Darling Companion

Year 12, Day 74 - 3/14/20 - Movie #3,476

BEFORE: Love in the Time of Corona, Day 4 - I'm determined to finish the March Marriage Madness Tournament, especially since the REAL March Madness Tournament has been cancelled.  I imagine that millions of people are at home, not knowing how to pass the time without spending the day agonizing over filling out their brackets.  Except for the Food Network's "Tournament of Champions", it seems like maybe I've got the only game in town that isn't on hold, so where's my endorsement check?  I'll settle for people betting on my tournament, as long as I get a cut...  (Seriously, somebody contact me...my principles are for sale at a reduced cost.)

Just two more days to go, then I'll have 2nd and 3rd round match-ups and announce the winner of my extremely un-scientific and very rigged process.  In the meantime, Kevin Kline carries over from "Dean" and we'll find out after this which Kline-centric film is headed to the Elite 8.

THE PLOT: The story of a woman who loves her dog more than her husband - then her husband loses the dog.

AFTER: It's a simple enough story - girl meets dog, boy loses dog, and umm, the girl is married to the boy.  Does the girl get the dog back again?  That's the question, isn't it?  Also, does the boy learn that he should have had the dog on a leash?  I see people here in Queens all the time who can't seem to be bothered to use a leash when they walk their dogs, even though that's THE LAW, and apparently they all think their dog is SO SMART that it would never run out into the street, or get chased away by another dog, or just run off randomly.  Each person who is so ignorant (or so lazy) could learn a very hard lesson, I'm just sorry that the poor dogs have to pay the price.  And I wonder how we're going to contain the spread of the corona virus if some people can't even follow simple dog-walking guidelines.

Anyway, Beth rescues a dog that she sees by the side of the road, and ends up adopting him and naming him Freeway.  Her husband, Joseph, is a successful spine surgeon, but someone who has over the years been putting perhaps too much focus on his job and not enough on his family.  They have two adult daughters and a vacation home in Colorado that apparently has its own banquet hall, and requires a full-time caretaker.  Yes, the dog is very lucky to have been adopted into this family.  Many good things come from opening their hearts to this dog, including their daughter Grace finding love with the veterinarian.  One simple act of kindness reaps many rewards.

However, one simple act of neglect also has a ripple effect, as Freeway runs off to chase a deer in the woods, and Joseph doesn't know what to do.  This causes much friction in his marriage to Beth, and while it may be nobody's fault, it's totally Joseph's fault.  Everything gets called into question, including whether Beth loves the dog more than her husband, and whether Joseph loves his job more than his family.

Extended members of their family - Joseph's sister, nephew, and sister's boyfriend stay behind after Grace's wedding to help look for the lost dog.  That caretaker suddenly claims to have psychic Gypsy powers and suggests a holistic approach to searching for the dog, based on her visions.  This is where, one might imagine, that the film would very easily run off the narrative rails, and in fact it came very close to doing so.  But running around their Colorado town and the nearby hiking trails, paired up in particular ways by the psychic, coincidentally turns out to be exactly what the family needed to mend their broken relationships - it's not just Beth and Joseph's marriage that gets improved by working together for a common goal, it's the one between the nephew and his mother's new boyfriend, and that nephew, in a shaky romance with an offscreen girlfriend, starts to bond more with the psychic caretaker.

This all sounds very corny on paper, but on film it didn't seem so contrived - hey, if you don't know where exactly the dog is, chasing after psychic visions is as good a method as any, I guess.  Thankfully the dog owners also go the more reliable routes, like they post flyers, they check the shelters, they issue an APB over the radio airwaves.  Plus they previously had their dog microchipped, so while waiting for someone to see the dog and report in via phone, why not follow a psychic vision or two, especially since they seem to be somewhat valid, at least for a while.

There's a lot to like here, especially if you're a fan of the actors involved - I'm usually bullish on Kevin Kline, Dianne Wiest and Richard Jenkins, myself, and there's nobody here I can't tolerate.  Plus it's a pro-dog rescue film and one that advises proper care and dog parenting, so all of that is positive. There are a few negatives in the oddball characters, especially the weird guy who lives out in the woods and keeps a lot of dogs in makeshift cages - what was the point of this little diversion?  Why was he wearing a Harvard shirt?  Why was he such a prepper/Unabomber stereotype if it added nothing to the story?  It's a diversion that goes nowhere, so why is it even there?

Ah, the IMDB trivia section points out that director Lawrence Kasdan and his wife adopted a dog from a rescue shelter, and he was lost during a trip to the Rockies.  They searched for weeks, enlisting the help of friends and family, and just when they had given up hope, got a call from a stranger responding to their flyers, whose pack of dogs had been playing with their lost one.  So like several recent films ("Marriage Story", "Dean"), the inspiration came from a specific time in the director's life, only that doesn't really explain the weird guy who lives in a shack in the woods.  Maybe that also comes from the real-life incident, who can say?

I've been more of a cat person throughout my life, but most dogs tend to like me, too.  Most of the cats in my life have been former strays, with only two exceptions.  Sometimes stray cats take longer to come around and become affectionate, but eventually they get there.  We've got two right now, Dax is living in the (furnished) basement while we work on integrating her to the upper floors, where Heidi is basically in charge of cat things.  It's an agonizingly slow process, because Heidi only just took over 4 months ago when Data died.  The trick is bringing the new cat together with the old one with a minimum of fighting, only there's bound to be some, it's instinctual and nearly inevitable, still I'd like to minimize the damage if possible.  Plus we only JUST got Dax to relax around me and not view me as a threat when I feed her - recently I've been feeding her dinner on the main floor, but she's always nervous because she doesn't quite know where the other cat is, or if she's about to be attacked.  It took over a year to integrate Heidi with Data, and now we're going through the process all over again, four months and counting.

I think I'm going to give the edge to this one over "Dean", so we'll see how "Darling Companion" fares in the second round of the tournament...

Also starring Diane Keaton (last seen in "Book Club"), Richard Jenkins (last seen in "Let Me In"), Dianne Wiest (last seen in "The Mule"), Elisabeth Moss (last seen in "The Old Man & the Gun"), Mark Duplass (last seen in "Tully"), Sam Shepard (last seen in "Fair Game"), Ayelet Zurer (last seen in "Ben-Hur"), Jay Ali, Lindsay Sloane (last seen in "Horrible Bosses 2"), Tod Huntington, Charles Halford (last seen in "Bad Times at the El Royale"), Jericho Watson, Yolanda Wood, D.L. Walker, with cameos from Lawrence Kasdan (last seen in "Into the Night"), Jonathan Kasdan (last seen in "Dreamcatcher").

RATING: 6 out of 10 dead cell phone batteries

Dean

Year 12, Day 73 - 3/13/20 - Movie #3,475

BEFORE: Love in the Time of Corona, Day 3?  (I don't know where to start counting from, when the first outbreak hit in China, or when it reached the U.S., or NYC - let's count from March 11, when the W.H.O. started using the word "pandemic", I guess.)  Everything is in a state of shutdown, from Disney Parks to a large number of film festivals and events (SXSW, Tribeca FF, WonderCon), to the NBA season and the NCAA Tournament.  Now Broadway shows are closed for a MONTH, Hollywood films are moving their release dates, and it's honestly easier at this point to look at a list of things that are still open.  Last night I stopped in at a grocery store at 9 pm, when it's usually still open with barely anyone there, to find a long line of people stocking up on canned goods and as much toilet paper as they could fit on their carts.  I just needed a loaf of bread, I swear, but then the mentality of a panicked crowd takes over and I ended up buying more groceries, just in case there's a bigger run on the stores, or we're all quarantined when the food I already have at home runs out.

It's potentially a terrible time to be working in any industry, but the film business depends on large crowds coming out to see movies in theaters, that's kind of the goal.  So city-imposed limits on crowd sizes seems counter-productive, and now I don't know when or if I'll get to see that "New Mutants" film, which has already had its release date postponed three times since last year - since it seems like a horror-based X-Men spin-off I was planning to review it in October anyway, but now I don't know if it will be in theaters by then, or get released on Disney+ or what.  "Black Widow" is the next questionable release date, so we'll see if people are allowed back in movie theaters by May 1 or if that film gets delayed until summer - thankfully I'm planning to review that one in late September, so at the moment all of my plans are still on.

Looking at e-mail at work, it seems we're already in Stage 3 of promotions - Stage 1 was notices of things being cancelled or postponed, Stage 2 was messages from movie theaters and the few film festivals that are still taking place that the management has implemented all kinds of new procedures and cleaning regimens, and is taking their response to the coronavirus very seriously.  Stage 3, which gives me a sense of hope, is represented by companies already trying to profit from the pandemic - I swear we got e-mails from a real estate company (saying, "In these uncertain times, you need the reliability of a practiced real-estate office space broker...") and a company that makes SIGNS ("Here's how proper signage can prevent the spread of corona virus in your office...")  Shameless, just shameless, but that's capitalism at work.  Somehow that makes me believe that we're going to get through this - after working in NYC through a terrorism attack, a blackout, Superstorm Sandy and all the closures and shutdowns that resulted from those things, I think we'll be OK in the end, it's just going to take a month or so to let this thing run its course.

If I'm ordered to stay home, I'll stay home.  If I'm allowed to keep working, I'll keep working.  We've all got to stay well if we can so we're ready to vote in the NYC primary and then the general election.  Nothing is more important than that.  We've got two upcoming trips, and right now we're just waiting to see if things improve before we leave town.  I'm reminded that we took a cruise in April 2013, just two months after that notorious Carnival Cruise ship got stranded in the Gulf of Mexico after an engine-room fire, and people ended up getting sick after there were overflowing toilets everywhere - on our cruise, staffers were overly cautious about germs and no passengers could serve themselves from a buffet for the first two days.  I'm surprised that there were corona virus problems on cruise lines, because I thought they'd implemented these controls industry-wide back in 2013.  Our cruise was fine as a result - I just hate to see them backsliding like this.

Kevin Kline carries over from "Definitely, Maybe".  And he'll be here tomorrow, then one more time before the romance chain finally comes to a close on Monday.

THE PLOT: Dean is a NYC illustrator who falls hard for an L.A. woman while trying to prevent his father from selling the family home in the wake of his mother's death.

AFTER: It's too bad, this one just barely qualifies for the March Marriage Madness Tournament (which has NOT been postponed or cancelled, unlike the real March Madness) because it's mostly about the lead character dealing with the death of his mother, but also his father dealing with that same loss, and they were married, so there you go.  Also, we find out midway through the film that Dean was once engaged, but called it off.  Or the relationship fizzled out, it's a bit tough to know who to believe on this point.  There's one more connection to the institution, but I'm holding back on it because spoilers.

Dean is an illustrator who makes simple cartoons, and so is Demetri Martin, the stand-up comic who plays him.  Since he also directed this film, as with "Marriage Story", I'm now intensely curious to find out to what extent this film is based on his real life.  According to Wikipedia, Martin was married briefly while attending NYU Law School, and moved to California in 2009, and got married again in 2012.  Dean, the character, was engaged and then flew to California after his mother's death, and met a woman there.  The major difference is that Martin apparently based this film on the loss of his father, not mother, when he was 20.  For all the other details, we're left to wonder what's based on real life and what is fiction.

Dean's a troubled soul here, not just grieving for his mother, but also upset because his best friend has asked him to be the "second best man" at his wedding, not the first.  When the wedding occurs, things do not go well because of petty jealousy between him and the other best man.  The fact that Dean's ex-fiancee is also in the bridal party may have something to do with this.  At the same time, Dean's father is thinking of selling his house, and Dean does not agree with his decision.  All of this leads Dean to hop on a plane to California, where an advertising (?) company is interested in using some of his illustrations in a campaign.  This meeting does also not go well - but at least it got him out of NYC, and he meets an interesting woman named Nicky at an L.A. party.

This burgeoning relationship also has a variable level of success, because Dean's having a hard time connecting with someone because of everything else going on in his life.  And like any new relationship, it's awkward, unfamiliar and full of conversational minefields. But just after he boards his plane back to New York (with a very talkative seat neighbor), he gets a text from Nicky, and decides to get off the plane and meet up with her on the beach.  Who's to say if this is done more to follow up on the intriguing new relationship or to avoid going back to deal with reality in New York at this point?  Maybe an equal amount of both?

Meanwhile, in NYC, his father has proceeded to sell his house, and also starting an intriguing relationship of his own, with his real estate agent.  What's weird is that the father and son are essentially in the same place, being unsure about starting a new relationship, yet when they speak face to face it feels like they can never get on the same page with regarding to important things.  This feels sort of realistic, how many of us are more like our parents than we care to admit, even if we have difficulty communicating with them.

This movie is many different things, a grief-based black comedy, a fish-out-of-water story, a quirkly little festival film, but it's also therefore quite unfocused, like it doesn't really know what it wants to be or say.  Maybe it doesn't have to be one thing or make a larger point, but then again I think it's usually stronger when a film does that.  I'm going to try to just appreciate it for what it is, even though it may not add up to much, and I also fear that it's going to end up being quite forgettable.  I like Demetri Martin and I'll watch him in a comedy special, I just don't know if a dramedy (comi-tragedy?) like this is the right showcase for his talents.

Also starring Demetri Martin (last seen in "In a World..."), Gillian Jacobs (last seen in "Lemon"), Mary Steenburgen (last seen in "The Proposal"), Reid Scott (last seen in "Home Again"), Christine Woods (ditto), Rory Scovel (last seen in "I Feel Pretty"), Briga Heelan, Barry Rothbart (last seen in "The Happytime Murders"), Beck Bennett (last heard in "Sing"), Andrew Santino (last seen in "Game Over, Man!"), Peter Scolari (last heard in "The Polar Express"), H. Jon Benjamin (last seen in "22 Jump Street"), Nicholas Delany, Ginger Gonzaga (last seen in "Ted"), Kate Berlant (last seen in "Sorry to Bother You") and the voice of Florence Marcisak.

RATING: 5 out of 10 missed deadlines

Definitely, Maybe

Year 12, Day 72 - 3/12/20 - Movie #3,474

BEFORE: Well, it seems that public opinion is in, events and film festivals are being cancelled all over the place - down goes SXSW, down goes WonderCon, and images are pouring in from Europe where all the crowded tourist areas look like ghost towns.  It seems the best way to combat a viral outbreak is with something called "social distancing", where people don't go out much, avoid crowded areas, and limit human contact.  Jeez, it turns out that without realizing it, I've been practicing for this for years.  I only go to Comic-cons now when I have to work there, I only go to the movies when a Marvel or Star Wars film gets released, and I've slowly been alienating the majority of my friends and family members.  I've got a new movie every night, nothing on my social calendar until we go to Atlantic City, and I'm stocked up on snack foods and beer.  Except for work, I'm happy to stay in until April.

Ryan Reynolds carries over from "The Proposal".  Which Ryan Reynolds romance film will advance to the Elite 8 in the March Marriage Madness Tournament?

THE PLOT: A political consultant tries to explain his impending divorce and past relationships to his 11-year-old daughter.

AFTER: Honestly, I wasn't looking forward to this one, because the premise seemed very stupid - it seemed like "How I Met Your Mother", only worse.  In that sit-com, I think the father was in the future, telling the story set in the past (our present?) to his children and his wife was deceased (I don't know for sure, I never watched that show...).  This movie seemed to employ a similar mostly-flashback story, only I wondered, how does his daughter NOT know anything about her mother?  Has this single father somehow been keeping this information about her mother from her?  That doesn't seem right, everyone should know about their parentage if possible, plus hasn't the girl been at least curious over the last decade to know who her mother is?  And she can't be deceased here, because the in the first scene Ryan Reynold's character gets his divorce papers at his office, so if his wife was dead then there would be no reason to divorce her.  Things just didn't seem to add up, but again, this was BEFORE watching the film.

The real storyline is not that bad - political wonk Will Hayes relates this story about the three women he dated to his daughter and she KNOWS her mother in real life, only he changes all the names in his story so she can't tell at first which one turns out to be her.  OK, that explains some of the situation, but it's still weird - nobody would tell their life story to their daughter and change all the details just to preserve a little bit of mystery.  What was the point he was trying to make, that all women are (more or less) interchangeable?  That he bounced between relationships for about a decade before he could decide on one person to spend his life with?  That some people are destined to "play the field" a bit before settling down?  Well, yes, apparently his daughter has just been through her first sex education class, and she doesn't quite get the distinction between "practice" non-commitment sex and relationship sex.  So maybe he feels the need to explain to the daughter why he was such a man-slut?  Nah, it's still a bit odd.

Will's story flashes back to before the 1992 election, when he was a young intern volunteering for future President Bill Clinton and working the NYC campaign office, leaving his girlfriend Emily back in Wisconsin.  At the campaign office he becomes friends with April, the girl who makes copies, and later he meets Summer, a journalist who was Emily's old roommate.  For the next few years he works on several campaigns and bounces between all three women (Emily finally moves to NY) and we follow the various Clinton scandals in the background.  This turned out to be quite timely, remember when we had a President who secretly fooled around with many women and then got impeached, but not removed from office?  Good times...

You can play along and try to guess which one of the three women ultimately became Will's wife, the story bounces between them so liberally that it could be any of them.  The weirder question, though, is what was up with that author character played by Kevin Kline?  Was he just there as a foil character, somebody who was dating Summer to make her unavailable when the plot needed her to be?  Or was this supposed to represent a real-life author?  He just seemed so specifically odd that I wonder if his character was a thinly-veiled reference to somebody famous.

NITPICK POINT - much is made of Will finding the "perfect song" to listen to on such a fine, fine morning at the start of the film. Again, this is the morning he received his divorce papers, but he's happy that it's also the day he gets to pick up his daughter from school.  OK, but how is "Everyday People" by Sly and the Family Stone the "perfect song" for either occasion?  It doesn't fit with the divorce thing, or the daughter pick-up, so isn't it much more likely to just be the best song that the film's producers could license?  Unless it's somehow just generically the "perfect song", which it is not - I've never liked that song.  It feels half-written with all the scooby-dooby-dooby stuff, like somebody couldn't be bothered to create a full song's worth of lyrics.  Then there's all that stuff about "There is a short one, who doesn't like the fat one" or the "yellow one that doesn't like the blue one".  Great, so the song is guilty of both fat-shaming and racism.  Plus, there are NO BLUE PEOPLE, so the song is nonsensical at best.  Perfect song?  I think not.

But hey, I liked this film more than I thought I would, so I think we've got an upset victory over "The Proposal", which I didn't like as much as I predicted.  So "Definitely, Maybe" is moving on to the second round of the March Marriage Madness tournament!  Yeah, I'll admit it got me in the end with a sentimental ending.  Sometimes a sucker-punch ending is also a knockout victory.

Also starring Isla Fisher (last seen in "Tag"), Derek Luke (last seen in "Self/Less"), Elizabeth Banks (last seen in "The Happytime Murders"), Rachel Weisz (last seen in "The Favourite"), Kevin Kline (last seen in "The Emperor's Club"), Abigail Breslin (last seen in "No Reservations"), Adam Ferrara, Annie Parisse (last seen in "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days"), Liane Balaban (last seen in "Last Chance Harvey"), Nestor Serrano (last seen in "The Man"), Marc Bonan (last seen in "Cadillac Records"), Alexie Gilmore (last seen in "Labor Day"), Daniel Eric Gold, with cameos from Kevin Corrigan (last seen in "Winter's Tale"), Sakina Jaffrey (last seen in "Red Sparrow"), Robert Klein (also last seen in "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days"), with archive footage of Tom Brokaw (last seen in "The Wizard of Lies"), George W. Bush (ditto), Bill Clinton (last seen in "Race to Witch Mountain").

RATING: 6 out of 10 copies of "Jane Eyre".

The Proposal

Year 12, Day 71 - 3/11/20 - Movie #3,473

BEFORE: I'm in a position where I can see what damage the Covid-19 virus is causing, because at work we're getting more e-mails each day with announcements regarding what film festivals have cancelled or postponed their events, the latest is the SXSW Festival in Austin, which is a major deal.  (The Cleveland Film Festival too, but who cares about that? JK.)  I'm hoping against hope that the situation in Europe is going to eventually abate, because the Annecy Festival in France in June is a really big deal, like the most major animation festival of all, and one of my bosses has a ticket to attend Annecy, and she's going to present her upcoming feature there as a work-in-progress, and that's crucial to raising more money to finish the film.  Plus I work hard to find her a decent plane fare on Iceland Air, with a stop in Rekjavik on the way to Geneva, and that ticket is non-refundable.

It's a little weird to move around New York City now - while it's hardly a ghost town, you can tell that there are fewer people working in the city than usual.  There was no line in the post office today, and I go to the James Farley post office, usually one of the busiest in the whole city.  Other people who commute during rush hour (I can't be bothered to get up early) have told me that the subways are not very crowded, and also that they've seen crews cleaning the cars and the stations, which for many is an unusual sight, an anomaly at the very least.  I saw photos today of empty sites around the world, usually busy places like the canals of Venice and the Ginza in Tokyo, and it's not too much of a leap from there to envision a post-humanity world, it's very chilling.  This makes me want to travel so I can feel like Charlton Heston in "The Omega Man", like I'm the last man alive.

My wife and I are planning a short trip to Atlantic City in a couple weeks, and then in May we're off to Florida for five days.  We were thinking of hitting Epcot Center or maybe Busch Gardens, but who the hell knows what things are going to be like then, or what the theme parks' response to the viral outbreak will be.  I guess we'll see how the casinos in N.J. are handling things, and then go from there.

Mary Steenburgen carries over from "Book Club", and now that I've shifted things around a little, another actor does, too.  Here in the closing days of the 2020 romance chain, there are so many Steenburgen, Diane Keaton and Kevin Kline appearances scheduled that I probably could have watch the films in just about any order I wanted.  We're getting close to the end of the March Marriage Madness tournament, this one should fit right into place, right? Just three match-ups left over the next five days and then I can announce the winning film.

THE PLOT: A pushy boss forces her young assistant to marry her in order to keep her visa status in the U.S. and avoid deportation to Canada.

AFTER: This premise somehow managed to be both clever and stupid, what year was this released? 2009?  OK, at least they gender-flipped it so the pushy boss was female and the executive assistant who agrees to pose as her fake spouse was male.  If it were a male boss pressuring his female secretary to marry him, that would be all kinds of wrong.  (Umm, so if that's wrong, how is this right?)

Plus, it's an overly simplistic depiction of our nation's immigration policies, even the ones from 2009.  For years we've seen the "Hollywood" version of how green cards work, and I'm willing to bet that the process we've seen in films bears little resemblance to the real one.  According to movies like this, you can just pick some random person to marry, memorize some key details about their life, family, how you met and fell in love, plus who sleeps on which side of the bed, and once you pass that little pop quiz, that's it, you're a citizen.  It just can't be that easy.  Plus, marriage is a legal contract, one that should not be entered into lightly, even if you're not desperate to stay in the U.S.

And on top of all THAT, something tells me that the laws we have in place (or had, back in 2009) are there for specific reasons that are political, cultural and therefore are probably very biased against certain countries, if you know what I mean.  I suspect that high-profile book editors from Canada are not that high on the INS's list of people to target.  Is this professional book editor really jeopardizing the U.S. economy by taking a prominent publishing position away from a hard-working American?  Because I'm in a creative industry, I happen to know that exceptions are made for people who can demonstrate extraordinary abilities, and that includes talents in the creative arts.  I think that probably a case could be made for publishing being a creative art, and that means that if our publishing executive here has a proven track record for finding and nurturing talented authors, having a hand in producing a couple of best-sellers, it would be easier to plead her case as an "alien with extraordinary ability" rather than to move ahead with a sham marriage and have to memorize a ton of her assistant's personal details.  This is called the O-1 non-immigrant visa, and I know several people who have applied for it and received one - any decent immigration attorney would have brought this to their client's attention.

Come to think of it, there's another NITPICK POINT - at no time do we ever see Margaret Tate consult with an attorney of any kind.  This is very basic stuff for someone not born in the U.S. who is also working in the U.S. - I know some people in their twenties who know all the ins and outs of immigration law, what they're eligible for and what type of visa they want to apply for next, and it's because they have a decent immigration lawyer.  For this character to have a publishing job, a visa and NO lawyer?  That makes no sense.

But for the purposes of comedy, she has to be very smart as a book editor, but very dumb as an immigrant, I guess.  Here is where they had to fall back on the old "Well, I guess I gotta get married to stay in the U.S." trope, which is sad.  And it just so happens that she has no steady boyfriend, and the Type A sort of personality that would prevent her from getting one.  As I also saw in "Set It Up", it's the boss's executive assistant who knows them the best, also that's someone who's a doormat that the Type A boss can take advantage of, because a comedy film just wouldn't know what to do with a boss that's fair, kind to their employees and not a complete hard-nosed stereotype of a boss.

It's all designed to get her to Alaska (actually, coastal Massachusetts subbing in for Alaska) where Andrew, her assistant is from, so they can work a "fish out of water" routine into the "fake marriage to fool immigration" plot.  Andrew's grandmother is about to turn 90, and the plan is for her to come along as his fake fiancée for appearance's sake, while at the same time she can learn details about his family for that pop quiz thing.  She learns that Andrew comes from a wealthy Alaskan family, he's on the outs with his father, and that it's hard to get to sleep when the sun never sets.

Speaking of that, I was going to call another N.P. on the fact that Sitka is in the southern part of Alaska, so I doubt that they have days during the summer where the sun never sets - I thought that only occured above the Arctic Circle.  However I found some web-sites that explained that there are parts of Alaska that don't fall into 24-hour darkness during the winter, but also enjoy prolonged periods of daylight during the summer.  Hence the nickname "The Land of the Midnight Sun".  I stand corrected.  (Maybe not - the IMDB lists this as a mistake, stating that in Sitka, there are never days where the sun doesn't set...)

The family is overjoyed when Andrew announces his engagement - which originally he wasn't planning to do, but it seems he was looking for leverage against his father, who couldn't quite understand why Andrew preferred to move to New York to work in publishing, rather than stay in Alaska and take over one of his many family businesses.  So the party for Grandma instead turns into a hastily-planned wedding (Can you plan a whole wedding over a weekend?  I'm not sure.)

Anyway, it seems that Andrew has just as many reasons to participate in the phony marriage scam as Margaret does - in addition to sticking it to his father, he also gets his ex-girlfriend to notice him again.  However, she seems very unaware of the strongest rule of all in these rom-coms - the person who's helping the other person through their situation is destined to be the person they're really supposed to be with, right?  I'm not sure I follow all the logic near the end about who's really making a sacrifice for whom, and whether or not these two people belong together, but if you think about it this way - they were both willing to make a sacrifice, and they were both willing to get fake-married because it benefitted them to do so.  Andrew was demanding a promotion and a raise in return, and Margaret was doing it for a green card - so maybe these do actually DO deserve each other.  Marriage is not only an expression of love and a social construct, it's also a business arrangement, no matter who you are.

It's kind of funny when you think about it - but Ryan Reynolds and Scarlett Johansson used to be married in real life.  The film "Book Club" has neither one of them in it, but it served as the connecting film between three Scarlett Johansson films and two Ryan Reynolds films.

Also starring Sandra Bullock (last seen in "Bird Box"), Ryan Reynolds (last seen in "Waiting..."), Craig T. Nelson (also carrying over from "Book Club"), Betty White (last heard in "Toy Story 4"), Denis O'Hare (last seen in "Private Life"), Oscar Nunez (last seen in "Baywatch"), Malin Akerman (last seen in "Rampage"), Michael Nouri (last seen in "The Terminal"), Aasif Mandvi (last seen in "Movie 43"), Michael Mosley (last seen in "27 Dresses"), Lee Wesley, with a cameo from Niecy Nash (last seen in "Downsizing").

RATING: 5 out of 10 Native American chants

Book Club

Year 12, Day 70 - 3/10/20 - Movie #3,472

BEFORE: So I learned late yesterday that actor Max von Sydow passed away at the age of 90, he's always been one of my favorite actors, even though I haven't yet seen the films he was most famous for, the ones directed by Ingmar Bergman.  Those films like "The Seventh Seal" and "Wild Strawberries" are on my list now, but they're notoriously hard to link to.  I've got a shot in late April where I MIGHT be able to link to the Bergman films now, since I just added "A Kiss Before Dying" as a possible lead-in.  But, do I want to?  I'd already made a possible chain to get me to Mother's Day, and this change-up could easily interfere with that.  I'll have to check in early April and make a decision to either stay the course and shake things up.  The other possibility is that I watch "A Kiss Before Dying" next January 1, and head into Bergman territory from there - this would be a great choice if I choose to send out my annual Jan. 1 dedication to von Sydow - which would also give me time to put together a proper tribute.  This is the problem with programming far in advance, if an actor I like passes away, I may have to wait 9 or 10 months to give him his due.  But let's note it here, the guy who I think I first saw in "The Greatest Story Ever Told", then later discovered in "Strange Brew", then in "Hannah and Her Sisters", then when I finally watched "The Exorcist", who came back into my life yet again in "Star Wars: The Force Awakens", is no longer with us.

I don't think you'll find a more varied cast of characters played - Jesus, Ming the Merciless, Father Merrin, Brewmeiser Smith, Blofeld in "Never Say Never Again", Leland Gaunt in "Needful Things", Lor San Tekka.  I'll have more to say later - I mean, the guy was 90 so this doesn't come as much of a shock, but damn, what an actor.

Wallace Shawn carries over from "Marriage Story", which will probably beat this film in the early round of the March Marriage Madness Tournament - but let's make sure!

THE PLOT: Four lifelong friends have their lives changed forever after reading "50 Shades of Grey" in their monthly book club.

AFTER: OK, while this isn't the treatise on marriage that yesterday's film was, there's enough related material, I can make this one qualify for the tournament.  Of the four older women in the book club, only one is married, but one is divorced, one is widowed and the fourth one defiantly never got married, but even that's sort of on track - if a character is purposely NOT getting married over the course of 50 years, that says something about them, their views against marriage, and it's worth examing.

Unfortunately, the structure here allows for liberal jumping between the stories of these four women, they're not exactly intertwined except that they're all friends and they're all reading the same book, but at the same time, the movie is pretty much admitting that none of the four stories are interesting enough to be the focus of their own movie - so slamming them all together isn't going to improve them.  And in fact toggling between them all, advancing each story incrementally, then switching over to the next one ended up being very jarring.  I couldn't help thinking that something exciting is happening to one of these women somewhere else, but I'm probably missing it because THIS one's having a stupid crisis over how to get a ladybug out of her house safely.  (Umm, I'm thinking maybe just open the window, rather than turn this into a complicated home-improvement project, but what do I know?)

Yes, it's an original idea, to show all four ladies reading "50 Shades of Gray".  But it's not really a direct connection between that S&M based story and the resulting changes in their lives - they could have been reading ANY steamy romance novel here, and that could have had the same effect.  It's not like these four women in their 60's suddenly developed an affinity for bondage play, or jumped into bed with a young, fabulously wealthy man who wanted to spank them, that doesn't happen.  Thank God, because when I programmed this one I didn't exactly sign up for GILF porn.

Look, I know that actresses over a certain age have been complaining about the lack of suitable roles available for them in movies as of late, but this is not the answer.  These are incredibly talented actresses, with many many notable movies on their resumés, and this just feels like they're all slumming.  Wouldn't they be better off transitioning to producing or directing?  Come on, they're not going to get offered roles in "Tomb Raider" or "Wonder Woman", that much is clear but doing anything else has got to be better than appearing in this inanity.

Ugh, it's so contrived, from the tech problems that result from a woman in her 60's trying online dating for the first time, to the married woman being somehow unable to seduce her own husband.  They've been married so long, wouldn't they have worked out some kind of signal system, or you know, be able to express themselves by using words to say what's on their mind?  How did this woman lose the ability to communicate in English, to the point where she gets so frustrated that she has to scream?  Now, is she screaming AT her husband (because that's not really going to help the situation) or out of frustration over her inability to be blunt, or at least communicative?  She's angry over a problem that she clearly had a hand in creating, unless I miss my guess.

Then the widowed one has a similar problem, her daughters want her to move to Arizona so she can be closer to them, but they're at a point where they think they need to baby her, and she just met this great guy who's also a pilot and seems really into her.  How can she tell her daughters that she's not ready to live in a basement apartment in Sedona?  Again, maybe try using your words.  The best story is probably the one with Jane Fonda's never-married character, who re-meets an old lover from the 1960's and tries to get something going again, only it's her many (ultimately) non-successful relationships that seem to be holding her back here, and that should never be an excuse to justify not trying again.

I think the title is ultimately misleading, because there's very little discussion of books, and the majority of the action takes place in between the book club's meetings, and not during. Sorry, but I'm just not seeing the direct connection between reading "50 Shades of Gray" and thinking, "I've got to join a dating service" or "I've got to put Viagra in my husband's beer."  It's a shaky line at best connecting the dots here, so it's an easy cakewalk for "Marriage Story" to win the match-up and head into the next round of play.  Well, I did say it was probably the top seed.

Also starring Diane Keaton (last seen in "Town & Country"), Jane Fonda (last seen in "Our Souls at Night"), Candice Bergen (last seen in "Home Again"), Mary Steenburgen (last seen in "Last Vegas"), Andy Garcia (last seen in "The Mule"), Don Johnson (last seen in "The Other Woman"), Craig T. Nelson (last heard in "Incredibles 2"), Richard Dreyfuss, (last seen in "My Life in Ruins") Alicia Silverstone (last seen in "Butter"), Katie Aselton (last seen in "The Sea of Trees"), Ed Begley Jr. (last seen in "What's Your Number?"), Lili Bordan, Tommy Dewey (last seen in "The Front Runner"), John Shartzer, Ravi Kapoor (last seen in "Flight"), Mircea Monroe with a cameo from E.L. James.

RATING: 4 out of 10 bottles of wine

Marriage Story

Year 12, Day 69 - 3/9/20 - Movie #3,471

BEFORE: Scarlett Johansson carries over again from "A Good Woman", and she'll be back later in the year in "Black Widow", which right now I'm tentatively placing between "Hellboy" and "Jojo Rabbit" as a lead-in to Halloween.  If I have space for "Under the Skin" and "The Perfect Score" then it could be a whole other chain of 4 films with her in late September?  I don't know, it's just a thought but it could happen that way - thinking about it now is the first step toward making it happen.

I'm really regretting not starting some kind of "March Marriage Madness" tournament on March 1, which would have justified keeping the romance chain going past the end of February.  Is it too late, can I sort of back-date this, now that I know there will be 16 romance films in the month of March - you know, kind of like the "Sweet Sixteen"?  Or am I going to hear from a bunch of lawyers telling me that "March Madness" is trade-marked, and I have to change the name of my promotion to "Spring Marriage Insanity"?  You never know, everyone's afraid to use the term "Super Bowl" in their advertising and every product has to use the generic term "The Big Game", it's just dumb.

Anyway, how would that even work, like would I take the first two films of March and square them off against each other in the first "game"? And then some kind of bracket system that moves each film forward to the next level, until there are just two films left in the finals?  That sounds ridiculous.  But I'm so doing that.  OK, "Just Like Heaven" vs. "Home Again", two Reese Witherspoon films - both were charming, but nobody was married in "Just Like Heaven", so it almost doesn't count.  It's a DQ, and "Home Again" moves on.  Next, it's "Set It Up" vs. "Just a Kiss".  Hmm, "Set It Up" had two bosses almost getting married, and the other film sucked.  "Set It Up" is the winner.  Match-Up three is "Rent" vs. "Opening Night".  Hmm, no marriage in either one, really, except two women got engaged in "Rent", but didn't make it to the altar - anyway gay marriage wasn't legal in the 1980's, but "Rent" still squeaks out a victory.  Then there's "In Good Company" vs. "A Good Woman", which is really a push, same score.  Dennis Quaid is married in the first one, and Scarlett Johansson is a young bride in the second.  Eh, I'll give the edge to "A Good Woman" for having the Oscar Wilde pedigree, but neither film will probably make it to the finals.

So there you go, four films so far have advanced to the Elite 8 in March Marriage Madness - "Home Again", "Set It Up", "Rent" and "A Good Woman".  Today's film really is the top seed in the whole bracket, coming in with a strong six Oscar nominations and 1 win.  It's the film to beat - I still need to play the games out, but this one's a near-lock to move on to the next round.  It's fun, right?  I mean, it's stupid, but it's also fun.

THE PLOT: Noah Baumbach's incisive and compassionate look at a marriage breaking up and a family staying together.

AFTER: SPOILER WARNING, proceed no further if you haven't yet seen "Marriage Story".  I can only go so far tonight without revealing specifics of the plot, generalizations are not gonna do it today...and there are bits near the end of the film that should be experienced first-hand.

There's really another warning label that should be front and center on the poster, as this film may remind divorced people of the process that they went through, and they may experience that sick, sinking feeling that they had IRL.  If you ask me, the film should have been titled "Divorce Story" instead of "Marriage Story" but that would probably have been marketing suicide.  I can already tell that some stress dreams are headed my way as a result of watching this.  What's that long German word for the feeling that your life is spiraling out of control, only you suspect that you caused it through your own actions or inactions, and nothing that you do now will stop it? Some form of "Weltschmerz" mixed with "Angst", I suspect.

Anyway, there hasn't been an Oscar contender completely on the topic of divorce since "Kramer vs. Kramer", and that was way back in 1979, right?  Surely much has changed in the world since then, and we're overdue for an update on the topic.  Baumbach was certainly headed in that direction with "The Squid and the Whale", a film I watched in 2018, and I've also been catching up across the board with other Baumbach films like "Kicking & Screaming" and "Frances Ha" last year.  But here it doesn't take much investigating to figure out that Baumbach found the inspiration for "Marriage Story" from his marriage to Jennifer Jason Leigh, and the divorce that resulted.  To some degree that makes this film review-proof,  like I can't nitpick and say, "Oh, that wouldn't happen that way..." or "Nobody would do that..." if it already happened to him.  But the trick then lies in figuring out where this fiction might deviate from reality, and if this is just a thinly-veiled roman a clef.  Even if it is, there may still be things that are not specific to that one particular marriage, and may in fact be universal.

I believe it takes some cojones to put pieces of your life into a screenplay - I tried several times but I couldn't manage to complete anything coherent.  Here's what we know: Baumbach and Leigh also have a son, they lived in NYC, like the character of Nicole, Ms. Leigh was most famous for being in a teen sex comedy ("Fast Times at Ridgemont High") although she's done a lot of work since then.  But to some degree she probably put her career on hold to be a mother, as many women still do - here they changed the male lead from a film director to a theater director, but for all we know, the rest may be spot on, we weren't there.

But here's what I know about marriage - in order for it to work, there needs to be some kind of equilibrium.  If there is any imbalance, that can affect the long-term nature of the relationship.  In years past one person needed to be more active and the other person more passive, and for many decades this meant the man made the decisions, drove the car (literally and metaphorically) with women in the passenger seat.  This way of thinking is now quite outdated, but modern relationships still need to have some form of a driver and a passenger on many issues, or else conflict ensues.  One person (male or female) may take the lead on some things, and ideally their partner would have other strengths or talents and take the lead on others. (NOTE: I'm using "men" and "women" here to make a point, but the same principles apply to same-sex relationships.  I made a reference last week to gay marriage and how the people who fought for it somehow didn't see gay divorce coming, and I heard this reflected a few days later in the comedy routine of Cameron Esposito - thanks for confirming my hypothesis.)  But a relationship between two "Type A" personalities just isn't going to work, neither is one between two passengers - you can't have active-active or passive-passive, especially if the couple both works and lives together.  Sometimes you see a couple running a restaurant together, where one is in charge of the kitchen, and the other controls the front of the house.  This is less common but still represents a form of equilibrium, because each is taking the lead on a different front.

And here's what I know about divorce - it's a lawsuit at heart, so by nature there needs to be a plaintiff and a defendant.  Again, active vs. passive, at least on paper. One party sues the other party, claiming wrongdoing or neglect - my ex-wife ended up taking the heat on that one, she agreed to be the defendant, wearing that scarlet letter, even if it wasn't true, because it was the quickest path.  We had no kids, no furs, no jewelry, no boats, no tangible property to divide except the VHS tapes and the condo, which was only 1/10 paid for.  I had to raise 1/20 of the value to buy her out and get her name of the mortgage, and it was the best money I ever spent.  Marriages come and go, but real estate is forever.

We didn't have very expensive lawyers, we went through a mediation process, which I recommend.  Technically there were two lawyers, but really we only worked with one to work out the terms ourselves, and at the start of "Marriage Story", the main characters are using a similar process with a mediator - so it looked for a minute like the film was going to take a very safe route, but also one I've not previously seen explored in a film.  But this leads to a NITPICK POINT for me - each character is asked to read a list of the traits they like and admire in their partner, but that seems more like couples counseling than separation mediation - did Baumbach inadvertently conflate the two processes?  Anyway, Nicole can't bring herself to read her list of Charlie's good traits, she's mentally not the right space to do that, because reasons.  But if she had, maybe they wouldn't have gone ahead with the divorce - no such luck, these characters need to go through their very awkward individual hells before things will start to get better.

Eventually papers are served, and Nicole moves out to L.A. to work on a TV series - which had always been part of the couple's plan, only they'd planned for her to move back to NYC after.  Time apart, though, plus a consultation with a divorce lawyer, one who encourages Nicole to start thinking about what's best for HER and what she wants out of life, leads to her filing divorce papers, and then the separation process starts to get jumbled up and more complicated from there - Charlie tries to stay in New York and work on his play, while flying out to L.A. at various times to spend time with their son, and also search for a lawyer to represent him in California, despite his insistence that they are still a "New York couple".  Umm, it seems that ship has sailed already.

The California divorce laws turn out to represent the height of absurdity.  Charlie meets with an expensive shark-type lawyer that he can't afford, and then with a looming deadline retains the "nice guy" lawyer, but still gets bogged down in his "Catch-22"-like advice.  The lawyer advises him to get an apartment in L.A., which will look better in court than living in a motel, however this also bolsters Nicole's argument that they are no longer a "New York couple".  Other things are done to look better in court, only the lawyers' goal seems to be to avoid a court appearance, so why is everything done for the court's sake?  Perfect casting here, getting Alan Alda, who complained about the absurdity of army regulations in "M*A*S*H" for many years, to play a lawyer pointing out the absurdity of divorce law.

In the end, getting divorced is like any other loss, it's similar to the death of a family member, like when a mortician presents you with many options, which all feel terrible, and you would honestly not have to be in such a position at all, let alone making decisions.  But it's too late, you can't go back and do anything different to fix things.  Or imagine it's a restaurant where you like none of the food, or are allergic to it all, but you still have to choose something and eat it.  Better metaphor, if the marriage is a car, and the couple in question are the driver and passenger, in a divorce situation that car is headed over the cliff.  Maybe there's a point at which you can turn the car in a new direction, but if you wait too long, the momentum's going to keep the car going, even if you slam on the brakes.  Your best bet at that point is to grab what you can from the car (like your kid, if he or she is in the back seat) and jump out.  But the car's going over, if you stay in it too long you've got yourself a "Thelma & Louise" situation, and nobody wants that.

With Charlie and Nicole, there's a late strategy switcheroo, and he goes back to the more expensive lawyer - now everything becomes evidence in a hotly contested case, like who's the better parent, who drinks more, who put their career on hold, who makes more money now, who had an affair, it all becomes grist for the lawyers' mill and comes out in court.  To me, this is the equivalent of staying in the car as it goes over that cliff.  Somebody should have jumped out when they could.

There's a powerful argument after that where Charlie and Nicole end up screaming at each other in his L.A. apartment, and it's terrible, violent and ultimately cathartic.  What's very real about that is that it doesn't change anything between them, it's just a release that some people might find hard to watch.  For myself, I've been in a version of that scene, where I admit I said some hurtful things that I didn't mean and probably shouldn't have said.  My situation was such that during and after my divorce people family and friends cut me a lot of slack, I heard a lot of people saying, "Well, clearly this is not your fault.", which was somehow both helpful and not helpful.  Because I knew that my actions or perhaps inactions played a role in getting to that point, so I couldn't possibly have been as blameless as others might have believed.  Or maybe that was just something that people say out of courtesy when they don't know what else to say, I'm not sure.

But the scene that was even harder for me to watch was when Charlie was being visited by the court-appointed observer, and he explains the "knife trick".  Man, I was squirming in my seat because that's not something you should even bring up to someone who's evaluating you for a court case to determine your fitness as a parent.  Look, in the middle of a tough workday I might put two fingers in my mouth and mime blowing my brains out, but that sort of thing is not funny.  If I had a friend who told me they did that with a real loaded gun, only they didn't shoot it, I would still be very concerned about them.  Anyway, the "knife trick"  sounds like a very convoluted thing, something that a person might come up with after the fact to explain away a suicide attempt.  Mr. Baumbach, I hope that's not really the case for you, and if it was, I hope that you reached out and got the help you needed.  No relationship is worth losing your life for in the end.

This film could have easily devolved into excessive flash-backery, as so many films do these days, so I appreciate that it started in a bad place and kept moving forward.  I think the only flashbacks were in the opening montages, to help establish the two main characters, and then after that, Baumbach showed great restraint in remaining linear.  Also, who the hell knew Adam Driver could sing so well?  I knew he was a theater guy, and has done a lot of respectable theater work, but he sings a Sondheim number here near the end, and maybe he should be cast in a musical right away.

And as I thought, somewhere between 2004 and now, Scarlett Johansson got some better acting advice, where she displayed real emotions and she wasn't just smile-sulking or acting like a robot trying to mimic human feelings.  Unfortunately my system doesn't allow me time to go back and watch all of her films in the order they were filmed (not released) so I could maybe pinpoint when, exactly, she gained some ability to act, by which I mean being present in the moment and not all caught up in over-thinking how to react to things, which really is the anthithesis of acting.  Perhaps someone else could go through her filmography chronologically and determine this.  Perhaps it was during the three films she made with Woody Allen, 2006-2008, or maybe "Iron Man 2" was the turning point, I'm not sure.

Also starring Adam Driver (last seen in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), Laura Dern (last seen in "Happy Endings"), Alan Alda (last seen in "Bridge of Spies"), Ray Liotta (last seen in "The Place Beyond the Pines"), Azhy Robertson (last seen in "Rough Night"), Julie Hagerty (last seen in "The Story of Us"), Merritt Wever (last seen in "Welcome to Marwen"), Mark O'Brien (last seen in "Bad Times at the El Royale"), Matthew Shear (last seen in "The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)"), Brooke Bloom, Kyle Bornheimer (last seen in "Rules Don't Apply"), Mickey Sumner (last seen in "The End of the Tour"), Wallace Shawn (last heard in "Toy Story 4"), Robert Smigel (last seen in "The Week Of"), Rich Fulcher, Lucas Neff, Martha Kelly (last seen in "Spider-Man: Homecoming"), Tunde Adebimpe (ditto), Jasmine Cephas Jones, Mary Wiseman, Matthew Maher (last seen in "Wonder Wheel"), Becca Blackwell, Eric Berryman, Pete Simpson, Amanda Rovner

RATING: 6 out of 10 hacked e-mails

A Good Woman

Year 12, Day 68 - 3/8/20 - Movie #3,470

BEFORE: I'm sure I must have railed against Daylight Saving Time many times in this space, so I'll try to refrain from repeating myself, but it's an abhorrent practice that needs to be abolished.  We're only fooling ourselves by changing the clocks, the earth and the sun know what time it REALLY is because time is an imaginary construct, but also based on a very real thing - the relative position of the sun and the earth, where the sun appears in our sky, and that's not going to change just because we move the digits on our devices.  So why live out of harmony with the planet, aren't we all supposed to be trying to do exactly that?  Why try, impossibly, to impose man's will on the turning of the earth?  I can call today the first day of Summer, that doesn't make it so.

Plus, there's no financial or health benefit achieved by arbitrarily moving the clock - longer days with more sunlight are coming, but that was going to happen ANYWAY for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, there's no need to rush things.  If anything, more accidents are caused the day AFTER the switch-over to DST, just because everyone's exhausted, probably falling asleep at the wheel.  Stop the insanity, save some lives, let's abolish the practice once and for all.  There's NOTHING wrong with staying on good old standard time all 12 months of the year.  I was getting ready to support Andrew Yang, the only candidate willing to get rid of changing the clocks, but then I found out that he was in favor of staying on DST all year long - no, no, NO!  That's exactly the wrong solution, that's like trying to improve your credit rating by paying all your bills late on purpose - if it's wrong, it's wrong, and extending the practice won't help, but getting rid of it might.

I thought about abstaining from DST this year, keeping all my clocks set to Standard Time, but then I realized that I'm already usually like an hour late for everything, and then I'd be two hours late, but at least I'd be able to say I was late because of my principles and not because I just stay up too late and like sleeping a little longer.  This year I got hit HARD because I realized that I hadn't yet pulled my DVDs out from my storage cases that would get me through the rest of March - yes, I'm watching more films via streaming and not all of my channels will still let me dub movies to DVD, but there were still 7 or 8 films that I had on hard copy that were going to round out the month and get me to April 1.

Now, what I've tended to do over the years is put two or three films on each DVD disc, to keep the collection at a (somewhat) manageable size.  Often that means putting a film on a disc with its sequel, or with another film with the same actor, or on a similar topic, and if that's not possible, then things get a little more random.  So if I'm looking through my collection for the remake of "The War of the Worlds", it's probably on a disc with the original film from the 1950's, so I go right to the "W" section.  Other times a franchise film came along much later than its prequels, so while I might have "Mad Max" and "The Road Warrior" together on one disc, where is "Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome"?  It's not under "M", so I have to think about when I added it to my collection, and what other similar film I might have put it on a disc with.  "Mad Max: Fury Road" - same problem.  Ideally I'd have both of those sequels on the same disc, but frankly, it's not an ideal set-up.  So one could be or a disc with "Dune" or any of a number of other sci-fi films.

So, even though I was only looking for 7 or 8 films, that means flipping through ALL the pages in the book-like DVD cases until I stumble on what I'm looking for - if the film isn't where it should be alphabetically, then it's the 2nd film on a disc and I need to scan all of the labels until I (possibly) see it.  At the same time, last night I needed to re-alphabetize and work 52 new titles into the cases, and that meant shifting every disc down the appropriate number of spaces to preserve my radical somewhat-alphabetized system (All Frankenstein movies are filed under "F", all James Bond movies filed under "J", all "Planet of the Apes" movies filed under "P", regardless of exact title).  It's still not perfect, I'd love to have all the Marx Brothers movies together, all the Hitchcocks, but I eventually find everything.

So just before midnight, I started shifting discs down, starting at "Z" and working my way back up to "A", through 7 cases of DVDs, working in the newer discs while at the same time looking for the 8 DVDs I need to finish March.  I got about halfway through by 1:00, but then I had to stop and watch my movie, plus I knew that 2 am was going to turn into 3 am, so even if I started my movie at 1, I wouldn't finish until the new 3:30 am, even though the movie was just 90 minutes long.  So yeah, I picked the absolute worst night of the year to re-organize the collection.  That's on me, but if we could just abolish DST, then this would never happen again.  I could have the time NOW to do the things I need to do in the wee hours of the morning.  (Forget all this "SAVING", when is Daylight SPENDING Time?  And what the hell are we saving it FOR?)

A couple of years ago, I thought of a work-around solution - just make a spreadsheet on my computer of what films are on each DVD, one disc per row, one title per column.  Then in a few short minutes each month, I could realize that to find the movie "Office Christmas Party", I need to look under "D" because it's on a disc with "Daddy's Home 2".  That would sure be quicker than flipping through EVERY book, looking for that title on EVERY disc.  It's a great idea, but how would I find the time to type up the whole spreadsheet?  The original problem was that I don't have time to scan through the cases, so I certainly don't have time to type up the spreadsheet!  Right?  What would that take, days?  Weeks?  Is that worth it to save an hour or so every month?

Well, I'm finally going to find out.  It turns out that I'm a very fast typist (another skill I acquired over the years, typing up these blog entries, plus blogs for TWO bosses, plus countless screenplays that need to be typed AND properly formatted for arbitrary deadlines, PLUS two books on animation that I ghost-edited and never got proper credit for.)  So I've finally started the process to make my collection more searchable at the start of each month - I'm already up to the letter "D".  Re-alphabetizing will still be a nightmare, but after I get this all typed up (in a few days, ideally, end of this week, tops) I should be able to drastically reduce the time it takes me to FIND any particular movie.  Or, if I wanted to confirm that I have copies of all the films in the "Kung Fu Panda" franchise, for example, that should now be a breeze, even if they're spread out over 3 discs and none of them are filed under "K".

Scarlett Johansson carries over from "In Good Company", setting me up for "Marriage Story" tomorrow.

THE PLOT: A 1930's American socialite creates a scandal in the expatriate high society of the Amalfi Coast of Italy when she forms a secretive relationship with a wealthy American unbeknownst to his young wife.

AFTER: This film is based on an Oscar Wilde story, which I figured out about halfway through when one of the characters said this line: "There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it."  Look, HOW I know that Oscar Wilde wrote that line is not important (I play the mobile game "The Simpsons: Tapped Out" and the ghost of Oscar Wilde is a character there...) but like with most trivia, it's only important that I know it.  After that I realized that one of the characters is named Meg Windermere, and that sparked the memory that Wilde wrote a play (or short story, whatever) named "Lady Windermere's Fan".  So either she was going to own a fan at some point or have a notable admirer, I wasn't sure.

Oscar Wilde was apparently very quotable - this film also features characters saying the lines "Bigamy is having one wife too many.  So is monogamy." and "I find the best way to keep my word is never to give it."  And then there's "If everyone knew what everyone said about each other, there wouldn't be four friends in the world."  So Oscar Wilde was a bit like the Yogi Berra of his day, these witty lines always seem a little contradictory, with a little zinger at the end, like "Nobody goes there any more, it's too crowded."  I bet if you put a list of Wilde-isms and Berra-isms together it would get hard to figure out who said which ones.

But wait, I thought, this film is set in the 1930's, and Oscar Wilde died in (just a sec...) 1900.  So did he set this story in the future (our past, but his future)?  Nah, I think the filmmakers just moved the setting ahead a few decades to have more appeal for modern audiences - because some people out there might watch something set in the 1900's, but something set in the 1800's would feel positively ancient?  At least if it's Depression-era it's akin to "The Great Gatsby" and other books they made us read in high school, and not some dusty old Victorian-era tale.  That's the theory, anyway.

The story concerns several Americans and Brits who are living in exile (or perhaps just vacationing) on Italy's Amalfi Coast.  Now it seems with the time-shift maybe they're waiting out the Depression? Escaping Prohibition?  Not sure.  But they're there, and young Mrs. Windermere has been married to her husband for a year, but this relationship gets called into question when he's seen paying frequent visits to the villa of Mrs. Erlynne, and gossip starts to circulate.  Meanwhile, Lord Darlington is befriending Lady Windermere, and is quite honest about his intentions, he's standing by to catch her if and when her marriage falls apart.  We the audience know what type of woman Mrs. Erlynne is from the opening scene when she's talked about by all the women in New York whose husbands she's slept with, so when Darlington creates a situation where Lady Windermere will look through her husband's checkbook and see all the payments to Mrs. Erlynne, she'll conclude what we (and everyone else) has come to believe, that her husband is having a long-term affair, or had a short one and is now paying off the woman to keep her quiet.

Ah, but there's more to the story, and all is not what it seems.  No spoilers here, but like many of this year's romances, fate and coincidence have an effect, even if some of the connections may be less than believable.  Boy, when you boil all of this year's romances down, you might conclude that everything is rooted in the classics - what is "Some Kind of Wonderful" but a gender-flipped Cyrano de Bergerac, and "Rent" of course comes straight from "La Boheme", and now this turns out to be an adaptation of "Lady Windermere's Fan".  Of course there's really nothing new under the sun, so if you told me that "You, Me and Dupree" could be traced back to Shakespeare's "All's Well that Ends Well" I'd at least be inclined to listen.

So there you go, this one's a true classic, even though they changed a few things, like moved the original play from London to Italy, the boats became planes, there were two checkbooks instead of one, and the Windemere's had a small child in Wilde's version.  But the essence remains the same, people are going to lie and cheat and have complicated relationships while saying pithy things, because things like that never go out of style.  And at least Scarlett Johansson wasn't smiling uncomfortably through the whole film, so her acting was marginally better here, even though this was released the same year as "In Good Company".

Also starring Helen Hunt (last seen in "I Love You, Daddy"), Mark Umbers (last seen in "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword"), Stephen Campbell Moore (last seen in "Goodbye Christopher Robin"), Tom Wilkinson (last seen in "The Catcher Was a Spy"), Milena Vukotic, Roger Hammond (last seen in "Around the World in 80 Days"), John Standing (last seen in "The Elephant Man"), Diana Hardcastle (last seen in "Jenny's Wedding"), Giorgia Massetti, Jane How (last seen in "Miss Potter")

RATING: 5 out of 10 pieces of pawned jewelry