The Wife

Year 12, Day 248 - 9/4/20 - Movie #3,645

BEFORE: These days I've got so much time on my hands that watching a movie each day is very easy, and writing about it isn't that much of a struggle, either - since I'm still not back to work full time.  It's harder for me when I have to skip a day - I've got 22 films to spread out among the 30 days of September, for example.  So, no more than 5 or 6 a week, unless I want to have a big gap at the end of the month.

I took a look ahead at the schedule, and there's one film coming up that seems like it wants to be on Labor Day - but that meant watching only two movies in four days, just to get that one to land on Monday - so no movie yesterday, and no movie tomorrow.  Guess I can always watch 4 episodes of "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee" instead, and come closer to getting one more TV series off my list.

Glenn Close carries over from "Cookie's Fortune".  I forgot that she appeared a few times earlier this year, like in "Tarzan 2" as the voice of a gorilla.  She's a pretty late entry vying for the top spot this year, but I don't think she can win it.  She still might make the top ten, though, when I add up her earlier appearances with this chain of four of her films in September.

THE PLOT: A wife questions her life choices as she travels to Stockholm to see her husband receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.

AFTER: I took this film (and the two other Glenn Close films coming after it) out of the February line-up, because the linking demanded it - I needed material to help connect the back-to-school films, since they weren't connecting to each other.  Relationship-driven films like this one could have a place during February's romance chain, because even a film that depicts two people on the verge of a break-up is still a valid topic to explore - "romance" is just code for "relationships" in some ways, so this could have counted as a February film, but you know what?  I've got a ton of romance/relationship films, in September I'm focused more on preserving the chain with solid links.  I didn't link 8 months of films together this year just to allow the chain to be broken in early September, not with this year's horror chain coming up in just a few weeks.

I suppose I could have saved "Cookie's Fortune" to be the outro from the romance chain, but everything here in this month, right now, is serving a purpose, even if the movies are terrible - the chain is telling me what to watch, and every day I get closer to the end of regulation play 2020.  I'll have plenty of time in November and December to review the damage done to February 2021's romance chain, plus the hole I created by removing three films, and see if there's still a good plan to make a connected chain with whatever's left.  But that's a concern for another day, and I've got to get there first.

The title character here is Joan Castleman, whose husband, Joe, has just been chosen for a Nobel - and if the film had just concerned itself with an insider's look at that process, that might have been enough.  You have to travel to Sweden, you have to participate in a ceremony where you have to bow several times, and then you have to give an acceptance speech in a separate ceremony - unless you're Bob Dylan, in which case you can decline to participate but still get the honors anyway.  The Castlemans bring along their son, David, who's just starting his own writing career, and like many people, the son doesn't always see eye to eye with his parents, because they just can't help being that specific mix of supportive and critical over his life choices.  David can't get a straight review of his own work from his father, not without a few overly honest criticisms, and several "When I was starting out as a writer..." anecdotes.  That right there would be enough to make me choose a different profession as my parents - David's at that difficult age where he finds his parents super-annoying, which is really any age.

At some point, the film starts the flashback sequences (ah, I should have known there would be a catch) that go back to show us how Joe and Joan met, and it turns out that he was her college professor, at a time when he was married to the first Mrs. Castleman, and Joan baby-sat for the couple.  But slowly she worked her way into Joe's life, and by the time we get to the second set of flashbacks, Joe's lost his teaching gig (probably for having an affair with a student) as well as his marriage (umm, same reason) and so it's "publish or perish", as they say.  Joan has a secretarial job at a publishing house, and overhears one executive saying that they need a good Jewish writer, like the other publishers do, so she steps forward to suggest Joe.  But Joe's novel needs a lot of polish, so she steps in as a sort of "ghost editor".

Meanwhile, back in the present (which isn't the right use of "meanwhile", I know...) a younger writer has traveled to Stockholm to convince the Castlemans to let him write the definitive biography on Joe, and when Joe turns him down flat, he targets Joan instead.  He reveals that he knows about Joe's many affairs, then puts forth the theory that maybe Joe isn't the great writer that everyone believes him to be, and perhaps the real writer of all those novels is someone hiding in plain sight.  Gradually through toggling between the two advancing timelines (sort of a similar structure to "Wonderstruck" here) we're brought to the conclusion that the young writer could be right - this could explain why Joan has specifically asked to not be thanked or even referenced in Joe's Nobel acceptance speech.

The problem here, I think, is that assuming the theory is true, that Joe's nothing more than a figurehead, while Joan's the true creative genius, there's not a real explanation given here for the decades-long deception.  Why, exactly, was this necessary?  Was the patriarchy so powerful in the 1950's that a book by a male author would get published and one by a female author wouldn't?  That can't be true, because Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, and Agatha Christie all managed somehow.  Or was there specifically a bull market at the time for a particular type of novel being written by male Jewish writers?  This is all left just a little uncertain, I could have used some edification here that would justify this couple presenting an image to the world that wasn't truthful.  Why couldn't they have shared co-writing credit on these novels, for example?  Was there not enough room on the covers of their books for two names?

Sure, there's one female character in the flashbacks who decries the lack of opportunities for female authors, but is that enough of a justification?  I'm not sure.  And while Joan was writing eight hours a day, Joe was cooking dinner for the family, cleaning house and raising their son - is that really such an embarrassing job for a man, that he preferred the fantasy life of an author over his reality?  They had such a great opportunity here to be a progressive couple and flip the traditional gender roles around, why didn't they take it?  Then again, why do Stephen King and J.K. Rowling write some of their novels under pen names?  It's a strange process when you can read a book and not be entirely sure who the author is, because the vagaries of publishing are sometimes shrouded in mystery.  So who's really getting shafted here if Joe's not really the author of the books?  Is it the public, or Joan herself?  The couple seems to have enjoyed a pretty darn good life for a pair of frauds.

And it's odd that it takes the trip to Sweden to finally cause some tension between the married couple.  If Joan knew about Joe's many affairs, why hasn't she expressed her dissatisfaction with them before this?  And Joe had a pretty sweet deal, too - what with his wife writing the novels and him taking all the credit.  Why would he want to ruin all that by sleeping around?  Driving his wife away would therefore not only take a personal toll on him,  but it would also mean the end of the writing career, right?  So why take that chance?  Obviously it just seems like a set of circumstances designed to create the greatest amount of drama within the confines of this film.  I'm not saying it doesn't work, because mostly it does, but there's a fair amount of bending the story over backwards to bring it all to this place where it apparently needs to be.

Also starring Jonathan Pryce (last seen in "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote"), Christian Slater (last heard in "Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay"), Max Irons (last seen in "The Host"), Annie Starke (last seen in "Father Figures"), Harry Lloyd (last seen in "The Theory of Everything"), Elizabeth McGovern (last seen in "Once Upon a Time in America"), Alix Wilton Regan, Karin Franz Körlof, Johan Widerberg (last seen in "Ocean's Twelve"), Richard Cordery (last seen in "Mr. Turner"), Jan Mybrand, Anna Azcarate, Peter Forbes, Jane Garda, Fredric Gildea, Nick Fletcher, Mattias Nordkvist, Suzanne Bertish (last seen in "W.E."), Grainne Keenan, John Moraitis (last seen in "Woman in Gold"), Michael Benz (last seen in "Joker").

RATING: 6 out of 10 autographed walnuts

Cookie's Fortune

Year 12, Day 246 - 9/2/20 - Movie #3,644

BEFORE: Lyle Lovett carries over from "The New Guy" - he really hasn't been in that many movies, and it seems like a good portion of the films he has acted in were directed by Robert Altman - like "Short Cuts", "The Player" and "Ready to Wear".  Today's film was also directed by Altman, which could be good, or could be bad.  I've tried to see as many of Altman's film as I could, but while I'm a fan of "Short Cuts" and "The Player", he also had some films that were just OK, like "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" and "Nashville", and also stinkers like "Dr. T & the Women", so you just never know.

THE PLOT: Conflict arises in the small  town of Holly Springs when an old woman's death causes a variety of reactions among family and friends.

AFTER: Yeah, I was afraid of this - there's something of a good idea behind "Cookie's Fortune", but parts of it are really dumb, and other parts just drag on and on, over-explaining everything that doesn't need to be explained.  Maybe this is an accurate portrayal of life in a small town in Mississippi - I wouldn't know, I've never been there - and maybe if I visited there or lived there I'd get this same feeling, that life moves at a snail's pace, everything takes too damn long and all the residents are clueless as hell about life.  Could be true.

One character in particular is intentionally slow, I don't know if she's learning disabled or mentally challenged or whatever the proper PC term is these days, but she somehow manages to remember all her lines for the church's Easter-themed play, so I'm not sure.  The storyline on IMDB just calls Cora "incredibly shy", which I suppose is a thing, but then that doesn't seem to match up with Cora playing Salomé, a Biblical character noted for performing "The Dance of the Seven Veils", which is essentially an ancient striptease, right?  This could have really livened up the film, since Julianne Moore plays this "incredibly shy" character, but the director chose not to go that way - his loss.

Cora's sister, Camille, on the other hand, is the pushy director of the play, who's taken it upon herself to rewrite some of Oscar Wilde's scenes, so that sort of tells you what you need to know about Camille.  She's always sure that she's right, and she takes advantage of her shy (or is it dumb?) sister whenever she can.  The two women go over to their Aunt Cookie's house to "borrow back" (aka steal) their mother's fruit bowl, only to find that Aunt Cookie has committed suicide with a gun.  But since it wouldn't be "proper" for a member of their family to have committed suicide, plus since only crazy people commit suicide this would imply that there is madness in their family (quite clearly there is, so I don't see what the big deal here is) so Camille stages the suicide to look like a break-in and impromptu murder, removes the gun from Cookie's hands and ditches it in the yard, before calling the police.

Based on the evidence, the police determine that the prime suspect is Willis Richland, Cookie's friend and handyman, who had cleaned all the guns for her the night before, so therefore his fingerprints were on the gun in question.  Even though Willis is known by everyone in the town as a sweet man who would never kill another person, he's put in jail anyway (well, sort of) while they straighten everything out.  The sheriff is convinced Willis is innocent just because they fish together regularly, that's the kind of town it is.

The ensemble cast is the sort you'd expect to see in an Altman film - nearly everyone's in that church play, including the dead woman's family attorney, and also the rookie cop who can't seem to keep any information about the case to himself.  He's sleeping with Emma Duvall (everybody in this film seems to use everyone else's first and last names at every opportunity, and that's just not how most people talk) and Emma just happens to be the daughter of Cora (the shy one), the niece of Camille (the pushy one) and close friends with Willis (the accused one).  So yeah, it's a small town, everybody's connected, we get it - still the film keeps over-explaining to us how everybody is related to each other, ad nauseam.  

Or maybe it's just the fact that there's not much of a mystery here - since we saw Camille stage the crime scene, we know Willis didn't kill Cookie.  So much for suspense.  Wouldn't it have worked better if we hadn't seen everything up front, so we the audience would still have some doubt over whether Willis was guilty, also if he didn't kill Cookie, then we could still wonder who did?  I guess Robert Altman wasn't much for crime dramas, which employ the usual technique of having a detective figure out the crime scene, and then we all get to see the crime being committed in flashback sequences.  I know, I'm usually the one complaining about flashbacks and non-linear narratives, but here's a case where they could have been useful and served a purpose, and they weren't even used at all.  What a shame.

Instead we get to meet all of Willis's friends as they're interviewed by the police and a special investigator brought in from a bigger city, as they confirm (THREE TIMES!) that Willis was doing errands on the day of Cookie's death, just like he said he was.  It's overkill - and like the fish supplier character (played by Lyle Lovett) who seems to have a thing for Emma and is building an apartment for her out of a train caboose, largely unnecessary.  You could take Manny the fishmonger's character right out of the film and it would hardly make any difference.  By the same token, there are a few too many police characters for such a small town.

It's also quite obvious that "Salomé", the play within the film, is largely symbolic of the larger crime, especially when the soldier character (played by Jason, that rookie cop) commits suicide, mirroring Cookie's own choice to take her life.  Plus the whole thing is set on Easter weekend, so there's a tie-in with Jesus' sacrifice, too - in the deaths of Cookie and Jesus, there's a similar confusion over what really happened, I'll wager.

It's just a very clunky mystery story here, and it didn't need to be.  Camille didn't HAVE to re-stage the suicide scene, but she did, so the story then has to deal with the repercussions of that.  Every little detail is super-important, like the fact that the neighbor kid saw what happened, and that the lawyer just happened to know exactly where Cookie hid her will.  I'll maintain there were much more elegant ways to move this story along, ones that didn't rely on coincidences and last-minute revelations, but the film just didn't seem interested in those methods.  Nah, let's just keep making things more and more confusing before starting to resolve anything.

And of course, the fact that Camille could so easily steamroll her sister Cora into believing a different version of the facts is going to come back and haunt her.  (Hmm, that feels a little bit familiar.  Who's also known for presenting sets of "alternative facts" to the American citizens, without worrying about any of the possible repercussions?  Karma's a bitch, man, just saying.).

If I had known this was set over Easter weekend I would have preferred to watch this then, but since I needed the linking this film provided now, maybe it's better that I didn't know.  And this way the theme of characters going to jail also carries over from "The New Guy".

Also starring Glenn Close (last seen in "Father Figures"), Julianne Moore (last seen in "Wonderstruck"), Liv Tyler (last seen in "Ad Astra"), Chris O'Donnell (last seen in "The Bachelor"), Ned Beatty (last seen in "Nashville"), Courtney B. Vance (last seen in "Office Christmas Party"), Charles S. Dutton (last seen in "Against the Ropes"), Patricia Neal (last seen in "Ghost Story"), Donald Moffat (last seen in "The Bonfire of the Vanities"), Danny Darst (last seen in "Swing Shift"), Matt Malloy (last seen in "Phil Spector"), Randle Mell, Niecy Nash (last seen in "Selma"), Rufus Thomas (last seen in "Elvis Presley: The Searcher"), Red West (ditto), Ruby Wilson, Preston Strobel, Ann Whitfield, Hank Worsham, Christopher Coulson.

RATING: 4 out of 10 rolls of yellow crime-scene tape.

The New Guy

Year 12, Day 245 - 9/1/20 - Movie #3,643

BEFORE: September is here, and I still can't go to the movies.  It's OK, I planned for this.  There are enough movies available on streaming platforms for me to hold out until November, what a relief.  I'm giving the industry two more months to get its act together - I'm secretly hoping theaters in NYC will open soon, because I'm figuring that they're going to need an influx of ushers and concession stan workers, and I really need to get a second job, and get off partial unemployment.  I've worked in theaters before, and since the shifts are mostly nights and weekends, I could still work days at my old job and still have time for more job-hunting.  That's the plan, anyway.

For some people, September means "back to school", and look what happened here, all my debating and fretting over my chain, and breaking it apart and putting it back together again, and turning pieces of it around, and a high-school based film is right here on September 1.  Honestly, I didn't plan this, I thought this was a prison movie, which it is, but it's also a high school movie.  Divine providence manifests itself once again.  I had three other school-based films planned for later in the month, this will make four, and it's a nice surprise.  Here's another one - David Hasselhoff carries over from "Killing Hasselhoff".  Yep, it's a Hoff two-fer.  Who saw that one coming?

Before we proceed, here are the platform stats from August, the first month this year that I didn't overbook or double-up:

AUGUST -
9 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Standing in the Shadows of Motown, Hitsville: The Making of Motown, 13 Going on 30, The Equalizer 2, Captive State, The Gambler, Matinee, The Kid, Death Wish
0 Movies watched on cable (not saved):
4 watched on Netflix: Fyre, A Single Man, The Ballad of Lefty Brown, Killing Hasselhoff
1 watched on iTunes: Greed
1 watched on Amazon Prime: Wonderstruck
4 watched on Hulu: Whitney, Fyre Fraud, Where'd You Go Bernadette, Once Upon a Time in Venice
2 watched on Tubi: Muscle Shoals, Lay the Favorite
2 watched on other random sites: Shine a Light, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
23 TOTAL

I was all over the place in August, cable films didn't even make up 50% of my viewing, or even 40%. But that's just the kind of month I had, a weird mix of weird films that was slammed together for one purpose only, just to connect the end of the documentary chain with the start of the back-to-school chain.  It still represents some solid work on my part, but with vigilante action films, westerns, sci-fi and alien invasion films, off-beat comedies, and also docs on Motown, the Rolling Stones AND the Fyre Festival, what else is there to say about August?  Hey, at least it was unique - and at least I avoided watching "Trolls World Tour", which also could have connected to "Killing Hasselhoff" via Ron Funches and to tonight's film via Zooey Deschanel.  Whoops, sorry, I don't seem to have a slot for that one - come see me in 2021.  Maybe.

THE PLOT: A high school senior branded uncool in the ninth grade gets himself expelled to change his image to a cool kid at another high school.

AFTER: While people in America are concerned with "cancel culture", I've spent my year enduring "reschedule culture" - that doesn't really sound as catchy, but in its own way, it's a bit more positive.  For me it's a constant process of rescheduling the films that don't seem to fit - plus it might be helpful to view the Covid-19 pandemic as a constant rescheduling of everything.  Like in May when I first ventured out of the house, I noticed that drug stores in NYC were still selling Easter candy, though Easter was on April 12.  I guess after Easter there are no good candy holidays until Halloween, plus there might not have been enough people working at the drugstore to pack it all up (ah, so THAT'S why marshmallow Peeps always taste stale...) so I took advantage of the situation and loaded up on peanut butter eggs, maple creme eggs, marshmallow eggs - basically any flavor of egg-shaped chocolate went into my basket, and that kept me snacking through June, because I stored it all on the fridge.  But that's what you have to do in 2020, it seems - we went out for our Easter dinner in July, and then in July there were too many amateur fireworks for us to venture out, so Fourth of July celebrations for us might happen in mid-September, you never know.  Then I visited my parents the weekend after Father's Day for a re-scheduled Mother's Day/Father's Day weekend, and so on.

By extension, New York Comic-Con wasn't cancelled, it's rescheduled for a bigger event next year - hopefully it doesn't conflict with the 2020/2021 Olympics, right?  Indoor dining in NYC is still rescheduled for either the vaccine proving effective, or a class-action lawsuit once the weather gets too cold to sit outside - and that's coming.  The start of indoor school is now rescheduled for Sept. 21 in NYC, to triple-check safety measures and also prevent a teachers' strike.  The tax deadline was rescheduled this year, plus baseball games, basketball games, college football and so on.  Life keeps moving forward, but everything's also on hold, and significant events just keep getting moved into the future, again and again.  The fact that the "New Mutants" movie is screening anywhere, for anybody, is a minor miracle, turns out that the fifth try at a release date was the charm.  I might be cut out for this lifestyle, because I've spent the last 12 years living it - every time I watch one movie, I'm saying "Let's hold off on those other 379 movies on my list..."  Meanwhile while I'm still sticking to this actor-linking format, there are classic films like "Grand Illusion" or "The Prisoner of Zenda" that have been waiting patiently for their turn, and it seems they may be waiting in vain.  And this will probably be yet another October where classic horror films like "Salem's Lot" and "The Mummy's Tomb" go unwatched again.

But, they say that every dog has his day.  Every film, hopefully, will get its chance to be seen.  Yes, even "Trolls World Tour", god help me.  (Someday, just not today.  Look, I've agreed to watch the "Twilight" films this October, I can only handle so much.).  And that brings me to "The New Guy", a film that I passed on when it was on cable - it just seemed too below the radar.  Then it was on Hulu, so I figured, what the heck, and added it to my playlist.  You've probably guessed by now that by the time I was ready to watch it, and found a way to link to it, it was gone from Hulu - that's par for the course, I think I have about a 50% success rate with Hulu on this front.  Who the hell's in charge of this streaming thing, anyway, who decided that two years is the preferred amount of time for a film to be available?  Who does this help, or is this all an extension of that horrible "Disney Vault" mentality, namely the theory that if a film is kept from the public, somehow it regains its value and people will suddenly want it again?  This doesn't help the people who want to see it NOW, does it?  I'm finally ready for this film, it serves a linking purpose for me as well as being entertaining (ideally...), but now I have to pay $3.99 to see it?  Well, that's going to color my opinion of it, isn't it?  I might rate this film higher if it's FREE, or included with one of our monthly subscriptions.  We need to get to a place where every film is available, all the time, and nothing is unavailable, why doesn't that fit with anyone's corporate strategies?  Don't make me cancel - er, reschedule - you yet again.

OK, rant over, I paid the $3.99, but now the pressure is on "The New Guy" to be worth the cost.  Eh, I'm not sure if it is.  I've seen so many films about navigating high school, from "Never Been Kissed" and "Can't Hardly Wait" back in the day, to more modern films like "Superbad" and "Booksmart".  They're all using the same playbook, really - and it's very outdated.  That's what tends to happen when you have movies about 17-year-olds, played by 22-year-olds, that have been written by 40-year-olds.  If you really want to know what's going on in high-school NOW, why not produce films written by current high-school students?  I suppose "Love, Simon" was notably progressive, at least on the sexual orientation front, but the classroom stuff keeps taking a back seat to the social interactions.  All of these high-school films spend more time in the bathrooms than in the classrooms, while my high school experience was about learning.  Sure, I had extra-curriculars, but also I had a job on nights and weekends, so I sure didn't have any time for dating.  (I had no idea how to talk to girls anyway, so it all sort of worked out.).

For Dizzy (Gillespie) Harrison, it's all about rising above his current social status, where he's nothing more than a "blip" on everyone's radar.  His friends are "blips" too, which calls to mind other films where the losers get together and commiserate like "The Goonies" (which we re-watched this past weekend) or "Good Boys", or "Superbad", etc.  Here Dizzy and his "blip" friends have formed a funk band and are constantly rehearsing, but I guess that path takes too long to be cool, so Dizzy's got to speed up the process.  Here the movie has to go through a bunch of contortionist acts to get Dizzy into jail - he gets a public erection while talking to a girl, an older librarian then thinks he has a concealed weapon in his pants, so she grabs it, causing him to have a broken penis, and this somehow convinces the school counselor that he has Tourette's Syndrome, so she puts him on medication, and the medication somehow makes him jump on stage with a gospel choir at the mall, and for this he gets arrested.  Wow - that's a lot to take in, so many contrivances in the first 10 minutes of the film, that it's almost painful.

And then once he's in prison, the contrivances continue - he shares the weirdest possible bullying experience with his cell-mate, Luther, so of course they instantly bond.  Luther's also been moved from prison to prison, and found that if you're on the bottom of the social ladder in one place, the easiest thing to do is to act up and get yourself moved to another prison, where you can start from scratch, act even crazier, and maybe end up on top.  And thanks to pop culture and movie tropes, we all know by now what to do on your first day in prison, right?  You're supposed to find the biggest, baddest mofo in the prison, and beat him up, just to show everybody how tough you are, that you're not messing around.  I wonder, has this advice ever worked out for anybody?  Or has it just gotten a lot of prison newbies killed?  I'd like to see some stats on this.  Anyway, Dizzy goes back to high school - which is just another form of prison, if you choose to think about it like that, and he sets out to get himself expelled.  He cheats on an exam, then tries to bribe the teacher, even records video of the principal straining in a bathroom stall (he uses a security camera with an unbelievably long cord, because this film was made a couple years before everybody had video cameras on their phones) but nothing seems to work.  Finally he breaks a mop handle in two (intending to smack the principal with it) and gets expelled for destroying school property.

Dizzy then goes back to prison - though it's a bit unclear if he was jailed for breaking the mop handle, or if he was just visiting his old cell-mates for more advice.  Either way, he gets a prison make-over, learns to walk tough and act tough and make "crazy eyes", even gets a jailhouse tattoo, which is all going to help him make that all-important first impression at his new school.  He somehow changes his name to Gil Harris, dyes his hair blond, and gets his new prison friends to drop him off at the new school in restraints, as if he's Hannibal Lecter or something. (Actually, this was a riff on Steve Buscemi's character in "Con Air").  Right, because they frequently allow violent serial-killing teens to attend classes with regular kids.  It's a bit much, but it works.

"Gil" then quickly identifies the 25-year-old tough teen who's at the top of the social pyramid (it helps that East Highland High) was built on a big metaphorical hill, and only the most popular kids get to sit at the top of the hill, so they can more easily bully the loser kids who can't or aren't allowed to climb up the hill.  At the top of the hill is Conner, a classic leather-jacket wearing bully of the "greaser" variety, who takes Gil down with one punch.  Gil gets up and retaliates, but as luck would have it, the bell rang and nobody got to see it.  So Gil has to drag the unconscious Conner around through the halls and then pull the fire alarm, just so everybody can see that the new guy means business.  Like most of this film, this comedy bit ends up working, but it's a long, arduous struggle to get there.  (I see your "hill as social status" metaphor, and raise you a "finding comedy is like dragging a bully's unconscious body around" one.)

What's the moral here?  That with a little bit of planning, some hard work, and maybe a couple of lucky breaks, it's possible to completely re-invent yourself, and improve your social situation?  OK, I guess that works, but then also there's a danger that if you completely burn down your life plan and start a new one, you may lose what made you special and unique in the first place.  "Fake it till you make it" can produce results, but it can also make you a fake version of yourself, because Gil finds himself turning his back on his friends when he's got a shot at getting close to the hot girl at the new school.  Meanwhile there was Nora, one of his "blip" friends, there all the time, right there in his band, and he just never thought of her in that way?  People might totally want to ship Dizzy and Nora here ("Dora"?) but it all works out - Nora had her eye on somebody else, anyway, which is awfully convenient.  Hey, let's note that Zooey Deschanel was in teen comedies like "The New Guy" before she became famous for starring in "The New Girl" on TV.

There are a few clever bits here, like when Dizzy/Gil decides to invigorate the East Highland football team by re-enacting the classic motivational scene from "Patton" to get them their first win in years, then he gets the whole school to participate in a parody of "Braveheart" later in the film when they've somehow reached the state championship.  Umm, NITPICK POINT here, Texas is a pretty big state with a lot of high schools, so I think to win the state championship you can't just be a good football team, you've got to be like the best football team ever, and I think you have to win like 87 games in a row - but I'll admit I'm not quite sure how high school sports works.  Like most everything else in this film, this seems just a little bit beyond believable, that one guy on a horse could turn a team full of zeroes into champions.

Ultimately I think this one lands somewhere between "Napoleon Dynamite" and "Drillbit Taylor", if that makes any sense.  I actually had to check the dates, this film came out two years BEFORE "Napoleon Dynamite" did - while watching it I was willing to bet that it was one of those films that came out a few years after, trying to capitalize on the unexpected success of that quirky little indie film.  Nope, this one came first.  But all three films sort of have the same DNA, the same message about how being quirky or a misfit is OK, despite whatever the bullies at your school do to bring you down.  They all just take different roads to end up in the same place (umm, more or less).  And like "Killing Hasselhoff", the extensive blooper reel during the closing credits implies that much of this film, perhaps most of the film, was improvised.  So, umm, what did the screenwriter DO, then?

It's nice to know, though probably wishful thinking, that if all the so-called losers in a high school can band together, they can change the social status rules for everyone - all the nerds, geeks, freaks, weirdos, disabled kids and troubled teens working together is a nice thought, but possibly also a pipe dream.  (Plus, getting all the losers working together could produce another Columbine, instead of a high-school paradise.).  But perhaps there's a metaphor somewhere in there about voting - the largest voting block in the 2016 election was the people who didn't vote at all, and they certainly had an impact with their absence.  Maybe it wouldn't have changed anything, maybe if the non-voters voted they also would have been split among the candidates in similar proportion, but we'll never know, will we?  But if the non-voters could come together and somehow agree, which is unlikely, I'll admit, they do have the potential power to change the course of history.  But as we all know, they probably won't - an entire generation of disaffected Americans isn't suddenly going to get motivated overnight.

NITPICK POINT: Remember what I was saying about 40-year old writers not portraying high school accurately?   This film really screws up the school football season, even worse than a pandemic could.  Dizzy's band is scheduled to play at the homecoming dance, which somehow takes place after the championship football game.  That's simply not how any high-school calendar works.  Homecoming is traditionally in the fall, representing when a football team that's been playing on the road at other schools finally comes back to their home field (though admittedly, the team hasn't really "gone" anywhere, the students still need to show up for classes in-between games played on the road, right?) for a big game, maybe against a traditional rival school.  The state championship would logically be at the END of the sports season, right?  (again, not an expert on the high-school sports, but come on.). So in what universe could the championship game come BEFORE homecoming?  I went through something similar with a director who insisted that proms took place in the fall, and I tried in vain to convince him that proms always take place in the spring, like May or June.  He was clearly confusing prom with homecoming, because that film also had a prominent football game sequence, right before the big dance in the fall.  Some screenwriters and directors get into their 40's or 50's and forget details about how high school functions - I just couldn't convince him that a fall dance should be called homecoming, since proms take place in the spring, so the resulting movie's calendar makes no sense as a result.  (I begged him, call anybody on the phone, any friend you trust, and ask that person when prom is - he refused to do that.). Who knows, maybe the school calendar will get so screwed up this year because of the coronavirus that maybe the football championship game will happen right before homecoming.

Also starring DJ Qualls (last seen in "The Core"), Eliza Dushku (last heard in "Batman: Year One"), Eddie Griffin (last seen in "A Star Is Born"), Zooey Deschanel (last heard in "Trolls"), Lyle Lovett (last seen in "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story"), Jerod Mixon (last seen in "Me, Myself & Irene"), Parry Shen, Rachael E. Stevens, Ameer Baraka, Kina Cosper, Ross Patterson, Geoffrey Lewis (last seen in "The Great Waldo Pepper"), Kurt Fuller (last seen in "Ghostheads"), Sunny Mabrey (last seen in "xXx: State of the Union"), Illeana Douglas (last seen in "She's Funny That Way"), Justine Johnston, Matt Gogin, Jerry O'Connell (last seen in "Can't Hardly Wait"), Charlie O'Connell, Henry Rollins (last heard in "Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker"), M.C. Gainey (last seen in "Wonderland"), Horatio Sanz (last heard in "Ralph Breaks the Internet"), Josh Todd (last seen in "The Banger Sisters"), Julius Carry, Avery Waddell, Mike Erwin, Bryan Shy, Laura Clifton, with cameos from Vanilla Ice (last seen in "Sandy Wexler"), Tony Hawk (last seen in "xXx"), Tommy Lee (last seen in "God Bless Ozzy Osbourne"), Kool Moe Dee (last seen in "Quincy"), Jermaine Dupri, Kyle Gass (last seen in "Saving Silverman"), Gene Simmons (last seen in "Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story"), Jai Rodriguez, with archive footage of James Brown (last seen in "Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown").

RATING: 5 out of 10 swimsuits worn by Danielle in a gratuitous impromptu fashion show at the mall.

Killing Hasselhoff

Year 12, Day 243 - 8/30/20 - Movie #3,642

BEFORE: How does this happen?  How do I find myself watching something that's probably a throwaway film, at best guess, and potentially a big piece of nonsense, especially when this film just appeared on Netflix at the start of August, and there are probably MUCH more important films to watch, ones that have been on the list much longer?  I'll attempt to explain.

The original plan was to link from "Once Upon a Time in Venice" to a film called "Replicas", which also has Thomas Middleditch in it.  And then "Replicas" also has Keanu Reeves in it, and it would have served as the link to "Bill & Ted Face the Music".  (It's not really the original plan, it's the revised original plan, which is the original original plan backwards, because "Bill & Ted" got delayed or something, it's a little tough to remember.  No, I think that's correct, because Ron Funches was the original link out of the documentary chain, since he appeared in archive footage in "Fyre".)

OK, so I held a spot for "Bill & Ted", only then it got released in theaters, but not in New York City, which is keeping its theaters closed for now.  I mean, it's not like there's a lot of people who live in NYC who want to go to the movies, right?  (I don't know, is this true?  Between marching in Black Lives Matter protests, building seating enclosures for outdoor dining and just generally trying not to catch Covid while we ride the subways, we're all pretty busy...). Sure, I could watch "Bill & Ted" on Demand, but it's priced at like $20!  That's too much to pay for a first-run movie, so I've removed "Bill & Ted" from the schedule.  So much for Plan "B" (which, if I'm being honest, was more like Plan "F" or "G") and I did have a back-up plan for my back-up plan.  Removing both "Replicas" and "Bill & Ted Face the Music" is possible because "Once Upon a Time in Venice" shares an actor with the next film in the chain.  (In the original plan, Kid Cudi would carry over from "Bill & Ted" to today's film...).

Surprise, it's Ron Funches!  He's here again tonight, carrying over from "Once Upon a Time in Venice" as I wrap up August - I've spaced out my days so I wouldn't have too many days off in a row - so 23 films in August, and I've got another 22 films planned for September (bringing the year's count up to 3,664), and then I'll be in to horror films for October.  Another 24 films in October gets me to 3,688, and then, assuming "Black Widow" gets released in November, 12 more films gets me to the end of the year.  (And if I still can't see "Black Widow" in a theater in November, or don't want to pay $20 to see it On Demand, which I could do, then it's on to Plan "J" or "K", damn it.)

Now, removing "Replicas" from this part of the list raised another issue, where should it go?  Should I just put it at the bottom of the list, or think of it as a "Maybe" for 2021?  Well, I left myself a note that this (sort of?) horror film connects to a number of other horror films planned for this October, so on a whim I checked out placing it somewhere in October, and here's the best news of all - I can use "Replicas", along with two other films recently acquired, to replace a three-film section in October that I really wasn't crazy about.  The linking was solid, but watching "Black Christmas", "Beautiful Creatures" and the reboot of "Nightmare on Elm Street" didn't really thrill me, plus I would have had to rent all three films on iTunes for $2.99 or $3.99 apiece.  Now I don't have to do that, and I can replace those three films with ones I really want to see, and also already have in my possession - I'll save some money and the October movie count stays exactly the same!  It's a win-win.  Umm, except for the "Bill & Ted" movie that's off the schedule now, that one I will have to catch up with in 2021. This would also have been a fine place to drop in "Trolls World Tour" (actually, there may not be a good place to drop in that film, it looks horrible) but it's still $5.99 on iTunes, so I'm going to pass on that one too.  It's a lot easier to pass when I know I have a solid path to the end of the year.

Anyway, all that explains why today's film is "Killing Hasselhoff", at least I hope it does. I'll total up the stats on August's movies and report back in two days, when it's September.

THE PLOT: A struggling nightclub owner resorts to desperate measures in order to pay off a loan shark.

AFTER: It's been a pretty big week for loansharks, they figured prominently in the plots of "The Gambler" and "Once Upon a Time in Venice".  It's interesting what Hollywood thinks about loan sharks, look at the actors they cast to play them - John Goodman, Ken Davitian and Will Sasso.  So, all loan sharks are fat guys?  Seems like an interesting stereotype - I guess a fat guy is shorthand for a rich guy, but then they also have to be ruthless, mean characters who will hurt or even kill people if they don't pay up, and that's just not what most fat guys are about.  Fat guys are jolly, happy guys in real life, right?  I can believe Michael Kenneth Williams as a loan shark, but I'm not sure about Will Sasso.  John Goodman's a good enough actor to pull it off, I think - when he threatened Mark Wahlberg's character, I believed it.

Ken Jeong's character here, Chris Kim is the clueless lead, unfortunately he's not smart enough to handle a loan shark who wants to collect on the money he borrowed to open up a nightclub - especially when the club gets some bad publicity due to a false sexual harassment claim (umm, yeah, that's a really questionable plot point, see NITPICK POINT below) so when the loan shark comes to collect, it seems that Chris' only option is to collect the money from the celebrity death pool that he's been a part of for six years, and the pot keeps growing every year because all of the 18 celebrities chosen have decided to keep on living, so I guess the participants re-invest every year, which makes the pot worth about half a million.

NITPICK POINT #1 - 18 guys betting $500 each adds up to only $9,000 - can $9,000 in a bank account grow to over $500,000 in just 6 years?  That seems like an impossibly high interest rate. Even if each participant anted up another $500 each year, I'm not sure that the math here justifies the total.  Six times $9,000 is just $54,000, and I still don't think that money could grow tenfold in just six years in the bank. So there goes the premise, right out of the gate.

But the lead character picked David Hasselhoff to die - factoring in that "The Hoff" is sort of getting up there in years, plus may be likely to engage in high-risk activities like sky-diving or driving his own version of the KITT car.  Hell, even shaking hands with fans is a high-risk activity these days, you never know what you could catch.  And who are the other celebrities that were picked in the pool?  I just paused the film to find out - they include high-risk celebs like Charlie Sheen, Dennis Rodman, Gary Busey, Courtney Love, Mel Gibson, Tommy Lee, Britney Spears and Tara Reid.  But I may have to call a NITPICK POINT on some of the other choices.  Somebody picked Howie Mandel?  Being a total germophobe will keep you alive longer, I believe. Hulk Hogan?  He may be a big jerk, but he seems pretty healthy, except for the steroid damage.  Tony Danza, Nicolas Cage and Joe Piscopo?  They all seem like they're aging well - but I guess they had to round out the field somehow.  Technically, you're not supposed to use even the NAME of a person in a movie without permission - so perhaps these are just the 18 celebrities who said "yes" when the producers called and were willing to sign a release.  (One loophole method around this is to find a regular, non-celebrity person also named "Tommy Lee", for example, and have them sign a contract for $1 to use their name in the film.  But good luck finding another person named "Britney Spears" or "Hulk Hogan".

The Hulk Hogan thing is a bit interesting - it seems he was a big part of this film at one time, but then had a dispute with WWE Studios (which produced this film) and then the whole film had to be re-cut to remove every scene he was in.  It seems he made some racial remarks that resulted in the termination of his contract.  I suppose it's possible that this film was once called "Killing Hulk Hogan", then they had to find Hasselhoff as a replacement - I'm not sure.  It's a bit like "Being John Malkovich", which managed to cast John Malkovich to play himself - and if he hadn't been available and willing, what would they have done?  Would they have cast another actor to play Malkovich, or changed the title of the film to accommodate whoever replaced him?  "Being Terrence Stamp" just wouldn't have been the same film, admit it. But today's film could have easily been transformed into "Killing Shatner" or "Killing Stallone" or even "Killing Grammer", any larger-than-life celebrity willing to poke fun at his own image would have sufficed.

Still, it's great that Hasselhoff said yes and agreed to come along for the ride.  He at least seems like he's in on the joke - another celebrity might have taken umbrage or not been able to laugh at himself in the same way.  As long as everybody understands that reality is not being depicted here, we're viewing everything through the comedy lens and taking everything with many grains of salt.

That being said, any legitimate Celebrity Death Pool worth playing would probably have some kind of rule, or at least a guideline, that it's NOT O.K. for one of the players to try and kill their celebrity in order to collect.  It's just not sporting.  Chris makes three attempts at "offing the Hoff", once by playing upon his shellfish allergy, and once by spiking his juice at a party, before resorting to a handgun, the "old faithful" approach.  It's a shame, when the film's storyline went to all the trouble of creating Fish, another celebrity death pool participant who had a mental breakdown after learning that his girlfriend was sexting another guy, and then crafted a long list of ways to kill that guy while institutionalized.  Fish gives Chris his journal with over 100 ways to murder Hasselhoff, but only three get tried before Chris realizes that he's not the murdering type.  (Yet he still tried twice before realizing this, so that's something of a contradiction.  N.P. #3.

While I'm at it, NITPICK POINT #4 - if a celebrity was only 16 years old, and booked the "party room" at the nightclub, whose responsibility would it be to keep that female celebrity away from alcohol and drugs?  Would that be the job of the nightclub manager, or the celebrity's mom-ager?  It seems to me that this situation itself would create something of a scandal - namely, what is a 16-year old girl doing in a 21-and-over club?  Wasn't she herself breaking the law by just being there?  I guess this sort of thing might happen all the time - dating back to the Drew Barrymore days and probably before - but come on, there's a lot of blame to go around here.  Turning the situation into a false "me too" charge against the club owner is not just bad form, it's missing the point - what was she doing there in the first place?  Booking that space for her party was, in itself, a violation.  And again, depicting a false sexual harassment claim in a film helps nobody IRL.  Agreed, the club owner should have had a better system in place to check IDs, even those of the celebrities.

While I'm at it, a gay hit-man (sent to kill the Hoff by the loan shark, who realizes that he can't collect the money owed to him unless Chris wins the pot) seems like a progressive idea, but if that character just gets reduced to a series of stereotypes, than it's a bit questionable whether any new ground was broken here.  The guy can't decide whether to kill Hasselhoff or make love to him, and like the Hoff himself, I'm wondering why those were the only two choices.  Is he that unprofessional that he can't separate his job from his desires?  A real hit-man wouldn't have this problem, a straight hit-man probably wouldn't have a problem with killing a woman, so what is it about a gay man that his sexual orientation is so easily going to get in the way of completing his assignment?  He's so weak when under the spell of Hasselhoff that his judgment is clouded?  It's a strange plot point at best, and homophobic in some way at worst. (I'm just not sure exactly how.)

I hesitate to compare this film to "Amadeus", but it's a similar plot-line.  Once Salieri decides that Mozart doesn't deserve to live, how does a man just kill another man?  How do you get close enough to someone to accomplish that?  But since this is a comedy, you know everything's not going to have a tragic result, the Hoff is going to be fine, even if we can't see for a long time how that's going to happen.  At least Hasselhoff understands that we've all got to go sometime, so we might as well have a party while we're here.  Just don't hassle the Hoff's fans, and everything's going to be OK.  I"m very curious as to what this film COULD have been, because the filmmakers have said that it would have been much funnier before all the re-editing, but then, filmmakers can say that about any film that failed to find an audience.  The film is just 80 minutes long, so at least it won't take up too much of your time - that gave me a lot of extra time today to wonder where Jim Jefferies' Australian accent went.  Because if Aussies don't HAVE to talk that way, then why the heck do they?

Also starring Ken Jeong (last seen in "Lady and the Tramp"), Jim Jefferies, Colton Dunn (last seen in "Other People"), David Hasselhoff (last seen in "Baywatch"), Dan Bakkedahl (last seen in "Battle of the Sexes"), Jennifer Ikeda, Rhys Darby (last heard in "Trolls"), Victor Turpin (last seen in "Murder Mystery"), Jon Lovitz (last seen in "The Stepford Wives"), Master P, Will Sasso (last seen in "Movie 43"), Flula Borg (last heard in "Ferdinand"), Carlos PenaVega, Michael Winslow (last seen in "Cheech and Chong's Next Movie"), Sarah Colonna, Taylor Collee, Harry S. Murphy (last seen in "Race to Witch Mountain"), Alfred Adderly, Joseph S. Griffo, with cameos from Justin Bieber (last seen in "Zoolander 2"), Rick Fox (last seen in "Holes"), Kid Cudi, Tony Rock, Mel B, Howie Mandel (last seen in "Gilbert"), Gena Lee Nolin, Pat Monahan.

RATING: 4 out of 10 fans in red swimsuits