Fighting with My Family

Year 12, Day 151 - 5/30/20 - Movie #3,556

BEFORE: I've got one more day left in May after today, and maybe just one more week on staycation/lockdown after that.  Right now June 8 is the target date to start re-opening New York City, and at least one boss wants to re-open an animation studio on that date.  If the other boss feels the same, then I'm back in business and off the dole.  I can also get back to borrowing some screeners, right now there's just one or two key ones I'd love to see in June to avoid paying for them on iTunes.  I devised a June schedule that steered clear of movies only available to me on screeners, for the most part, but in some cases it just couldn't be avoided.  Hey, if I have to pay a $3.99 or even a $5.99 rental fee here and there, that's fine, I just don't want to do that too often, free is always better.

This means that movie theaters MIGHT be back in business soon (and restaurants, casinos, bars) but let's not get ahead of ourselves - I think the infection rates and death tolls in NYC will have to stay down for the government to consider moving to Phases 2 & 3.  If I'm lucky then maybe I can see "Wonder Woman 1984" in a movie theater in August, which I have a way to link to, only the chain is about 10 days too short.  Sure, I could take 10 days off from movies in August, but let's not get crazy, we may not be traveling anywhere, so that's 10 days at home without movies.  Spending about 75 days at home WITH movies was difficult enough.

Stephen Merchant carries over from "Good Boys", and also directed this one.

THE PLOT: A former wrestler and his family make a living performing at small venues around the country while his kids dream of joining World Wrestling Entertainment.

AFTER: Amazingly, wrestling was one of the first, if not THE first sport to come back after everything shut down.  I think maybe Korean baseball was being broadcast first, but shortly after that, the WWE got themselves declared as "essential" to the Florida economy and started holding matches again, I think without crowds at first.  Since then, Florida's been fully re-opened and people are enjoying the beaches and restaurants (and soon, theme parks) there, what could POSSIBLY go wrong?  Answer: everything, because it's Florida.  But it's not like there's a lot of older people living in Florida, right?  Oh, wait...

This film was based on a documentary about a real U.K. wrestling family, the one that produced WWE wrestler Paige, whose real name is Saraya-Jade Bevis, though in this partially-fictionalized version, her name is Saraya Knight.  Only her first name was her mother's wrestling stage name (Sweet Saraya), then it became her name, but this was too confusing so she started going by Britani, then Paige, which to me seems even more confusing.  OK, maybe the real Saraya was named after her mother's wrestling persona, but then that fact didn't HAVE to carry over into the fictional film, it only mucked everything up, to the point where I couldn't tell if somebody was talking about the mother or the daughter in the family.  The real Saraya/Paige makes a cameo in the film, but thankfully, not as herself, which would have been even more hard to follow.

There's a lot of good father-daughter interaction stuff here, where at first wrestling is just "that silly thing Dad does" to something that the family can do all together, to an activity that Paige can excel at and actually surpass her father's career, and then her father is probably both proud and jealous, and gets upset when she falters and wants to quit.  It's a great story arc for anyone who tried very hard not to become their parents but ended up becoming a version of them anyway, which is nearly everyone, right?

This is the best character that I've seen Florence Pugh play to date - I didn't care so much for her character in "Little Women", but some of that can be blamed on Louisa May Alcott, plus whoever decided to chop that movie into little bits and present it non-linearly.  I found her character in "Midsommar" to be really annoying, but again, that's not necessarily her fault if she was told to play a whiny, demanding character.  You do the best performance you can with the parameters given, I guess.  The only caveat here is that Paige comes off sometimes as the sulky, disconnected Goth girl, and when she confronts the "cool kid" wrestlers who have been making fun of her, somehow it's made out to be HER fault, that she doesn't have any friends because she never took steps to make friends with the "cool kids".  That's a little too close to victim blaming, but I guess maybe if someone's been ignored or picked on for too long, maybe they tend to go into new situations with a pre-conceived attitude that it's going to happen again.

But man, is there a person on the planet who seems more comfortable in front of the camera than Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson?  Wrestling, acting, whatever he's doing, he's super cool, I finally get the appeal.  He's the character and the character is him and we are all together.  Goo goo g'joob.  If he ever had nerves or stage fright, you get the feeling it was a LONG time ago.  Sure, nobody's putting him in a Victorian-era costume drama where he has to rally support for the Queen, then dance a waltz, but still, as long as he sticks to action movies and light comedy, he's so much more of a natural than someone like, say, Tom Cruise.

The debate has raged for years about whether wrestling counts as a sport or entertainment.  It's physical, sure, but there are storylines and the outcomes are pre-determined, and much like soap operas or comic books, they represent storylines that don't have endings, which tends to keep the public coming back for more.  It's somehow sports AND entertainment, so maybe on some level, it is essential, at least to some people.  I think somehow the message of the film is the same as the WWE's corporate strategy, don't be who everybody wants you to be, just be yourself and keep working at it.  On that level, this film kind of won me over at the end, even though what happens in the WWE barely affects my life at all.

Also starring Florence Pugh (last seen in "Midsommer"), Lena Headey (last seen in "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies"), Nick Frost (last seen in "Tomb Raider"), Jack Lowden (last seen in "Dunkirk"), Vince Vaughn (last seen in "Hacksaw Ridge"), Dwayne Johnson (last seen in "Race to Witch Mountain"), James Burrows, Hannah Rae, Thea Trinidad, Kim Matula, Aqueela Zoll, Ellie Gonsalves, Julia Davis (last seen in "Love Actually"), Tori Ellen Ross, with cameos from Paul "Big Show" Wight (last seen in "MacGruber"), Stephen "Seamus" Farrelly, Michael "The Miz" Mizanin (last seen in "The Campaign"), the voices of Jerry Lawler, Jim Ross, Michael Cole, and archive footage of Hulk Hogan (last seen in "Gremlins 2: The New Batch"), "Stone Cold" Steve Austin (last seen in "Grown Ups 2"), John Cena (last heard in "Ferdinand"), Paul "Triple H" Levesque, Ultimate Warrior.

RATING: 6 out of 10 giant truck tires

Good Boys

Year 12, Day 150 - 5/29/20 - Movie #3,555

BEFORE: Will Forte carries over from "Booksmart", playing a dad two nights in a row.  This was originally going to be where I would watch the film "The Laundromat", and put three Will Forte films in a row, but that's a key film that's going to get me from July 4 to the start of the documentary chain in mid-July, via another set of actors.  So that film is tabled, and the chain closes up without it, putting two school-based films next to each other - and as a result, two actors carry over instead of one.

If "Booksmart" reminded you of "Superbad", you weren't the only one.  I can't believe "Superbad" came out 13 years ago, but it's true - and it kind of takes that long for somebody in Hollywood to say, "Hey, let's do a female spin on "Superbad".  And then it becomes a trend, and somebody else says, "Let's do a film like "Superbad", only with three boys instead of two, and they're all five years younger."

For bonus points, not everyone realized this, but Beanie Feldstein is the younger sister of Jonah Hill, who was born Jonah Hill Feldstein, and dropped the last name when he got into movies.  So that's another reason "Booksmart" was reminiscent of "Superbad".  I could have followed up with two more movies with Beanie Feldstein, recently added to my list - "How to Build a Girl" and "The Female Brain", but I'm going to table those, too.  They don't link back to my chain, and I don't want to mess with my plans if they're going to take me all the way to the end of July.  Plus they link to a bunch of the films in the romance category, so perhaps they belong in February.

THE PLOT: Three 6th grade boys ditch school and embark on an epic journey while carrying accidentally stolen drugs, being hunted by teenage girls, and trying to make their way home in time for a long-awaited party.

AFTER: Young Max finds himself at odds with his father, who doesn't seem to have proper boundaries, and finds it adorable that his son is, umm, getting in touch with his body, so to speak.  Dad also warns Max not to fly his super-expensive rare drone that he needs to use for work, so you can probably guess what's going to happen, it's SO blatantly telegraphed here.  Max and his two friends, who call themselves the "Bean Bag Boys", have managed to get invited to a classmate's party, where kissing games are going to be played.  So they decide to use the drone to spy on the teen girl next door, who's bound to kiss her boyfriend at some point.  Or maybe her girlfriend, which might be even more interesting.

This is a last-ditch, desperate move for the Bean Bag boys, after experimenting with a "CPR doll" (one that looks more like one of those "Real Dolls" that people have sex with, hmmm...) and then watching a bit of a porn movie online (where, it turns out, the people didn't even kiss - not on each other's mouths, anyway).  So it's drone or nothing, and that's kind of the upside and the downside of a story about tween boys - everything is pitched as some kind of absolute.  Everything they think they know, they claim to be experts about, and everything they don't know, they're totally clueless about, and it's an EMERGENCY that they find out right away.

I get what someone was trying to do there, capture the feeling of what it's like to be a young boy, to be clueless about some things (sex, alcohol, drugs) but an expert on others (umm, battle card games, video games, and thankfully, the new rules about consent). But then the things that they don't know about seem very important, and they'll look like posers at school if they don't at least pretend to understand how to "do the sex" or brag about how many tiny sips of beer they can handle.  But my problem here is that most learning isn't binary, you don't not know something one day and then suddenly fully understand it the next, it's a constant process that, ideally, is going to take your whole life, or at least your first 18-21 years to start paying off.

I did like that these three boys had different interests, different personalities, different family situations, and that helped to create a bigger, richer tapestry for the story.  Thor's into musical theater, but starting to question whether this interest is hurting him socially.  Lucas is into following the rules, and Max is starting to dig girls, one in particular.  OK, it's not much, but it's something - and they slowly come to realize that they're friends because they live together and their parents know each other, and maybe in time they're going to develop different interests and step outside their small social circle into a larger world, and that's OK.

But the misadventure with the drone leads to a terrible set of bad decisions in order to fix their mistake before Max's Dad comes home from a business trip.  The teen girls decide to hold the drone hostage, so they steal one girl's purse in retaliation.  This leads to the boys being in possession of a party drug, and instead of doing a quick trade for the drone, Lucas's penchant for following the rules makes him feel like they need to turn the drugs in or dispose of them, rather than give them back to the users.  But then THIS means they have to buy another drone, skip school and ride bikes to the mall, raise money to buy the drone, contact a stranger over the internet, AND cross a six-lane highway to get to the mall.  These are all the situations that they warn you about in school, and so quite ironically they have to BREAK all these rules in order to stay out of trouble.  It's partially clever, but I could just feel all the parents out there, cringing while watching these kids do all the things that parents and teachers tell them not to do.

I've talked recently about cause and effect - if we see a kid race blindly across a highway, for example, and nothing bad happens to him, that kind of sends the wrong message to the audience, that doing this is not preferred, but it could be OK.  Especially if the audience is young and impressionable, there needs to be a bad result, in order to discourage kids out there from repeating these fictional kids' exploits.  I'm not saying all three boys should have been run over, but maybe something negative needed to happen.  And NITPICK POINT, what happened to the kids' bikes at this point in the story?  They rode bikes almost all the way to the mall, then suddenly they were on foot, crossing a highway.

I bet many parents would also agree there was too much sex stuff in this movie.  It was handled sort of delicately, like the jokes were done in such a way that if you understood how to "do the sex", you might more fully understand the punch lines, but if not, a kid might not even notice that something went flying by over his head.  Still, an easier way out would be to just not have so much sex stuff in the first place, kind of like the weird ending of "Sausage Party".  (Note, this film comes from the same producers as "Sausage Party", and also "Superbad".)

A lot of other connections to yesterday's film, namely that getting to a party is the most important thing, the ultimate reward in the quest.  Making out at the party, alcohol, drugs, all this carries over, too.  One character taking the fall and getting in trouble to save the others is a key plot point in both films, and then in both cases, the punishment (grounding in one film, jail in the other) is quite easily dealt with.  Another sticking point for parents here is probably seeing a very grounded Max leave his home quite easily, when another character points out, "What could possibly happen?  Getting MORE grounded?"  There they go, sending out the wrong message again.

Yeah, I know it's a movie and it's supposed to be funny, but then I don't really find the idea of watching 12 year olds sipping beer to be funny.  Or playing "spin the bottle", for that matter - even though there it was a very forward-thinking thing to have the party host announce that by playing the game, people are consenting to kissing, but the random nature of the game itself means that someone could end up being forced by the game rules to kiss someone they didn't want to kiss, and that's edging toward behavior without consent.  They can try to dress it up but they didn't change it. A better move would have been to find another kissing game that isn't so completely old-fashioned, because I'm not even sure today's kids still play this game.  Are they going to also play with yo-yos and hula hoops?  There was a VR game being played upstairs, why couldn't the kids who wanted to kiss play some kind of high-tech dating sim game, that would have really updated the plot.

Also starring Jacob Tremblay (last seen in "The Predator"), Keith L. Williams (last seen in "Lemon"), Brady Noon, Molly Gordon (also carrying over from "Booksmart"), Midori Francis (last seen in "Ocean's 8"), Izaac Wang, Millie Davis, Josh Caras (last seen in "Definitely, Maybe"), Lil Rel Howery (last heard in "The Angry Birds Movie 2"), Retta (last seen in "Other People"), Michaela Watkins (last seen in "How to Be a Latin Lover"), Sam Richardson (last heard in "Ralph Breaks the Internet"), Macie Julies, Zoriah Wong, Lee Eisenberg, Benita Ha, Lina Renna (last seen in "The Edge of Seventeen"), Alexander Calvert (ditto), Christian Darrel Scott,  Chance Hurstfield, Stephen Merchant (last seen in "Movie 43"), Mariessa Portelance, Enid-Raye Adams,

RATING: 4 out of 10 anti-bullying chants

Booksmart

Year 12, Day 149 - 5/28/20 - Movie #3,554

BEFORE: OK, I've started the "Dads & Grads" chain, last night was the first film on "Dads", now here come the "Grads".  I know, it's not even June yet, but there's a lot of ground to cover - plus I had to add some bridging material to connect all of these films, which are going to be off-topic a bit perhaps, but there's nothing I can do about that.   It's a couple of films about school, a whole LOT of films about fathers, plus some mortar to hold the bricks together, and before you know it, Father's Day will be here, with July 4 close behind.

Kaitlyn Dever carries over from "Beautiful Boy".

THE PLOT: On the eve of their high school graduation, two academic superstars and best friends realize they should have worked less and played more. Determined not to fall short of their peers, they girls try to cram four years of fun into one night.

AFTER: Today's film is something of a rarity - a high-school comedy told from a female POV, sure, but it's also a film I marked for my list on Hulu that was still streaming there when I was ready to watch it!  That doesn't happen often, has anyone else noticed how quickly things disappear from there?  Or is it just me?  Sometimes it takes me so long to even find a film there that by the time I do, it's already on the way out.  I guess society's to blame, nothing feels permanent any more, everything is disposable, including our entertainment - you crazy kids with the SnapChats and the TikToks, why are you even making videos that are designed to disappear hours later?  Oh, yeah, right.  Get rid of the evidence - maybe you're smarter than I figured.

This film really celebrates the graduating class of 2019, which is the last one from the "before times", I guess.  The Class of '20 ceremonies had to be held online in most cities and towns, which had to be a let-down.  No proms, either, except for virtual ones.  Eh, you kids didn't miss much. I spent my prom night on a golf driving range with my BFF, since we were both conscientious objectors at the time in the battle of the sexes.  At that point, it would still be another three years before I enlisted.  Much like the two lead characters in "Booksmart", I spent my high-school years trying to succeed at schoolwork, while avoiding P.E. as much as possible, but adding on school plays, clarinet and vocal groups.  Sure, I had high-school crushes, but with no idea how to act on them, I figured the best thing to do was to table that whole discussion.

Looking back, I think I can claim some form of high-school success.  Like, I knew I probably wouldn't be valedictorian, because I just didn't want to work that hard.  And by 11th grade the tougher math and science classes were starting to feel out of my reach, but I knew I was THE BEST at standardized tests that school had seen in a long while.  Something about doing crossword puzzles and trivia games for years made me good at taking tests, and how many people can honestly say they enjoyed taking the SAT's?  I figured that if I could just stay out of trouble, maintain a good GPA, maybe graduate in the top 10, I'd work the rest out in college.  See you guys at the reunion, I guess.

Nothing really gets done that last month of high-school, anyway - that's really what this film is about, being right on the edge of something, the next thing, when your college plans are set, finals are over, the graduation ceremony is coming up in a week, and everybody just wants to party.  It's a great time, but also a dangerous time, because you don't want to do something so crazy that you end up in jail, in the hospital, or with your heart broken.  (This film's plot may cover two of those three, but I'm not saying which...).

Friends Molly and Amy are straight-A students, and Molly's the valedictorian and preparing to attend Yale, but as both are getting ready for graduation, Molly has an encounter with some of the C-level students and learns that some of them are also planning to attend Ivy League schools, or go straight to high-paying coding jobs at Google.  Her reality is shaken, because she'd been operating under the illusion that there's only one path to success, and apparently she'd been unaware that it was also possible to have some fun in high-school.  To make up for lost time, and because they're in the "anything goes" last week of school, she and Amy plan to attend one of the final blow-out graduation parties.

Their crazy night actually takes them to THREE different parties, the sparsely-attended "rich kids" party (turns out it's also lonely at the top), the bizarre "murder-mystery" costume party put on by the kids in the drama club, and then the big house party at Nick's aunt's house.  I kind of have an issue here with all the stereotyping, because the film so easily falls back on simplistic groupings - all the kids in drama club are queer or queer-friendly, for example.  Which may be often true, but that doesn't mean that it's OK to over-simplify the high school cliques in a movie.  Plus,  I have to call a NITPICK POINT on the fact that the attendees of the first two parties also end up at the third party, just like Molly and Amy did.  What was the point of segmenting this high-school class into different social groups if we're going to bring them together at the end?  Would that even work, I mean, there was a reason that the drama club kids held their own party, because they felt the most comfortable together, right?  So why would they abandon all the activities they scheduled for their own party just to go to the big bash, where they probably wouldn't fit in?  I'm not sure the writer here understands how social grouping and parties work, you can't just switch the rules on and off.

On the positive side, not every character here is a cliché.  Amy's a complex character because she came out in the tenth grade, but so far has not had any experience, she hasn't acted on her feelings, or maybe just hasn't had the opportunity to do so.  She's got a crush on a skateboarder girl named Ryan, but isn't sure of Ryan's sexual preference, gender identity, or interest level.  There's a whole film right there, just someone balanced on the edge of taking that big step, but still unsure about the rules or what her success rate is going to be.  On one level it shouldn't be all that different than Molly's crush on class VP Nick, but yet somehow of course it is.  This is when I really don't envy today's teens, because it all seems like it's three times as complicated as it was when I was in high-school.  I couldn't really talk to girls just because I didn't understand them, so I just kept any feelings to myself.  These days some people are out and proud and occasionally transitioning, and I'd be way out of my depth.  I mean, if people are comfortable being gay or transgender or anywhere on the rainbow that's great for them, but at the same time I acknowledge how potentially complicated it all seems.  I'd have a few dozen questions that I wouldn't even feel confident asking.

I think I'll try to be kind in my scoring tonight, because there's a lot of good stuff here - like the message is good: do your best in school, but don't forget to have some fun, too.  Friendships and relationships are complicated, so navigate them as best as you can.  Then try to stay in touch with your high-school friends even if you're walking different roads as adults.  But it's the little things that are going to bug me, I think - like why was Molly unaware that other kids might make it into Ivy League schools?  Didn't her guidance counselors tell her that academic performance is only part of what the recruiters look at?  If another kid got, say, a sports scholarship to Stanford, that's just another person's path, right?  A brainiac like Molly would probably be aware that universities look at student's extracurricular activities, sports, volunteer work, etc.

Another NITPICK POINT, I thought it took Molly and Amy too long to figure out where the third party was - I mean, we've been told that these are two smart girls, right?  So why did it take so long for them to learn where Nick's aunt's house was.  Yes, of course, there was a piece of information that they didn't have, because not having it sent them on their journey to the other two parties, but still, a teen today would probably just jump on Facebook, check to see if Nick's friends with his aunt, and then once they have her name, they could just Google her address in that town.  Or, I don't know, maybe just find the house with all the party noise coming from it?  Or check the Instagram photos of the kids at the party and see if any of those photos have the location pinned?  With the use of modern technology I would imagine there would be many more simple solutions than "Hey, let's text everyone in class and hope that someone responds..."

In that sense, I guess any modern high-school movie is always going to feel like it's about 10 years behind the times, and that's because the people who direct high-school movies are probably in their late 20's or early 30's, if not older (yep, the director of "Booksmart" is Olivia Wilde, 35 at the time of its release).  To get a high-school film that really feels up-to-date, it would have to be directed by a teenager, right?

Also starring Beanie Feldstein (last seen in "Lady Bird"), Jessica Williams (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald"), Lisa Kudrow (last seen in "Happy Endings"), Will Forte (last heard in "The Willoughbys"), Jason Sudeikis (last heard in "The Angry Birds Movie 2"), Billie Lourd (last seen in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), Diana Silvers, Skyler Gisondo (last seen in "Vacation"), Molly Gordon (last seen in "Life of the Party"), Noah Galvin, Austin Crute, Victoria Ruesga, Eduardo Franco, Nico Hiraga, Mason Gooding, Mike O'Brien, Bluesy Burke, Christopher Avila, Stephanie Styles (last seen in "Bombshell"), Adam Simon Krist, Gideon Lang and the voice of Maya Rudolph (also last heard in "The Angry Birds Movie 2")

RATING: 6 out of 10 pizza boxes

Beautiful Boy

Year 12, Day 148 - 5/27/20 - Movie #3,553

BEFORE: I got out and about yesterday, my wife had to go into Manhattan for a minor medical thing, and I offered to go with her.  Of course, I didn't realize that the hospital wouldn't allow me to go in with her, but honestly, I was just happy to spend some time outside the house.  I sat on a bench in Union Square for an hour with a magazine or two, after walking into an OPEN Dunkin Donuts store and buying a large iced coffee from a real person, not through an app.  It was kind of weird.  I imagine that once we can sit in a restaurant again and order food to eat there, that's going to feel weird too.  But we used to do things like that all the time, right?

OK, last call for Timothée Chalamet, as he carries over from "The King".  Well, actually it's not, because he's also in another film on my secondary watchlist, but it's a Christmas movie, I think.  That would be ridiculous for me to watch that one here - I won't do it, not intentionally anyway.  But he's bound to be in a bunch more upcoming films, like the "Dune" remake, which is still scheduled for December.  Umm, we'll see.  I have a feeling that I'll be busy that day, or I'll run out of slots or something - meaning there's just an outside chance of me seeing that right away.

I've got more pressing concerns, because tonight I start my march toward Father's Day, and this film about the relationship between a father and his drug-addicted son is as good a place to kick it off as any.  I had a lot of choices this year for Father's Day films, and instead of saving some for next year, I'm just going to try to knock them all out and clear the category.  There are at least ten upcoming films that I'm fairly sure focus on fathers, and there are probably a bunch more that I didn't count on that will tie in somehow - mothers and fathers are all over any random bunch of movies, right?  Because every character has them, plus I've got some high-school/graduation films coming up, and all THOSE teen characters have parents, so this is bound to be easy.  Father's Day is June 21, almost a month away, but here we go...it's still National Mental Health Month, too, does drug addiction fall under that umbrella?

THE PLOT: Based on a pair of memoirs from father and son David and Nic Sheff, this chronicles the heartbreaking and inspiring experiences of survival, relapse and recovery in a family coping with addiction over many years.

AFTER: I'm probably about as equally qualified to comment on the raising of a teenager as I am to comment on the topic of gay romance, which is to say, not qualified at all.  Sure, I've seen other people go through it, but I've never been involved with teens first-hand.  I watched my younger cousin ruin/enhance Christmas one year by telling his parents that he'd been drinking, doing drugs and having sex, which I think is the teenage trifecta.  My uncle was most concerned about some of his collectibles in his liquor cabinet, which he figured were probably at least 50% water or iced tea at that point.  (Pro tip - monitoring the liquid levels doesn't work.).  My cousin now has three young kids who he sees only on the weekends, so in about 8 or 10 years he's probably going to realize what a bitch karma is.

Again, I'm not an expert, but I'm fairly sure that being the "cool dad" and sharing a joint with your son is the wrong way to go.  On the other hand, "Just say no" doesn't really work either, because teens all have to find out for themselves what drugs they can and can't handle, and sometimes the only way through it is to do it.  And come on, if they're not going to experiment in their teen years then they'll get to it during college, right?  I don't have all the answers, but neither did David Sheff.

There's a ton of time-jumping here, and flashbacks within flashbacks - but this is not appropriate for a rehab story, because we, the audience, need to walk that journey with Nic, we can't just flash back to a tender incident from childhood when things get rough, we need to be in the moment with him, feeling the effects of the addiction.  If there's a long, boring recovery period in a facility, we need to feel that too.  And if there's a relapse or a setback, or some other bad news or tense times, we should be right there with him, instead of cutting way to something else.

It also messes with the cause and effect, which is crucial to a story such as this.  Nic takes drugs, there are consequences, he's missing for the night.  If he comes back home, then there are other consequences, it strains the relationship with his father and step-mother - there needs to be a proper order to things so we can follow him on his journey toward sobriety.  Or relapse, if that's where his path should take him.  The ups and downs of this journey are important, and shuffling them around like this just confuses the issue - you can't follow a good day with a bad day without some kind of explanation how we got from there to here.

Worse, there's unnecessary duplication - we see David Sheff at the start of the film, asking some basic questions about the nature of drug addiction from someone unseen.  Then the film zips back to "One Year Earlier", but then this is the last title card we'll see with any kind of time-frame reference.  Look, if you're going to have title cards to show the passage of time, either do it for the WHOLE movie, or not at all.  Then shortly after going back "One Year Earlier", to a night when Nic didn't come home, his father starts having a flashback about putting him to bed when he was a small boy.  So just a few minutes in, there are flashbacks-within-flashbacks.  And you know how much I hate those.

The film then has to circle back to the starting point, to show us that conversation again, only the second time we find out who Mr. Sheff is talking to, and why.  It's one of the few reference points on the film's timeline that we have, except for the occasional mention of how many days sober Nic has under his belt, but often the scene that references that number is followed by a relapse, and again, it would be great to know for sure if the relapse that follows the meeting does in fact follow right after, or whether we've jumped around in time once again.  (So, DOES he have 485 days sober, or not?  It's tough to tell if the character is really going to a meeting when he says that's where he's going, or if he's going out to score again.  There are several times when he's seen driving while high, and that's why we need a proper framework and a linear time-table, so we can all get on the same page.)

This is all a trick to make me watch the film a second time, right?  So I can properly figure out when everything depicted happened?  Well, I'm not falling for that.  According to the trivia section on IMDB, the editing here took 7 months, and was completely re-cut multiple times.  That means, I suspect, that it was originally edited in proper chronological order, and for some reason, just didn't work.  Either there were parts that seemed too depressing, or there wasn't enough dramatic tension by someone's standards.  This supports my theory that the "randomizer" approach to storytelling is rarely justified artistically, and is most often used to cover perceived imperfections in a movie's story arc or pacing.

Another mistake was casting two young women who greatly resembled each other to play two separate love interests, Julia (the college girlfriend) and Lauren (the, um, post-college "break year" girlfriend?).  Maybe this was my error, but I could have sworn they were the same character, and after I read the plot outline on Wikipedia did I realize they were two different girls.  OK, maybe Nic had a "type", but a casting director still needs to make sure that two actresses don't resemble each other so closely, because that creates even more confusion in an already confusing non-linear timeline.  The opposite problem occured with the three other actors cast to play Nic at different ages - 5, 8 and 12.  For the most part I could believe that those young boys grew up to look like the 18-year old Nic, with one notable exception.

Look, I don't have all the answers here, but then, neither do the main characters.  If rehab doesn't work, and trusting your teen to get help and go to meetings doesn't work, and getting your other family members to help show support or stage an intervention doesn't work, maybe sometimes you do have to write off a troubled teen and hope they find their own way back to sobriety.  If you give them money and it turns out they're not using that money constructively, then it may make sense to cut them off - which simply has to be tough to do.  This turned out to be a very complicated issue with no clear solution, so while I'm comfortable taking points off for all the problems that resulted from a non-linear presentation, I'm willing to give one back for handing a complex problem without getting overly preachy or simplistic.

Also starring Steve Carell (last seen in "Last Flag Flying"), Maura Tierney (last seen in "The Report"), Amy Ryan (last seen in "Late Night"), Kaitlyn Dever (last seen in "We Don't Belong Here"), Andre Royo (last seen in "The Spectacular Now"), Timothy Hutton (last seen in "All the Money in the World"), Amy Aquino (last seen in "In Good Company"), LisaGay Hamilton (last seen in "Ad Astra"), Amy Forsyth, Christian Convery, Oakley Bull, Carlee Maciel, Jack Dylan Grazer (last seen in "Shazam!"), Zachary Rifkin, Kue Lawrence, Stefanie Scott (last seen in "No Strings Attached"), Ricky Low.

RATING: 5 out of 10 disturbing drawings

The King

Year 12, Day 147 - 5/26/20 - Movie #3,552

BEFORE: Timothée Chalamet carries over from "Call Me by Your Name", and what's up with this kid, anyway?  One July day in 2018 I was watching "Hostiles" and saying, "Hey, isn't that the kid that was in "Lady Bird"?  Yep, I think it is."  Fast forward a year or two, and suddenly he's in three films in a row, and four this year.  By my calculations, if I project forward from here, statistically this means that next year he's going to be in every film set to be released.  (It's just math, you can't argue with it.).  Maybe the filming slowdown caused by the pandemic will affect this, or maybe it will still happen, there's no way to tell.

Seriously, though, it's like he's the new Leonardo DiCaprio or something - remember that time when it seemed like Leo was in every movie.  (I just checked Leo's IMDB page, I guess this didn't really happen, after "Titanic" he was never in more than two big films in any calendar year, but they were always BIG ONES, so it just kind of felt like he was everywhere.). Maybe Nicolas Cage is a better example, that guy would take any acting job there for a while, 5 or 6 releases a year - but then, the analogy doesn't work because he's much older.  It'll come to me, just give it some time.  Chalamet was even in the most recent Woody Allen film, "A Rainy Day in New York", and Woody's one of those directors that I like to keep current on, like the Coen brothers - if I find out there's one of theirs I haven't seen, it goes right to the wish list.  Only nobody's showing "A Rainy Day in New York", none of the streaming services, so either it's terrible, or Woody's still being blacklisted for marrying his daughter and other allegations, it's tough to tell.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Henry V" (Movie #2,004)

THE PLOT: Hal, wayward prince and heir to the English throne, is crowned King Henry V after his tyrannical father dies.  Now the young king must navigate palace politics, the war his father left behind, and the emotional strings of his past life.

AFTER: Robert Pattinson, that's it!  Timothée Chalamet is like the new Robert Pattinson!  Remember a couple years after the "Twilight" movies came out, when it felt like Robert Pattinson was the flavor of the month, and he was in every movie, like, umm, "Water for Elephants" and, uh, "Maps to the Stars"?  "Queen of the Desert"?  "The Lost City of Z"?  Now I feel like I'm maybe the only person who watched all of those movies, and I still have yet to watch the "Twilight" films.  This October, I swear, they're on the list.  But with Pattinson playing the French "dauphin" (prince) here, and facing off against Chalamet's Henry V, it sort of felt a bit like he was handing off the "dark moody teenager in every movie" mantle.  Don't worry for Pattinson, it's his turn to be Batman next, so I think he's going to be fine.

I did a whole chain last year on British kings and queens (and a couple kings that were queens, if you know what I mean...).  I covered Robert the Bruce, Mary Queen of Scots, Queen Anne, Queen Victoria (if you count her comic appearance in "Holmes & Watson"), plus Edward VIII and George VI in "W.E."  Then in January of this year I got back to Queen Victoria in "The Young Victoria".  What's odd is that I see now where this film could have slid easily into last year's chain, right between "King Arthur" and "Robin Hood", which is a connection I made with the film "Darkest Hour".  I'm going to defend myself by saying that this film probably wasn't available at the time, since it wasn't released until November.  However, it could also have linked to "The Young Victoria" in January, via Tom Fisher.  I guess I either missed that connection, or figured it would have messed with my plans. Yeah, that's it, let's go with that.

What a difference 66 years makes - the last version of this story that I watched was the 1944 version directed by Laurence Olivier, which came straight from the Shakespeare version.  I just went back and read my review and I was struck back then with how many soldiers were wearing leotards and funny hats on the field of battle, which didn't make much sense strategically, and probably came from the stagings of Shakespeare's play that were being done at the time.  In this film, the soldiers wear armor, real metal armor, and it's heavy and makes it hard for some of them to move around.  But that's significant, and it factors into the strategy of the Battle of Agincourt.  Which, I remember my history teachers telling me, was won by the British at least in part because of the invention of the longbow.  Long-range weapons turned the tide...

But there's more to the story here, Henry V's military adviser, John Falstaff (I think he was another character drawn from Shakespeare, and not historical events) believes that it will rain the night before the battle, and the soldiers wearing heavy armor and riding horses will get stuck in the mud, and they could be easily taken down by soldiers flanking them from both sides who are NOT wearing heavy armor.  A small English force wearing armor could be sent out to lure all the French soldiers on to the battlefield, at which time the longbows could be shot from afar, then the non-armor wearing men could swoop in, stick and move, and take down the French while they're knee-deep in mud.  Looks good on paper, anyway.

This is more or less how it went down, at least when compared to the battle record that's on Wikipedia.  It was definitely muddy, the Frenchmen were in hevay armor and were exhausted by the time they reached the English ranks, and for some reason the French army had put their own archers at the rear of their forces, which doesn't seem like a good idea, especially if they didn't have the same longbows as the English did.  And those English archers were the ones who rushed in to fight hand-to-hand without armor, after they launched those initial arrows.  The French started with more soldiers (some accounts say 12,000 to England's 9,000) but suffered many more casualties, at least 6,000 (Shakespeare said 10,000) to England's 112.  It wasn't even close.

There's an alternate theory proposed here regarding the justification for the Battle of Agincourt - allegedly there's a claim that the French sent an assassin to kill Henry V, and this prompts Henry to invade France with an army and this led to the Siege of Harfleur in Normandy, precursor to Agincourt.  But later, when Henry returns to England with his new princess bride Catherine, she claims her father would never have the nerve an assassin, and her brother the Dauphin would be too stupid to think of it.  So, assuming Catherine's telling the truth, who did send the assassin?  Was Henry ever in any real danger from an assassin at all?  In this telling of the tale, Henry decides to follow the money and find out who might benefit from a war with France, and this part may be a bit controversial to some historians.  Did this also come from Shakespeare, I wonder, or is it a more modern addition to the story? According to what I just read, Henry V did not retain the same advisers his father did, which makes sense if he was trying to be a different kind of king.  Advance question for Father's Day, don't we all try to be better, or at least different from our fathers, only to find out later that in some ways we've turned out exactly the same?

Also starring Joel Edgerton (last seen in "King Arthur"), Robert Pattinson (last seen in "The Lost City of Z"), Sean Harris (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - Fallout"), Thomasin McKenzie (last seen in "The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies"), Ben Mendelsohn (last seen in "Robin Hood"), Tom Glynn-Carney (last seen in "Tolkien"), Lily-Rose Depp (last seen in "Yoga Hosers"), Dean-Charles Chapman (last seen in "1917"), Thibault de Montalembert (last seen in "Jefferson in Paris"), Edward Ashley (also last seen in "The Lost City of Z"), Stephen Fewell, Tara Fitzgerald (last seen in "Legend"), Andrew Havill (last seen in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), Tom Fisher (last seen in "The Young Victoria"), Ivan Kaye (last seen in "Layer Cake"), Steven Elder, Philip Rosch, Tom Lacroix, Jeremy Chevillotte, Tom Lawrence, Lucas Hansen, Vincent Latorre, Harry Trevaldwyn.

RATING: 6 out of 10 coronation gifts

Call Me by Your Name

Year 12, Day 146 - 5/25/20 - Movie #3,551

BEFORE: Here I go, kicking off the second half of the year with the re-scheduled Timothée Chalamet trilogy that was originally going to connect "Little Women" with "On the Basis of Sex" (before I figured out another way to do that in ONE film instead of three), but before that I was going to watch it in 2018, only I had trouble playing an Academy screener.  It's funny how things work out sometimes, who knows - maybe if I had watched this in 2018 as planned, then I'd be stuck here without a connection to move me forward, and my chain would come to an end.  Let's not even think about that, it's too horrible.

But really, it's the year of the re-schedule, right?  These days if something isn't being held virtually on-line, then it's not happening or being re-scheduled.  We're going to all spend the whole summer watching re-scheduled events like the Kentucky Derby and NASCAR races and baseball games, plus the spring blockbuster movies that didn't get released and that new season of "Fargo" if they can finish filming it.  Weddings, funerals, elective surgeries, all I can think about is how busy everyone's going to be after nearly three months of lockdown.  Who's going to have time to go to the beach or have a drink in a bar, somebody's got to do the accounting from April and hey, don't you have a tax return to file?  And what about that dental appointment or your kid's vaccination schedule, which is probably more important than ever now - we don't want measles and mumps to make a comeback just because Covid-19 slowed us down.

Anyway, my lead-in is different but I'm finally clearing this one off my schedule on the third attempt. Michael Stuhlbarg carries over from "A Serious Man" - in September 2017 I watched four films in a row with Michael Stuhlbarg in them (and a total of 7 for the year) - "Pawn Sacrifice", "Miles Ahead", "Arrival" and "Trumbo".  As far as I know, I may hold the record, but he's been in a fair number of films, so perhaps not.  Still, I'm not aware of anybody else out there doing what I do the way I do it, so I like my chances.

THE PLOT: In 1980's Italy, romance blossoms between a seventeen-year-old student and the older man hired as his father's research assistant.

AFTER: Well, maybe you could say I've been avoiding this one, because it puts me a bit out of my comfort zone - but I've been known to watch a gay romance or two in February, I watched "Jenny's Wedding", didn't I?  I should be comfortable enough in my own orientation to allow this sort of thing in the countdown.  I was raised hardcore Catholic, but gay marriage is the law of the land now, I've known plenty of gay people, so even though this isn't my thing I still can watch it in a movie.  I've watched plenty of movies that don't relate directly to my own experiences, like boxing movies and football movies, like sports, it's just another lifestyle that's out there that doesn't directly figure in to my everyday life - not since the divorce, anyway.  My ex retained all the LGBTQ (and sometimes Y) friends.  JK.

I managed to have this film on the list for TWO full years without anyone spoiling the details of "that" scene - only to have somebody crack a joke about it the DAY BEFORE I watched it.  So if you haven't seen this and you don't want to know about "that scene", then spoiler alert, please turn back now.  Like a secret same-sex attraction, it's probably going to come up at some point.

June is the season for Pride Month, right?  So I'm a few days early, but let's consider it a trilogy, with "Chuck & Buck" on one side and another gay-romance film on the other.  Only one of them will be scheduled during the correct month, but that's something, anyway.  The three films didn't link together, so there's about two weeks of bridging material between them, but for my purposes, that's still considered a working trilogy.  June is mostly going to be about Fathers Day, I'm going to double-check my links today - with a couple school-based films thrown in it's going to mostly be about Dads and grads, and I'll work in one more queer film for Pride Month.

All that being said, I don't think I "get" this film.  Maybe I'm not supposed to "get" this film - the emotional issues are very complex, I think, or maybe I'm missing something, because the actions don't always line up with the emotions, at least on some level.  If this teen boy has an attraction to this older man, that's OK, but then why does he act in that certain way?  You know, like he's disinterested or dismissive to this person that he's attracted to?  Is Elio in denial, or does he not yet understand what to do with the feelings that he has?  Is this a case where two people just can't seem to get on the same page for a long time, because it's awkward or because they're trying to hide from an unaccepting world, or because they accidentally sent each other the wrong signals?  Maybe if you want the straights out there to understand the plot, you've got to dumb it down for us?  Is the director being subtle or enigmatic or just plain "arty"?  I don't think I can tell the difference here.

I'm just going to ask the questions, even if that makes me seem dumb to some degree - if these two men are attracted to each other, why do they both date or fool around with women?  I'd expect Oliver to be more comfortable with his orientation because he's older, I can imagine that Elio hasn't really had time to figure everything out, so what gives, what am I missing?  Are they gay or bi-sexual, or just as confused as everyone else was in the 1980's?  Oliver dances with women at the nightly town get-togethers in the Italian square, and Elio goes swimming with a local girl and has a pretty heavy make-out session with her.  Of course, these incidents are nothing compares to what happens when the two men get together, but I'm still left sort of scratching my head.  If the gay sex and the relationship between the two men means so much, why doesn't it mean everything?

I'm trying my best to remember what the prevailing attitude was in the 1980's - it's possible that across the board, there was this belief or attitude that a gay relationship was not sustainable over a long period of time.  To a large degree, this was a fallacy based on a negative stereotype, but it persisted even within the gay community.  Remember, gay marriage was impossible, and a long-term exclusive gay relationship was like an albino elephant or something - you could probably find one if you looked long enough, but many gay people didn't believe it would even happen to them, so why even get their hopes up?  And thus it became a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy - well, why wish for what you can't have?  Might as well party like it's 1999, then...

Still, what's up here, was Elio experimenting with girls out of curiosity, a general interest, or just trying to keep his options open?  I guess if you're 17 and horny, you'll do just about anything, including pieces of fruit if you live near a peach orchard and there are more peaches than you know what to do with.  Hey, peaches are sexy, I get it - we've got a diner here in Queens NY that has a giant halved peach on its neon sign, and once you look at it a certain way, there's no going back.  (It's not called the "Vaginer Diner", but it might as well be.).   I guess in some ways it's a natural progression  from "American Pie" (apples) to "Girls Trip" (grapefruit) to where we find ourselves now.  So far it's been all about where men have been putting their things, but you know somebody in Hollywood is pitching bananas as a plot point, only to be told that sex with fruit is "so 2017".

I don't even really get the "Call Me by Your Name" bit - if you want to have a nickname for your lover, that's one thing, but isn't it just too confusing when that nickname is your own name?  Call me old-fashioned, but what happened to "pookie" or "sweetie" or "hot stuff"?  Is this some kind of ego-trip that allows somebody to call out their own name during sex and get away with it?  It feels a bit more like some actor accidentally called another character by the wrong name and then the story had to bend itself over backwards to explain why that wasn't a mistake.  But I know that can't possibly be the case here.

I guess what's universal here is the feeling of happiness and fulfillment that a romance can bring, and the depression and withdrawal that its absence can cause when it's over.  Everything ends, only it can be difficult for younger people to be aware of that going in, and the first cut is the deepest, right?  But if we can step outside ourselves for just a minute then everything we endure is just another experience we had, and the good news is that collectively we're all moving forward, and each generation might have a little easier time of things if we're doing it right.  Am I getting close to something, or did I completely miss the mark here?

It was driving me crazy listening to Armie Hammer, thinking that his voice reminded me of somebody else, only I couldn't quite place it.  He really tends to sound like he's narrating a car commercial most of the time.  But I googled to see if anybody else had thoughts about his voice, and someone else pointed out that his vocal twin is Jon Hamm.  That's it!  Armie Hammer sounds as if Jon Hamm just had a cup of hot tea with honey to get rid of a bit of the scratchiness.  What a relief, I'm not crazy.  Not for that reason, anyway.

This film is still on that list of "1,001 Movies To See Before You Die" - so update the big board, I've now seen 427 of them, with another 9 still on the watchlist, and I should get to one more of them before the end of May.  One is scheduled for October, plus I can knock off three more if I can get to my Ingmar Bergman chain in late 2020 or early 2021.

Also starring Armie Hammer (last seen in "On the Basis of Sex"), Timothée Chalamet (last seen in "Little Women"), Amira Casar (last seen in "At Eternity's Gate"), Esther Garrel, Victoire Du Bois, Vanda Capriolo, Antonio Rimoldi, Elena Bucci, Marco Sgrosso, Andre Aciman, Peter Spears (last seen in "Something's Gotta Give")

RATING: 5 out of 10 pairs of cutoff jean shorts

A Serious Man

Year 12, Day 145 - 5/24/20 - Movie #3,550

BEFORE: This Richard Kind trilogy comes to an end today as he carries over from "The Last Laugh", but it leads right in to the Timothee Chalamet trilogy that's been re-scheduled from April.  This has really been the year of the re-schedule in many ways, I had three animated films from January that found a new home in May, and now I'm re-scheduling "The Laundromat" for July, where I think it will play a key role.  To some degree this is always on-going, like any romance or horror films I don't get to each October or February just roll over - and really, every movie on the list rolls over every day I don't get to it, but there really have been some KEY re-schedulings this year.  Tomorrow's film is not just a re-schedule from April, but it's been re-scheduled at least twice, I think I had plans to watch it next to "Lady Bird" in 2018, and that didn't work out because an Academy screener wouldn't play.  So it went back on the watchlist, to slowly rise to the top again.  That film finally gets another chance tomorrow.

But I've reached the halfway point for 2020, the year that for many reasons, can't end soon enough.  Strangely, though the end of the year is already in sight, mathematically at least.  I've got a path that gets me to the end of July, thanks to my recently tacked-on documentary chain for the year.  Figure June, July and the pre-programmed October are 30 days each, that's 90 slots out of the second 150 that are already filled!  Just 60 left to program, and that's just 20% of 2020's 300 slots!  So if I stick to my schedule, I'm 80% of the way there!  Now, there's a bit more work that needs to be done, I still need to link from the last documentary to the first film in the horror chain, but given how many options I have, I should be able to come up with a path that takes (ideally) from 45 to 50 steps, so I'll have some room to play with in November/December, maybe work in a holiday film.  That's all that stands between me and another Perfect Year, well, that and Frank Welker's uncredited leopard/panther noises.

THE PLOT: Larry Gopnik, a Midwestern physics teacher, watches his life unravel over multiple sudden incidents.  Though seeking meaning and answers amidst his turmoils, he seems to keep sinking.

AFTER: You don't have to be Jewish to get this film, but it might help.  It couldn't hurt. The difference between the religions was highlighted for me earlier this week in a comedy special, when Lewis Black told Christians that they really should stop reading the Old Testament. ("That's OUR book!", he yelled. Christians get the "new" Testament with the kinder, gentler God, and started calling that other part of the Bible the "old" part.  Very forward of them.).  I guess collectively we create the religion that's going to meet our needs and help us get through the day, even if we don't realize that's what we're doing.  It's true, Christians don't really deal with a vengeful God very well, just look at how the evangelicals have blamed hurricanes on the acceptance of homosexuality, or similar misinterpretations of cause and effect.  Just because there's something out there in the world that YOU don't like, and then a disaster or tragedy happens, that does not mean that the two headlines are related.

So what am I to make of the trials and tribulations of a physics professor in the 1960's who's dealing with a lot of problems in his personal life?  His wife has been seeing another man and is asking him for a "get", a ritualistic divorce that will enable her to get re-married within the faith, and his screwed-up brother who's working on some kind of universal math probability formula has moved in with him, and he seems to always be in the bathroom draining a cyst (you get one guess regarding which role's played by Richard Kind).  His son's in trouble at school, doing drugs and always complaining about the TV antenna getting poor reception, his daughter's always going out with her friends, he's up for tenure at the college in a couple weeks, but somebody's sending anonymous letters to the school administration accusing him of committing lurid acts, and one Korean student who's failing his class is trying to bribe him for a passing grade.

It's a lot to deal with, and of course it brings to mind the Book of Job.  And it's not my first movie this year to do so, remember "The Tree of Life"?   It seems some screenwriters just love putting their characters under great quantities of pressure, as if they're lumps of coal that may turn into diamonds, given enough pressure and time.  Umm, it doesn't always happen, but I acknowledge the technique.  There's also the angle I've noticed where many of the tragic or stressful events that befall the main character come from somebody's real life, whether that's a stand-up comic or Louisa May Alcott, personal experience often seems to be one of the strongest inspirations.  Sometimes it's just a matter of figuring out WHO some of these things happened to in the real world, and that person's connection to a film's writer or director, in order to gain a little insight.  So, was this a very personal film for the Coen Brothers to make, and if so, why does this one seem to be part of their minor arcana, and not mentioned with the same reverence as "Raising Arizona", "Fargo", "The Big Lebowski", or even "O Brother, Where Art Thou"?

Sure, the Coens were raised in a Jewish household in a suburb of Minneapolis, and their father was a college professor, but in economics, not physics.  As for any problems in the relationship between their parents, there doesn't seem to be much information available.  But perhaps this is a pastiche about growing up Jewish in America, and draws from many stories and sources, and not actual events.  There are a couple stories here told by rabbis that come off like modern-day parables, the film even opens with one about a dybbuk, which is a malicious spirit that may be the dislocated soul of a dead person, inhabiting a new body in order to accomplish some goal in the human world.  (I had to look this one up.). But it's hard to say exactly what connection the opening dybbuk parable has to the main story.  Is there a dybbuk that's visiting Larry Gopnik's life, causing all his problems?  If so, who is it - Uncle Arthur?  Sy Ableman?  That Korean student?

I'm also struggling with a few other things - who is the "Serious Man" referred to in the title - is it Larry himself?  Or is it Sy Ableman, who was called a "serious man" at one point, and he also calls himself one in Larry's dream about him.  We see a few of Larry's stress dreams during this film, only they're not revealed to BE dreams at first, so each time the audience thinks those events are real, at least until they see Larry waking up with a start.  Yeah, they pulled this trick a few too many times here, kind of like somebody else did in "We Don't Belong Here".  If you go back to this well too many times it starts to create the feeling that maybe nothing is real, like this is a fiction film created by a couple of writers and directors.  Which it IS, of course, only I'd rather not be aware of that during the course of the film.  Hey, maybe there is no reality, and I'm just a character in somebody else's film. Well, I am sitting in front of a computer typing right now, and that's something you see all the time in the movies.  So there you go, nothing's real and I don't exist, the end.

Larry references the physics problems of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and also Schrodinger's Cat, which is kind of like a parable on its own.  If you don't know it, it's a thought experiment where a cat is placed in a box with a container of deadly poison gas, and a radioactive material that emits particles on a semi-regular timed basis, so within a certain period of time, one would expect that material to release a particle, break the container of gas, and kill the cat.  But until you open the box to check on the health of the cat, one might say the cat is neither alive nor dead, and this illustrates the quantum nature of certain particles, which are neither one thing nor the other until you examine them.  Larry's problem with the Korean student is that he understands the physics, but not the math that supports them, while Larry maintains that if you don't understand math, then you can't understand physics.  NITPICK POINT here, I wasn't aware that there was any math problem associated with the Schrodinger's cat problem, plus - an Asian kid that can't do math?  Seems  a bit unlikely.

Larry makes it clear to the student - actions have consequences.  You can't bribe your physics teacher and expect there to not be consequences.  Is this the message of the film?  I'm not sure.  There are consequences all over the place - Larry has his brother move in, there are consequences.  Larry's wife starts dating Sy, there are consequences.  Larry's son listens to Jefferson Airplane during class, and this sets off a bunch of consequences.  There's a bit with the Columbia Record Club, which Larry's son joined at some point, and there are consquences - a bill collector starts calling Larry at work, asking him to pay for Santana's "Abraxas" album, which was the selection of the month, and Larry knows nothing about ordering this album, or joining the record club in the first place.

Let me back up a bit, because this may give some insight about the relationship between actions and consequences.  This was a real record club that you could join back in the 1960's to, umm, late 1980's?  I fell for this "scam" myself at some point - for 1 cent you could join the Columbia Record (and Tape?) club, and you'd get 10 or 12 albums of your choice for that penny.  Great deal, right?  Only when you joined the club, you'd automatically get the album of the month mailed to you, at full retail price plus shipping and handling, unless you specifically mailed back the little reply card saying that you DIDN'T want this month's selection.  You could choose to order nothing that month, or get some cassettes or CDs that were NOT the main selection, but the burden was on the customer to reply in time to STOP the automatic shipment if they didn't want that album.  Because there was such a tight window, this often meant that if you didn't reply when you first got the card, you'd get stuck with paying for an album you didn't want.  Oh, sure, there was a return policy, but that meant paying for postage to mail it back - if I was a bit late returning that reply card, I found it was easier to just dump the package back in a mailbox when it arrived, because once it was opened the post office was less likely to honor a "return to sender" request, even though it came in a postage-paid box.

So from this new propoesed "Columbia Record Club" physics thought experiment, we learn that not only do actions have consequences, but also INACTIONS have consequences.  Wow, this is a revelation, seriously.  You can affect the future by doing NOTHING sometimes - so maybe Larry's marriage was crumbling due to some kind of inaction on his part, or his kids were out of control due to some lack of attention or supervision. (In a Jewish household?  Again, not likely.)  And though I can't prove it just yet, the next most logical assumption is that sometimes actions and consequences are not related at all.  We can, again very coincidentally, apply this reasoning to the current pandemic.  Somebody in Wuhan province sells a bat in a meat market, and a virus starts to spread.  People get sick, they go about their business, they interact with each other, and they spread the disease.  Actions have consequences.

Other people in other parts of the world hear the news, and they fail to properly set up systems that would detect and trace the disease.  They fail to stock up on personal protective equipment, they fail to put any systems in place at the airport to scan passengers arriving from other countries.  Nobody thinks it can happen here, so they don't enact policies for social distancing and wearing face-masks until the pandemic is right in their backyard.  So, inactions have consequences.  And now we're headed into the unknown again by re-opening businesses and setting timetables for getting things like beaches, casinos, malls and theme parks back to normal, as if the virus is on our call-list and willing to adhere to our schedule, which is just ridiculous.  We can't see the virus, you dunderheads, so there will be no way of knowing which of our actions, if any, are being effective and which aren't.  There's going to be this enormous gray area after people start socializing again - like "I went to the beach and I didn't wear a face-mask, and I didn't get sick, so therefore I don't need a mask any more."  Which would be a fine example of fuzzy logic not working very well.  Past performance is just not a good enough indicator of future results.

Actions have consequences.  Inactions have other consequences.  And sometimes, actions and consequences are not related at all, but our minds conflate them when they appear to happen in sequence or in close proximity.  Larry has a car accident.  Sy also has a car accident, on the same day at the same time but in a different location.  One man is fine, the other man is injured.  What's the connection?  Possibly none at all, other than the fact that I mentioned them in the same sentence, and then by asking "What's the connection?" I implied that there WAS one.  And maybe that's how religion works.  If you follow the rules, be excellent to each other, you may get rewarded in the next world - or maybe not, nobody really knows for sure.  One way of thinking says your afterlife is going to be super-duper, another way of thinking is that you'll be just as dead and gone as the next guy.  Congratulations, you are Schrodinger's Cat, only nobody's going to be opening up the box to check on you.

But still, there's the message that being neighborly is particularly relevant during these troubled times.  After we make sure that we're each healthy and we have what we need to get by, it's a good time to check in on someone else, and get them what they need if you can.  Volunteer, donate blood, donate food or just your time, in addition to being a mitzvah it will give you something to do to help pass the time.  Don't even think about the next world, because there are people right here in this one that need some help now.  Will it help you to help others?  Well, it couldn't hurt. (unless you forget to wear your facemask.  Stay safe.)

Also starring Michael Stuhlbarg (last seen in "The Shape of Water"), Sari Lennick (last seen in "Café Society"), Fred Melamed (last seen in "The Spy Who Dumped Me"), Aaron Wolff, Jessica McManus, Alan Mandell (last seen in "Velvet Buzzsaw"), Adam Arkin (last seen in "Hitch"), George Wyner (last seen in "The Long Goodbye"), Amy Landecker (last seen in "Bombshell"), Katherine Borowitz, Allen Lewis Rickman (last seen in "You Don't Know Jack"), Yelena Shmulenson, Fyvush Finkel (last seen in "If You're Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast"), Simon Helberg (last seen in "Florence Foster Jenkins"), Michael Lerner (last seen in "The Postman Always Rings Twice"), David Kang, Steve Park (last seen in "Phil Spector"), Ari Hoptman, Peter Breitmayer (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them"), Jon Kaminski Jr.

RATING: 5 out of 10 mezuzahs