  I suck at networking, so this really saved my ass - TWICE.

But instead of getting a job, Megan buys beer for a group of teens (because someone did that for HER when she was in high school, but that doesn't make it right...) and then impersonates one girl's mother when she gets into trouble at school.  Umm, this is fairly bad behavior, and you'd think that someone with a Social Work degree would know better, and realize that these actions could have serious repercussions.

Then, since this girl Annika owes her a favor, Megan tries to "hide out" at the girl's house for a week, after telling her live-in boyfriend that she's going to a career seminar in another city.  And she came up with this plan after her boyfriend tried to propose while they were at a friend's wedding.  Another bad sign is when you lie to your partner about where you are - so clearly this relationship is in trouble.  The proposal just sort of forced the issue, causing her to decide if this man she's living with is also the person she wants to spend her life with, which she is kind of already doing, but maybe she just doesn't like the whole permanent commitment thing.

This boyfriend doesn't seem like that bad of a fellow, because if he were, I guess that would make her decision easier, from a screenwriting POV.  He's a little pushy, maybe, but when she balks at the idea of a church wedding, he's willing to entertain alternatives, like eloping to Vegas, just to satisfy Megan.  If anything, Megan's issues seem to be with her pushy, social-media present girlfriends, and her boyfriend seems to be part of their circle, so he's kind of guilty by association, but that's not really his fault if they all went to high school together.

Megan has made a fatal, perhaps common, mistake, by tying her relationship happiness and her career happiness together, when they should be separate.  How many people think they can't get married because they're not far enough along in their career?  Maybe some people want to wait until they have a bit more money before tying the knot, but what about the expression "Two can live as cheaply as one"?  It's not true, but it's something that people say.  But even an unemployed person can be in a positive relationship and get married - just think of all the time they have to plan the wedding and the honeymoon!  Hey, you can buckle down and find a job when you get back...  Or is it just a coincidence here that Megan's not completely satisfied by either her job OR the relationship.  If they've been together since high-school, and she's 29, they could just be going through the 11-year itch, some kind of relationship fatigue.

I gave my thoughts on her career problems - she should just take some kind of job to get started and stop dilly-dallying - but the relationship problem is bigger, and she's just not going to solve it by hiding from the world for a week, what will that accomplish?  Then when she makes a connection of sorts with Annika's father, the temptation is there to sort of wipe the slate clean, choose the new guy over the old guy she's been living with, but is that really the best answer for her, or is the grass always greener on the other side of the fence?  And some people are just habitually drawn to the "high" feeling of a new relationship, and all that it promises at first, without realizing that the new-car smell always wears off eventually, or at least dies down a little.  Annika's dad is more fun, but he's also more cynical, I don't know, which one's the better lover?

Megan and Annika go on a road trip to track down her mother, who works as a lingerie catalog model (in Seattle?) and she mentions a bit about why she left, her theory is that if you try to be the "cool Mom", that easily turns into being the bad Mom" - a lesson that Glen in "I Love You, Daddy" should have figured out.  Yes, Chloe Grace Moretz essentially plays the same character in both films, the slacking-off high-school senior who just wants to drink, party and be in love, with no intention of getting a job or going to college or living in the real world.  The only difference was that in last night's film, her father was much richer, and here her father is a divorce lawyer, he probably does OK financially, though.

Don't get me wrong, I love Sam Rockwell, he's great in any movie, and his divorced disciplinarian dad here is probably the best character in the whole film.  But what sort of future do he and Megan have together, how's this gonna work?  The thing about Megan (or anyone) ending one relationship and starting up another right away is that she should probably take some time to examine what went wrong, to figure out if any of her actions or attitudes were part of the problem.  Otherwise, if she doesn't do this, she might find herself right back where she started, with the same problems in her new relationship.  And Annika's dad would essentially have TWO slackers, er, laggies, living in his house.  Megan's going to keep on making non-decisions, because until you pick something to do, you can't succeed or fail at it, and she needs to move forward, try new things and fail at some of them so she can figure herself out.

Also starring Keira Knightley (last seen in "The Borrowers" (2011)), Sam Rockwell (last seen in "Everybody's Fine"), Ellie Kemper (last heard in "The Secret Life of Pets"), Mark Webber (last seen in "Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot"), Kaitlyn Dever (last seen in "The Front Runner"), Tiya Sircar (last seen in "The Internship"), Gretchen Mol (last seen in "Manchester by the Sea"), Jeff Garlin (last seen in a cameo in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), Jodi Thelen (last seen in "The Black Stallion Returns"), Sarah Coates, Louis Hobson (last seen in "Captain Fantastic"), Kirsten DeLohr Helland, Daniel Zovatto (last seen in "Lady Bird"), Dylan Arnold, Larissa Schmitz, Sara Lynn Wright, Phillip Abraham, Rocki DuCharme, Maura Lindsay.

RATING: 6 out of 10 skateboard flips

ANSWERS: The missing TCM "360 Degrees of Oscar" links are Anne Harding, Myrna Loy, Marie Dressler, Greta Garbo, Lionel Barrymore, Ethel Barrymore, Barry Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Virginia Mayo, James Cagney, Pat O'Brien.

I Love You, Daddy

Year 12, Day 33 - 2/2/20 - Movie #3,435

BEFORE: Yes, I know it's a special day in the sports world, and I'll probably fast-forward through the game just to watch the commercials for old time's sake, and the halftime show so I can pretend that I'm aware of what music the kids are listening to these days.  And we made sure to have a lot of snacks on hand, and we also made sure to not invite anyone else over, so there will be more snacks for us while we watch the Puppy Bowl.  Hey, when you get to a be a bit older and you want different things - now the day isn't about getting together with friends to drink beer and eat like a pig, it's about staying home and doing that.  Well, this way nobody has to drink and drive, get it?  Or share food from big communal bowls like animals.

But here I am, a day late but ready to start the romance chain.  You may well ask, why start it HERE, with THIS film?  Well, I put my romance films together in a document and moved them around until I achieved what I determined to be maximum linkage, with what I think is the smallest amount of mortar (films on Netflix & Hulu) to connect the bricks that I already had on hand (cable & DVD).  There's no way to be sure, there could have been a "better" way to put them together, but usually if I get to a point where everything seems to connect and that leaves me with a chain that I know I can connect TO and lead away FROM, that's probably a good time to stop messing with it.  At that point my eyes are probably weary from staring at a computer screen, anyway.  So all I had to do in January was to come up with 31 (OK, it became 34) films in a chain whose last film linked to THIS one, and I did - therefore Charlie Day carries over again from "Hotel Artemis".

No problem - and all I have to do now is come up with a 35-film that starts at the end of the romance chain that will get me to Hitler's birthday on April 20.  With luck, from there I can link to something for Mother's Day, and so on.  It's a sickness, I know, but I think earlier today I cracked the code and put together a chain with the right number of links - I've got to live with it for a while to make sure it's really the direction I want to go in, and if it leaves me in a good place, with a lot of options to make the next chain.  I'll have until mid-March to confirm it, or if it's good, maybe fine-tune it a little.

In the meantime, the reason this one makes the list is that I'm intensely curious about it - more on that in a minute, first let me post tomorrow's "31 Days of Oscar" schedule on TCM so you can make your own plans and play along at home.  Una Merkel links from "42nd Street" to tomorrow's first film, can you fill in the other links?  Answers below.

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 3 on TCM (31 Days of Oscar, Day 3)
6:30 am "Born to Dance" (1936) with _____________ linking to:
8:30 am "Broadway Melody of 1936" (1936) with _____________ linking to:
10:45 am "Lady Be Good" (1941) with _____________ linking to:
12:45 pm "Neptune's Daughter" (1949) with _____________ linking to:
2:30 pm "On the Town" (1949) with _____________ linking to:
4:15 pm "The Tender Trap" (1955) with _____________ linking to:
6:15 pm "The Bachelor Party" (1957) with _____________ linking to:
8:00 pm "Bus Stop" (1956) with _____________ linking to:
9:45 pm "Some Like It Hot" (1959) with _____________ linking to:
12:00 am "The Great Race" (1965) with _____________ linking to:
2:45 am "Pocketful of Miracles" (1961) with _____________ linking to:
5:15 am "Cimarron" (1960)

I've seen "On the Town", "The Tender Trap", "Bus Stop", "Some Like It Hot" and "The Great Race", so another 5 out of 12 seen brings me up to 12 out of 34, or just over 35%.  I wish I had time to watch more of these, but I don't right now - anyway, it's not the "Cimarron" that won the Best Picture Oscar, it's the 1960 remake.

THE PLOT: When a successful television writer's daughter becomes the interest of an aging filmmaker with an appalling past, he becomes worried about how to handle the situation.

AFTER: Perhaps you've heard about this film, or maybe you haven't, considering that it's not available on any of the popular streaming services.  Louis C.K., its star and director, was the subject of news stories about sexual misconduct that broke a week or so before this film was scheduled to be released in November 2017.  It had a promising screening at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2017, where the distribution rights were sold, and then after the distributor cancelled the premiere due to "unforeseen circumstances", namely all the negative publicity surrounding Louis C.K., he bought back the rights from The Orchard and took a loss on the whole deal.  This is what made me so curious to watch it - which I was able to do by borrowing an Academy screener, one that was apparently mailed out before all distribution plans were scrapped.  (You might find a posting of it online, but flipped or sped-up, or maybe in a torrent somewhere, but that's it.  Proceed with caution.)

But you know how when someone tells you that you can't watch something, you want to see it even more?  So I've been dying to know, like, what's IN this film?  What does Louis C.K. say or do in it that's so bad that the film got pulled?  As a comedian, he's a bit like the U.S. version of Steve Coogan, since he usually plays a fictional version of himself on his TV shows, and the audience has to figure out just how close that fiction is coming to his real-life life.  Since he plays a divorced dad in this film, one who works as a TV writer, which all describes him IRL, I figured there might be some insight here on what went down behind-the-scenes during his scandal.  I know, like others caught up in the sexual harassment scandals of 2017/2018, he's been lying low, and we're all supposed to boycott his films, or something.  But I was just so damn curious - I've met the comedian in person once or twice, watched all of his cable and Netflix stand-up specials, even saw him live once, performing at the Wang Center in Boston on New Year's Eve.

If you don't remember the charges made against the comedian, you can Google them or look him up on Wikipedia on your own time.  I run a clean shop here, so I won't list the accusations, but I can't stop you from doing research either.  Did he act inappropriately?  For sure, but it's a little complicated, because he claims to have always asked permission, no one's accused him of rape or touching anyone (umm, except himself) and he later admitted everything, apologized, and basically put himself in career jail.  The length of the sentence has yet to be determined, but I've noticed that accused rapist Kobe Bryant has pretty much been exonerated in the press, and all he had to do was die in a helicopter crash.  How long a man accused of bad behavior has to spend in career jail is perhaps proportionate to how bad his behavior was, and comedians like Aziz Ansari are working again, so there is hope for redemption, I guess.  It's not really for me to say.

Anyway, "I Love You, Daddy" isn't really about HIS bad behavior, in this film he plays Glen, a divorced dad with a 17-year-old daughter.  (In real life, C.K.'s oldest daughter would have been 15 at the time of the film's release, but she's 17 or 18 now.)  Glen is engaged in a sort of competition with his ex-wife, as his daughter, China, wants to live with him, because he's rich and has a nicer apartment, access to a private plane, and he basically spoils her and lets her do whatever she wants.  He offers her no sense of discipline, she's in the last term of her senior year of high-school, went on spring break in Florida and Glen's already authorized a "gap year" for her, so she's not even working on applying to colleges.  All of this produces a very dangerous environment for a teenager - she's the kind that never would have made it through Wonka's chocolate factory in one piece.

Glen finds that he can't say "no" to his daughter, because whenever he agrees to let her off the hook or gives her what she wants, he gets an "I love you, Daddy".  He should be training her to face the world, but instead, she's training him - and she knows enough to throw him that little emotional bone so his brain gives him a little chemical stimulus, and he's therefore fallen into the trap of thinking that being the more permissive parent is the same as being the "nicer" parent, when she probably needs tough love more than any other kind.

His TV work brings him into contact with an actress who's a potential lead for his upcoming show (and a potential love interest for himself) and going to one of her parties in the Hamptons brings Glen's daughter into contact with Leslie Goodwin, a veteran film director and personal hero of Glen's, but also an older man with a reputation for chasing young girls.  You can probably think of a couple real-life film directors with a similar reputation, I thought of two, both of whom are still making movies in their 80's and are not retired or blacklisted (yet). The 68-year-old Goodwin strikes up a conversation with China, and before long they're hanging out together, he buys her clothes and she models them for him, which is creepy enough, but then China wants to go off to France with him.  Of course, Glen says "No, absolutely not," at first but eventually gives in.

This would have been a perfect time to finally grow a backbone and put his foot down, cutting off the relationship between the old man and the teenager, so a viewer might scratch their head and wonder why Glen allows his daughter to run off to Paris as part of this older man's entourage (several other people are traveling with him as a group).  First off, Glen isn't completely sure what the director's intentions are, but also Glen himself is starting to date a (presumably) younger actress, so it would seem hypocritical of him to say his daughter couldn't befriend or date an older man.  Also, when you factor in the psychology of teenagers, it's very possible that forbidding China from doing something will make her want to do that thing even more.  So yes, some discipline is required here, but too much discipline could have the opposite effect.  Parents tell teenagers all the time not to drink, smoke or fool around, but most of them keep right on doing all that - at some point you just have to let them make mistakes and get hurt, because that builds up emotional scar tissue, and they'll be stronger for it in the long run.

As a society we've determined, quite arbitrarily, that an 18-year-old is an adult, but someone who's 17 years and 364 days old is still a child.  This is pretty ridiculous, someone doesn't mature overnight just because they've been alive for 18 of Earth's revolutions around the sun, it's a gradual process.  I moved away to college while still 17 and I was by myself in New York City (OK, my sister was attending the same college...) and yeah, I drank and smoked a little weed (this was back in 1986-87) and if I could have gotten laid then, I probably would have done that, too.  But that took me another three years, because I had zero dating game.

My point here is, these are all complicated issues.  As his character Glen, Louis C.K. confides in his younger girlfriend with his internal debate over watching his daughter (potentially) dating a much older man.  It's wrong because of the math, but to him it's also wrong to cast judgement on another person's relationship.  Anxiety upon anxiety follows - he didn't instill enough discipline, so he's beating himself up for not being a better father.  Then whatever happens to his daughter as a result is also his fault, and so on down the line.  But again, if he steps in to try to put an end to the situation, he could drive her right into the older man's arms, and then he's caused the very situation he's been trying to prevent.

To the story's credit, we never really know if the older director scored with Glen's daughter - maybe he did, maybe he didn't.  Was the old man so cool that he won her love by pretending not to NEED her love, or did he set her up with a younger boyfriend so when that relationship crashed and burned, she'd come running to him for consolation, instead of her own father?  It's all debatable, and maybe that's a good thing.  Every father eventually has to come to terms with his daughter as an adult, and dealing with that first boyfriend, when forced to think of his daughter as a sexual being, that's probably tough for any man.  I don't envy a father when that happens, but it's part of life.

Outside of all that, this film plays like sort of an homage to Woody Allen - it's in black and white, the main character is in the entertainment business, and there are complicated relationship issues and all the anxieties that come with them.  But the average Woody Allen film also manages to be FUNNY, and I'm a little disappointed that Louis C.K. seemed to have forgotten to do that.  Parts here are slice-of-life amusing, but nothing's laugh-out-loud funny.  But then, if the director really wanted to do a tribute to Woody, he would have had Glen dating his own daughter, am I right?  Talk about complicated relationship issues...let's not forget that Woody married his longtime ex-girlfriend's adopted daughter, so his ex is now his mother-in-law.

Also starring Louis C.K. (last seen in "The Last Laugh"), Chloë Grace Moretz (last seen in "Let Me In"), John Malkovich (last seen in "The Portrait of a Lady"), Rose Byrne (last seen in "Sunshine"), Edie Falco (last seen in "The Comedian"), Pamela Adlon, Helen Hunt (last seen in "Bob Roberts"), Ebonee Noel, Dan Puck, Lucca De Oliveira, the voice of Albert Brooks (last seen in "A Most Violent Year"), with a cameo from Rich Vos (last seen in "Top Five").

RATING: 5 out of 10 Emmy awards in the background

ANSWERS: The missing TCM "360 Degrees of Oscar" links are Buddy Ebsen, Eleanor Powell, Red Skelton, Betty Garrett, Frank Sinatra, Carolyn Jones, Don Murray, Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Arthur O'Connell, and Glenn Ford.