Spies in Disguise

Year 12, Day 256 - 9/12/20 - Movie #3,651

BEFORE: Will Smith carries over from "Gemini Man" (don't worry, Mary Elizabeth Winstead will be back in mid-October), and together with "Aladdin" earlier this year, after tonight I've cleared the Will Smith category once again.  Three films released in the last two years, all of which had him playing some kind of cop or secret agent - I'm not saying he's typecast, but he's certainly in some kind of pocket.  All of his recent films seem like they sort of riffed off of "Men in Black", but in the MIB films he was always the junior member of the lead duo, and in these three films it seems like he's been the senior member, so I guess that's progress.

I've taken to writing limericks on Twitter, mostly related to the pandemic or the upcoming election - what happened was, I wrote one limerick and a friend commented on how clever and next-level it was, and sometimes that's all the positive reinforcement I need.  I guess that's what happened with my first few blog posts, and now look where I am almost twelve years later.  Once I find something to do I make it "my thing" and then it's just easier to keep going than to stop.

But it occurs to me how much a limerick is like a successful movie plot - stay with me here - even though a movie's story is traditionally told in six acts and a limerick is always just five lines, some of the main principles are the same.  First you need an opening line, that's like the movie's premise, simply stated.  Then the second line has to follow logically, and also rhyme with it - this is like the second part of a movie, which extends the premise or shows a reaction to or fallout from the opening act.

The third line is critical, it's "the turn", where a new complication is introduced, or a plot twist of some kind that changes the whole story.  The fourth line has to rhyme with the third, so that's the hero dealing with the plot twist, fighting back against the unspeakable evil, and ideally also setting up the conclusion at the same time.  The fifth line can be the toughest, because it's got to represent a longshot and introduce a new idea at the last minute, but it also has to rhyme with the first two lines, just like a movie's 5th act has to use something that came before to solve the problems introduced in Acts 3 & 4.  At the same time, it has to be witty and also tie up all the loose ends in a satisfying, yet somehow also slightly unexpected way.  That's a lot to ask of that last line, and it also explains why so many films have disappointing endings - plus once you know what to look for, you can sometimes spot the little detail in the opening act that's going to be very important later.

For my little analogy, five lines representing six acts, I'm kind of ignroing the six act, which is the denouement - this is that little addendum that shows how everything's going to be OK after the climax, in recent times this has become just a little aside that teases the next installment in the franchise, anyway.  (Think of the ending of "The Empire Strikes Back", all it did was set up the next movie...).  So this can be easily ignored when squeezing six acts into five lines - so here would be an example of the plot of "Gemini Man" in limerick form:

There's a hit-man who wants to retire
But the agency would rather he expire
So they send in his clone
But now he's no longer alone
And they team up to take down the Colonel, that liar!

See, it's all there - the set-up with the premise, then the complication or imperfect situation, then comes the unexpected twist with the central conflict, followed by the reaction to the twist that's also an unlikely plan for the final conflict.  Everything culminates in line 5, the long shot against the ultimate opposition, the final push during which everything seems lost, until it isn't.  This is the formula for ALL MOVIES, but perhaps it's easiest to see this with action movies that generally all adhere to this formula.  It works for most comedic and dramatic movies, too, except for those that set out to defy the formula, and when you watch one of those, something might feel a bit off.

Hey, I may do all my reviews in limerick form from now on!  Just kidding.

THE PLOT: When the world's best spy is turned into a pigeon, he must rely on his nerdy tech officer to save the world.

AFTER: The other thing about limericks is that you only have so many lines, and a limited number of syllables in each one - so most of the time you really have to choose your words carefully to fit your ideas in.  This is another filmmaking lesson, a movie has a time limit, too - society has set two hours as the limit, but movies for kids have to try to get closer to 90 minutes, because of shorter attention spans.  "Spies in Disguise" clocks in at 102 minutes, so it didn't QUITE get there, but it came close. Now if THIS movie's plot was in limerick form it might be:

A top secret agent with poise
Has a nerd partner creating tech toys.
Some DNA from a bird
Creates a battle absurd
While the villain's drone army deploys.

OK, so it's not Shakespeare, but it proves my point.  I thought about rhyming "pigeon" with something like "DNA (just a smidgeon)" but that felt really forced, plus then two lines would have been spent on the same idea, and there's no room for that, you've got to keep that limerick moving if you're going to get to the final wrap-up idea.  And putting the words "nerd" and "partner" so close together suggests a new portmanteau word, "partnerd", defined as the lesser member of a team in a spy movie, responsible for creating gadgets or getting valuable intel to the lead agent. "Q" in the Bond films is the ultimate partnerd, but there are many other fine examples.

But even though this film fits the formula - perhaps even a little TOO well, it still manages to go off in some very unusual tangential directions.  And you can do that with animation, you can have a secret agent who gets turned into a bird, but then again, why that?  I have to remind myself, it's a year full of weird movies, so anything and everything is possible, but then I still have to wonder, why was THAT plot point so important to somebody?  Do kids love pigeons that much?  When somebody landed on this idea, what was it that made somebody say "Aha! That's our story!" because really, it's so far out there that it almost does a lap around weird and comes back again for another go.  The movie simultaneously portrays pigeons as the ultimate disguise for a secret agent, with stealth, flight, a full range of vision, being so common around the world as to essentially be invisible, and other so-called positives, while at the same time being annoying, dumb, attracted to eating garbage and also pooping everywhere.  So, is turning someone into a pigeon a good choice or a bad choice?  Somehow it's both, but then why not choose something with fewer negatives?

Of course, the concept of genetic mutation is really dumbed down here for the kids - even though there's a nod to CRISPR and things like DNA sequencing, essentially movies haven't come all that far from the "Jekyll & Hyde" days, where someone can drink a magic potion and turn into something else.  And again, if a teenager can develop technology that will turn a man into an animal, why a damn pigeon?  Is this a nerd thing, going back to characters like Bert on Sesame Street, who also famously loved pigeons?  The truth is that this feature is loosely based on an animated short called "Pigeon: Impossible", so that's part of the reason why here, but they could have changed it to any other bird or any other animal and created a different storyline.

Also, is this the way that we're viewing millennials now, that they're all obsessed with tech, and also so focused on fostering peace and happiness that it's nearly one of their faults?  I think somebody's confusing hipsters with hippies, right?  I kind of agree with this portrayal, but only up to a point - somebody that focused on changing the world with internet memes and glitter probably wouldn't have found his way into a job at a spy agency in the first place, instead he'd be some kind of YouTube star doing make-up tutorials.  Plus, if some tech kid really wanted to work on stealth technology, why not set out to make somebody invisible rather than the more difficult prospect of transforming their whole body into a pigeon, but one that somehow retains human intelligence and the power of speech?

It's the third film in a row where Will Smith faces off against somebody who looks like him, only this time it's not a clone, just a super-villain using some kind of holographic image tech to duplicate his face and frame him for a crime.  The IMDB trivia section also points out several overlaps with "Spider-Man: Far From Home", namely the presence of Tom Holland, an African-American super-spy (Lance Sterling/Nick Fury), a battle taking place in Venice, the villain's use of many drones, and a character played by Ben Mendelsohn impersonating that super-spy.  Hmmm, and both films produced by companies owned by Disney...

The denouement here is pretty weak, showing both main characters getting fired from the agency because they defied orders - yeah, but they also did that for a reason, so they could save the world!  It's a very cheap "all is lost" sort of moment, because the agency heads change their minds five minutes later, creating that "new situation" with the potential for a sequel.  Seems to me those two meetings, the firing and the re-hiring, realistically would have been combined into ONE meeting, and they wouldn't have had time to clean out their desks. The agency head is probably very busy, after all.  (I really swore that was the voice of Holly Hunter, but it turns out that Reba McEntire sounds almost exactly like her - or maybe watching two films with Holly Hunter just put me in that mind-set.)

I programmed this film a couple of months ago, when it was on iTunes but not yet on cable - so it was very nice of HBO to start running it last Saturday, so I didn't have to spend any extra money to see it on iTunes.  Once in a while, something like this works out in my favor when I program ambitiously - and it's why I start tracking movies early, often before they become available, because it takes me a while to link to them anyway, they could become available to me during that period.  Now, it would be great if some cable channel could start running "The Call of the Wild" some time in the next, say, 10 days.

Also starring the voices of Tom Holland (last heard in "Onward"), Rashida Jones (last seen in "Between Two Ferns: The Movie"), Ben Mendelsohn (last seen in "The King"), Reba McEntire (last heard in "The Fox and the Hound 2"), Rachel Brosnahan (last seen in "The Finest Hours"), Karen Gillan (last seen in "Avengers: Endgame"), DJ Khaled (last seen in "Bad Boys for Life"), Masi Oka (last seen in "Jobs"), Carla Jimenez (last seen in "Nacho Libre"), Bex Marsh, Stefania Spampinato (last seen in "Ford v Ferrari"), Eddie Mujica, Emily Altman, Claire Crosby, Randy Trager, Matthew J. Munn, Kimberly Brooks (last heard in "The Wild Thornberrys"), Krizia Bajos, Reggie De Leon, Casey Roberts (last heard in "Ice Age: Collision Course"), Jarrett Bruno, So Youn, Jang Min-Hyeok, with a cameo from Mark Ronson (last seen in "Michael Jackson's Journey from Motown to Off the Wall").

RATING: 5 out of 10 glitter bombs

Gemini Man

Year 12, Day 254 - 9/10/20 - Movie #3,650

BEFORE: Just 50 films left to go in this year (but 112 days to watch them), it's hard to believe but Movie Year 12 is 5/6 over, which is something like 83%.  I think we can all agree that this has been the weirdest collection of films ever assembled, and I'm not even up to the part with vampires, witches, werewolves and zombies yet.  Perhaps this is appropriate for 2020, a year with an undeniable level of anxiety over what's coming next - will it be election disasters or more police shootings?  Murder hornets or plague squirrels?  Wildfires or tropical storms?  What's next on my list, "Breakfast of Champions" or "Hot Rod"?  "The Family Man" or "River's Edge"?  It's all solid work, and even a bad film represents progress in some way - at the very least, I never have to wonder about that one again, and watching it frees up a spot on my list for something else.  Life is kind of like a box of chocolates, but sometimes it's a box where I don't like any of the filling flavors - I wish I could just take a bite of each one and leave the rest of the chocolate in the box.  But that's bad form, so I always press on, and finish the movie, even if it's not pleasing me.

Will Smith carries over from "Bad Boys for Life".

THE PLOT: An over-the-hill hitman faces off against a younger clone of himself.

AFTER: I saw the trailer for this film several times last year, back in the before times when you could go to a movie theater in NYC.  Of course the trailer spoiled the single most important plot point of this film - why?  I guess because it's the only thing that really sets this one apart from all other action movies, so at least giving this away might have convinced a few more people to then come out and see it.  To be fair, the poster also gives it away, and the title kind of does, too - and NOT giving this point away in the trailer would probably have resulted in a very boring trailer.  In case you don't already know, and it's barely even close to a spoiler at this point, Will Smith's character will be facing off against his own clone in this action film.

The industry has been slowly working up to stuff like this, in some of the Marvel movies they used new technology to "de-age" older actors like Kurt Russell, Michael Douglas and Laurence Fishburne for prominent flashback scenes.  Also, they used something similar for the younger scenes with De Niro's character in "The Irishman".  Meanwhile, the "Star Wars" films used similar techniques in "Rogue One" to generate realistic CGI younger versions of characters played by Carrie Fisher and the late Peter Cushing.  The darker parts of the web are also using "deepfake" technology to give you an idea what it might have looked like if actresses like Marilyn Monroe had made x-rated films, and if that's your kink, then I guess it's OK, but it's also sort of illegal and very disrespectful.  Nevertheless, this is where we find ourselves.

There were other ways of accomplishing this effect, I suppose - two films I watched this year with Glenn Close ("Father Figures" and "The Wife") cast her own daughter, Annie Starke, to play a younger version of the same character in flashback scenes.  But those weren't action films with big budgets, so if you've got the money, then filming a stand-in and putting Will Smith's face on him with effects seems to be the most efficient way to go.  I thought maybe they saved money by filming Will Smith twice and only paying him once, like the recent movie "American Pickle" did with Seth Rogen playing two characters.  But no, since there were several fight scenes here it made sense to have two actors engaged in hand-to-hand combat, and then used the CGI effects to make one look like "Junior, a young clone of Will Smith's character, Henry Brogan.  Perhaps they considered casting Jaden Smith, but I wonder if he was unavailable.

(I wonder if there was a temptation here to drop in a bunch of "Fresh Prince of Bel Air" references - Brogan at one point mentions growing up near Philadelphia, it might have been funny to have Junior act a bit like early 1990's Will Smith, just have him dribbling a basketball or doing a bit of rapping, something like that.  But I suppose that would have been really cheap humor.)

The real Brogan is a hit-man with 72 successful kills - thankfully, those were all bad people, right?  And the world is a much safer place without them, that is if you don't count all the assassinations that it took to remove them.  Killing people to make the world safer seems kind of misguided, or at least very ironic, am I right?  But after somehow shooting a terrorist target on a moving train from two miles away, he suddenly decides to retire.  Hey, he wants to go out on top, I guess - but what are the odds that the Agency is going to let him walk away, knowing what he knows.  Sure enough, the agency keeps an eye on him, and when he learns too much, they send a squad to eliminate him and the agent assigned to watch him.

When that fails, the agency turns to a private military unit named Gemini, and the agent they send to take Brogan out seems very familiar - he's got the same training, the same moves, but he's younger, stronger and faster.  And he's been trained his whole life to be just like Brogan, only better at following orders without questioning them.  Here I'm reminded of "The Boys from Brazil", which I watched back in April, when a bunch of Nazi scientists thought they could create a bunch of Hitler clones, if they just nurtured them the same way and subjected them to the same life experiences.  The intent here was apparently to create a bunch of expendable clone soldiers, and that sort of also links back to "Star Wars", with the same questions about whether clones have individual rights or free will, or if being just copies of the original precludes that.  Well, as a society we may have to find answers for this question at some point.

If it feels like it takes Brogan too long to figure out the plan, well, that may be because the audience was tipped off long ago, either by the trailer or the title or the poster.  And surprisingly this film is not set in some far future year, the storyline is NOW, but that means that the clone was born (hatched?) in the late 1990's or early 2000's.  This kind of fits technology's timeline, they cloned a sheep in 1996 and a human embryo in 1998, though that embryo was destroyed - as far as we know, anyway.  This film's been in development almost as long as human cloning, just waiting for special effects technology to become advanced enough to make it - and finally it got released in 2019, just a year after science first successfully cloned primates, a pair of macaques.  Meanwhile there's a long list of actors who were attached to this film at various times - Clint Eastwood, Harrison Ford, Nicolas Cage, De Niro, Pacino, Mel Gibson, Kevin Costner, Brad Pitt, Denzel Washington, Tom Cruise, Keanu Reeves, Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Gerard Butler, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Jason Statham, and most recently, Idris Elba, Dwayne Johnson and Michael B. Jordan.  Sometimes it takes longer to create, develop and produce a film than it does to raise a child - I don't know if I have that kind of patience for either endeavor.

I found the action scenes to be believable, though - outside of a man fighting his own clone, of course.  And it's rare to see such a perfect melding of story with special effects that have only recently been perfected - the last good example might have been something like "Avatar", which heralded the start of the motion-capture trend.  I guess this film didn't do the box office that was expected of it, but still, it made some money, it wasn't a total bomb.  Critically it apparently didn't fare very well either, but I didn't have too many problems with it - certainly not as many Nitpick Points as I had with "Bad Boys for Life".  And if you watch both films back-to-back like I did, you may notice that the two films sort of riffed off the same theme, at least to a certain degree.

Also starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead (last seen in "A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III"), Clive Owen (last seen in "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets"), Benedict Wong (last heard in "Lady and the Tramp"), Ralph Brown (last seen in "The Crying Game"), Linda Emond (last seen in "Jenny's Wedding"), Douglas Hodge (last seen in "The Report"), Ilia Volok (last seen in "Pawn Sacrifice"), E.J. Bonilla (last seen in "The Kitchen"), Bjorn Freiberg, Justin James Boykin, David Shae (also carrying over from "Bad Boys for Life"), Theodora Miranne, Diego Adonye, Lilla Banak, Igor Szasz,

RATING: 7 out of 10 tracking devices

Bad Boys for Life

Year 12, Day 253 - 9/9/20 - Movie #3,649

BEFORE: It's been almost nine years since I watched the first two "Bad Boys" movies - I barely even remember what happened in them!  I hope remembering the plot details of the second film is not important for watching the third movie, which came out earlier this year.  This one sure came to premium cable very quickly!  That's usually a bad sign, isn't it?

Vanessa Hudgens carries over from "Thirteen".

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Bad Boys" (Movie #976), "Bad Boys 2" (Movie #977)

THE PLOT: Miami detectives Mike Lowrey and Marcus Burnett must face off against a mother-and-son pair of drug lords who wreak vengeful havoc on their city.

AFTER: I may have watched the first two films back to back in September of 2011, but they were released eight years apart, and now here's the third film a full seventeen years after Part 2 came out in 2003.  But it's been only nine years since I watched the other two, and nine is less than seventeen, or so I've been told.  Standard SPOILER ALERT if you haven't seen the latest entry in the "Bad Boys" franchise just yet.

Without giving much of the plot away (there's a plot?) I think somebody did a fine job here of moving the story along for the two main characters, Mike Lowrey and Marcus Bennett - you have to figure that their lives would change over the course of 17 years since the last installment, right?  So Marcus has to deal with getting older, becoming a grandfather for the first time, and considering retirement to spend more time with his family.  Naturally Mike doesn't react well to the possibility of their partnership ending, but hey, everything ends sometime.  If a police officer has a chance to retire before the job becomes too dangerous, he should probably take that opporunity.  It's clear that Martin Lawrence is getting up there in age, too, because him being semi-retired gives him a chance here to bow out of having to be involved with any stunt work.  Notice that it's always Will Smith's (umm, or his stunt double?) character doing the running and the jumping, and Lawrence's character is noticably absent, or else he's made a promise to God to not shoot anybody or otherwise be violent in the future, which seems a bit too convenient.

(But this leads me to my first NITPICK POINT, which is an intended funny bit where Marcus refuses to admit that he's getting older, so he denies taking Viagra and also refuses to wear his glasses, even though it's clear that he can't shoot straight or catch something thrown at him until he finally relents and puts the glasses on.  As someone who's worn eyeglasses for most of my life, there's no shame in not having perfect vision, so this bit just doesn't really land.  What purpose does it serve someone to pretend that he doesn't need glasses, when this would cause him to walk around bumping into things, and also be very potentially hazardous?  It's not even that funny, so why is it even a bit?  It's just a way of keeping a character unimportant or useless until the plot needs him to be helpful, but there were other better ways of getting there.)

Marcus may be the family man, but in this storyline there's a relationship from Mike's past that comes back to haunt him.  It seems he was involved with a Mexican drug lord's wife, back before he was teamed up with Marcus - and she's out of prison and wants revenge on everyone who put her there, including Mike Lowrey.  OK, a couple of things don't really work here, the main one being that Mike is a Miami police officer, and as such he never would have been sent on an undercover assignment in Mexico.  It doesn't matter if drugs from Mexico are flooding the streets of Miami, this would have been WAY out of his jurisdiction.  Sorry, this is NITPICK POINT #2 - we have Interpol and DEA that work on this sort of thing, not local cops.

This druglord's wife, who's also some kind of Mexican witch or witch doctor or something, sends her son to Miami to kill everyone who had a hand in her incarceration and also her husband's arrest, from the judge on the case to the D.A., and the forensics guy, and especially Mike, the former undercover agent.  There's something a little wonky here, too - like was the drug lord operating out of Mexico, or did he get arrested and tried in Miami?  And if so, for God's sake, why did he come to Miami?  It doesn't really work either way - did they get extradited from Mexico to Florida to stand trial, and then sent back to Mexican prison?  That's just not how these things work.  N.P. #3.

N.P. #4 involves how quickly Mike manages to put the pieces of the case together, in about 10 seconds of searching the internet.  Which seems weird because the film just spent about an hour showing how ultra-impossible it was to figure out the criminal mastermind, since that combination of cop, judge and D.A. worked together to incarcerate several hundred people.  And then Mike just kind of pieces it together in 10 seconds in front of a computer?  No way, my browser takes longer than that just to load ONE WEB PAGE.  Besides, Mike isn't even an internet expert, there's another guy in the squad who's the technical genius, how come HE didn't put this together?   Anyway, if there's 100 criminal cases with somebody who might want revenge on exactly those four people, that's a solid start to the investigation, you take those 100 cases and you eliminate the unlikely ones until you have your answer.  Doesn't anybody remember good old-fashioned detective work?  Hey, that could have been something for Marcus the old-school relic to DO, instead of half-retiring and spending spa days watching telenovelas with his family.

NITPICK POINT #5 involves this special squad that's been put together, the AMMO (Advanced Miami Metro Operations) squad.  They're a bit like CSI meets SWAT, using computers, forensics and advanced weaponry, and their first task is to put all these resources into finding out who's targeted Mike.  And the police rules are very clear that Mike, under no circumstances, is allowed to be on this squad, because that would represent a conflict of interest.  Umm, guess what happens?  The Captain reasons that since Mike's going to investigate his own case renegade-style, making him a consultant to the squad is the safest thing to do, so at least he'll have some supervision and not ruin the investigation.  This is a most terrible idea, it's a clear violation of police procedure, and it only leads to him having some supervision when he DOES ruin the investigation.  Yeah, great idea there.

It all leads up to a showdown in Mexico City where, again, the Miami cops have no jurisdiction at all.  Sure, bring the whole squad, they don't have any right to be there, either.  And while they explain that Mike and Marcus can't bring their guns with them when they fly on a commercial airline, and they're seen buying new guns when they arrive in Mexico, none of that explains how the rest of the AMMO squad got to bring their guns and tech along.  Yup, that's N.P. #6.  While I realize you can't have a big finale with guns and explosions and super cool drones and stuff, them having all this equipment available is a big "HUH? moment.  While I'm at it, the drone reminds me about N.P. #7, earlier in the film the AMMO squad uses a drone to spy on an illegal arms deal going down, and there's just no way that the perps wouldn't have seen, or at least heard, that drone spying on them from inside the same room.

Despite all of these story problems, audiences didn't seem to have the same issues with the film that I did - this is the highest-grossing film in the franchise.  I guess action movie fans aren't really interested in movies making sense, they just want the flash-bang and the return of the two main characters they remember from the previous films.  Originally they were talking about making both "Bad Boys 3" and "Bad Boys 4" back-to-back, but then there were a number of production delays, getting all the parties to agree on salaries and scheduling was something of a nightmare, and then when talks resumed, they later announced just one sequel and not two.  So I wonder if this story somehow compressed the plot of both films into one, thus losing the potential cliffhanger at the end of Part 3 and this could also explain why the film felt so rushed, why Mike was able to figure out who was after him so damn quickly.

I think with a little more effort this could have been an entertaining and not just action-packed film, but so many sloppy, sloppy mistakes!  My conscience won't allow me to score it any higher than I did.

Also starring Will Smith (last seen in "Aladdin"), Martin Lawrence (last seen in "The Beach Bum"), Alexander Ludwig (last seen in "Race to Witch Mountain"), Charles Melton, Paola Nuñez, Jacob Scipio, Kate del Castillo (last seen in "The 33"), Nicky Jam, Joe Pantoliano (last seen in "Ready to Rumble"), Theresa Randle (last seen in "Bad Boys II"), Dennis Greene (ditto), Bianca Bethune (ditto), Massi Furlan (last heard in "Murder Mystery"), Happy Anderson (last seen in "Going the Distance"), Rory Markham (last seen in "Alex Cross"), Carlos Guerrero (last seen in "The Leisure Seeker"), Ivo Nandi (last seen in "Dolemite Is My Name"), David Shae (last seen in "Richard Jewell"), Jay Amor, Eduardo Rosario, with cameos from Michael Bay, DJ Khaled (last seen in "Pitch Perfect 3").

RATING: 6 out of 10 rubber bullets

Thirteen

Year 12, Day 252 - 9/8/20 - Movie #3,648

BEFORE: Happy belated birthday to Evan Rachel Wood, born on September 7, 1987.  That was Labor Day this year, and yesterday's film fit in more with that theme, but since I started watching this one before midnight on 9/7, I'm counting that as a birthday salute.

This is also BACK TO SCHOOL film #2, following "The New Guy", which was a film about a teen boy acting tough to survive high school - for the sake of balance, this one's about a teen girl acting out to make friends in high school.  One's a comedy and one's a drama, but still, things are still sort of happening in twos like they did in August.  I've had "Thirteen" on my list for quite some time, for a while I was going to link to it via "Swing Shift", but that film then got moved into the romance chain in February last year.  Then I tried to link to it via the animated film "Ferdinand", via Jeremy Sisto, but then that film got dropped last year and re-scheduled into 2020.  All of this didn't help me get to "Thirteen", so this is at least the third attempt to schedule it, as it didn't fit into last September's schedule either.  Finally, FINALLY I'm crossing off this film today, no matter what.

Holly Hunter carries over from "Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her".

THE PLOT: A thirteen-year-old girl's relationship with her mother is put to the test as she discovers drugs, sex and petty crime in the company of her cool but troubled new best friend.

AFTER: I think the first time I saw Evan Rachel Wood in a movie, she was just nine or ten, the film was "Digging to China", which I think I saw at the Sundance Festival in January 1998.  Then I don't think I saw her in anything else until I watched "Across the Universe" in 2007, that movie that made actors sing a bunch of Beatles songs, forcing a very convoluted plot.  Sometime after that I watched "The Missing", which she filmed at the age of 15 or 16, and then "The Wrestler", which came five years after that - and I didn't really make the connection back to that 10-year old girl from "Digging to China".  So by the time she became super-famous for starring in the reboot series "Westworld" in 2016, I was still saying, "Who the hell is that?" even though I'd seen her in a respectable number of films, but somehow she was always under my radar.

Clearly I missed something somewhere, maybe it was those awkward teen years - but after watching "Thirteen", maybe I got the better part of that deal.  I should have quit while I was ahead, because there are parts of this film that were just painful for me to watch, and I'm not just talking about the tongue-piercing scene.  Sure, everybody goes through some kind of rebellious phase when they're a teenager, who doesn't want to misbehave for fun every now and again.  It's become practically a rite of passage for teens to drink a little, smoke a little, try all sorts of little chemical experiments and also sexual ones, part of becoming an adult is to figure out where one's own limits are.  But this film really piles them on to demonstrate an extreme example of a teen girl acting up - or is it acting out?

Which really interferes with me being able to label this as a "back to school" film - OK, sure, there are some scenes set in a high school classroom, but there's very little attention paid here to doing homework, taking exams, or even taking notes.  Last week I pointed out after watching "The Wilde Wedding" that if that film had depicted a wedding in which everyone showed up, behaved and everything went smoothly, that would have been very boring indeed.  By the same token, I'll admit that if Tracy just went to class, completed all of her assignments, followed all the rules and generally tried her best to fit in but also not draw too much attention to herself, yeah, that's also a very boring film.  Some things HAVE to go wrong in her life, or she's got to get into some kind of trouble along the way, or her teenage experience would be, well, just as boring as mine was - and you don't see anybody making any films about my so-called high school life.

Instead she's an extreme example of bad behavior, in order to become friends with Evie, the popular girl, she starts shoplifting and also stealing a purse or two, then once they're besties there are drugs smoked, snorted and inhaled, from there it's on to kissing guys, making out with guys (separately and then together) and then making out with each other.  In a few weeks Evie's been spending so much time at Tracy's house that they're practically roommates, and Evie keeps selling sob stories about how her mother's not really her mother but just her legal guardian, and her mom's boyfriend likes to beat her, so can't she just stay over a little longer?  For extra messed-up points Tracy is also seen cutting herself, and that's a whole different ball of wax from what little I know about it, but hey, at least it prepares her for all the piercings that are in her future.

Tracy's a child of divorce, and her father is constantly too busy to visit, let alone be a guiding influence.  Meanwhile her mother works as a freelance hairdresser just to make ends meet, and also has a live-in boyfriend, who seems OK but is probably another bad influence in some way.  I don't think any of this explains or excuses Tracy's bad behavior, but I think somehow we're supposed to draw the conclusion that it's all connected somehow.  Is Tracy acting up to get noticed, or just taking advantage of the lack of discipline coming from her parents?  Those are kind of two different things, and sometimes it's hard to tell if the parental neglect causes the child's bad behavior, or if it's the other way around - or maybe it's a cycle once the ball gets rolling, who can say?

For that matter, did Evie completely drag Tracy into the world of bad behavior, or did Tracy jump into it herself?  Which one influenced the other, or are they both co-conspirators?  And how far will each girl go to misbehave and then try to cover it up when their mothers start to notice?  Evie's mother is a model and actress who's never around, so we're left to conclude that her method of "hands off" parenting is the worse of the two options, but still she can't believe that her daughter is the "bad one", she's convinced it must have been Tracy corrupting Evie, not the other way around.  Another cycle of bad behavior reinforcing itself, I suspect.

In all of this, it's the school work that gets neglected the most - which I think screenwriters are eager to abandon, even in films about good students.  Classes are boring, in life and in movies, so it's often the first thing thrown out the window in school-based films like "Booksmart", "Good Boys" and "Superbad".  You know what's more fun than seeing kids going to class?  Watching kids go to parties, or trying to get to parties.  Maybe if some screenwriter had allowed Tracy to pay more attention in class, or give her some time to focus on her homework, then she wouldn't have to repeat seventh grade.  Just saying.

Also, there's no real solution offered here to the problem of Tracy's juvenile delinquency.  The film ends after Tracy's mom blames Evie and Evie's mom blames Tracy for the situation, the relationship between the two girls is shattered, and Tracy and her mother are seen motionless together on a bed for a long period of time.  Umm, that's not a resolution of any kind - you can't just raise a bunch of  questions and not answer them - what's in the cards for Tracy?  Can she straighten up and fly right, or has she been forever tainted by her experiences with sex and drugs?  Will she learn anything in her second try at seventh grade, or ever do any homework at all?  How much therapy is there in her future?  A dream sequence of her on a playground isn't really an answer.

The director, Catherine Hardwicke, based Tracy on the real-life experiences of the actress who played Evie, as she was in a long-term relationship with Nikki Reed's father.  And the two actresses playing 13-year-olds were really 15 or 16, because otherwise some scenes might have been illegal.  Then that same director went on to direct "Twilight" (which I'm going to watch in early October) with two of the actresses from this film in it.  But none of that affects my score for the film, which is based mostly on how much I enjoyed it - but it's not really a film meant to be enjoyed, is it?  It's more of a cautionary tale, or for someone like me, a confirmation of my life choices to not have children who would only grow up to become problematic teenagers.

Also starring Evan Rachel Wood (last heard in "Frozen II"), Jeremy Sisto (ditto), Nikki Reed, Brady Corbet (last seen in "While We're Young"), Deborah Kara Unger (last seen in "White Noise"), Kip Pardue (last seen in "Remember the Titans"), Sarah Clarke (last seen in "Happy Endings"), D.W. Moffett (last seen in "Pacific Heights"), Vanessa Hudgens (last seen in "Spring Breakers"), Jenicka Carey, Ulysses Estrada, Sarah Blakly-Cartwright, Jasmine Di Angelo, Tessa Ludwick, Cynthia Ettinger (last seen in "Frailty"), Charles Duckworth, Jamison Yang (last seen in "The Ugly Truth"), Yasmine Delawari (last seen in "Mr. Brooks").

RATING: 3 out of 10 trips to the mall

Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her

Year 12, Day 251 - 9/7/20 - Movie #3,647

BEFORE: I saved this one for Labor Day, because it seems to be some kind of anthology of women's stories, and the characters have a variety of professions - doctor, bank manager, police detective - I don't want to read too much of the plot before watching the film, obviously.  This may be a tenuous link to the spirit of the holiday, but I can't be certain until I watch it.  Anyway, it was enough for me to insert two skip days into last week, which ultimately is going to make it easier for me to spread my films out across the month, as I'd prefer to not have a full week at the end of the month where I'm not watching any movies, and thus feel like I'm not making progress.  I also can't block out October yet, even though New York Comic Con got cancelled, I still don't know if we'll be able to go on any kind of vacation, like we have in October for the last several years.  The immediate goal is to just stay focused, spread out my movies and try to get through September as best as I can.

Either way, good or bad, this film's been taking up space on my DVR since June of last year, so it will be a relief to watch it and clear a little bit of room.  Glenn Close carries over from "The Wilde Wedding" for the last time in this chain, and I think for the year.

THE PLOT: Five California women struggle with personal problems as their own paths unwind in unexpected ways.

AFTER: As an anthology of sorts, this could be viewed as five short films that are linked together, they're set in the same storytelling universe, and I believe there are five or so characters that appear in two segments each, so in theory I should be all over this, in a way it's reminiscent of my movie chains, where every day one actor or actress carries over from the last film, and then a different one may carry over to the next.  Something like five days of movie-viewing for me, compressed into under two hours!  So I should support this storytelling style - but then since the five shorts are being presented together, the question then becomes - do the five stories flow together well, is there a point to telling these five stories in a row, does the total equal something greater than the sum of its parts?

There must be other movies that follow this format, but I haven't encountered very many - the only one that leaps to mind is "Pulp Fiction", which is kind of in its own league, and is one of the few films that I'll allow to bend time and space for the purposes of crafting a tale.  Somehow that film circles back on itself, it ends in a place and time shortly after where it started, and the real final scene is somewhere in the middle, if you're really interested enough to parse out the correct chronology through the actions of, and the things that happen to, John Travolta's character.  A pretzel-shaped timeline that managed to present the information in the most satisfying way, it seems, and somewhere around your 7th or 8th viewing of the film I found I could see the way it all is supposed to come together.

I suspect that it might also take 7 or 8 viewings of "Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her" in order to fully unlock all of its secrets and put every little thing properly in its place.  The clues are all there, it seems, and I managed to miss quite a few of them.  The film opens with the discovery of a suicide victim, and the detective later discusses some aspects of the case with her blind sister, and the sister's insights send her back to look for more clues at the crime scene, and then those clues spark more theories about this woman, whose name is Carmen.  Normally I'm against spoilers, but if you haven't seen this film, what I'm about to tell you will be helpful the first time you watch this.  Carmen appears in each of the five segments, somewhere in the background.  If you know to look for her, this might make things easier - and this tells us something about the timeline, if you're interested in putting the segments into chronological order.  The first part of the film, when Carmen's body is discovered, is therefore next-to-last, and a later segment where her autopsy is performed would then be the last one to occur.  It's possible that her appearances in the film, viewed as a whole, could confirm the theories put forth over why came to L.A. and why she killed herself - but since I wasn't looking for this evidence, I didn't notice it.  But maybe it's something of an "Easter Egg Hunt" that you could look for during your 4th or 5th viewing of the film - I don't have that kind of time, and honestly I'd rather watch "Pulp Fiction" again.

SPOILER ALERT for the rest of this post, because it's impossible to discuss the film further without giving away key elements of the plot.  If you haven't seen this film, but intend to in the future, please turn back now.

The first main segment concerns a female doctor who is caring for her elderly mother, while also dealing with her own relationship problems resulting from dating other doctors.  She passes the time in various ways, which include getting a tarot card reading from a psychic that makes house calls, and from what we're told (which, honestly, isn't much) the reading appears to be spot-on.  Well, I guess it is, since we're not given much information to contradict it.  The second segment concerns a bank manager, who is dating a married man and then learns she has become pregnant, after scheduling abortion for the next day, she happens upon a co-worker from the bank in a bar and has a one-night stand with him.  She also interacts with a homeless woman in the bank parking lot while on her smoke breaks, and the homeless woman sort of fulfills the same function as the psychic did in the first segment, namely accidentally giving insight into her character and mental state.  The doctor from the first segment re-appears as the bank manager's abortionist, the first crossover between the stories, but certainly not the last.

In the third segment, a divorced mother writes children's books and is focused on her 15-year old son, when a little person (they say "dwarf" in the film, but this was made in 2000 and I'm not sure the term is still acceptable) moves in across the street.  She sees him at the grocery store and offers him a ride home, and after learning his back-story, she seems to be considering him as a potential love interest.  The fourth segment brings back the psychic from the first segment, and details her home life, caring for her terminally ill girlfriend.  The final segment sort of wraps things up, picking up the thread of the detective with the blind sister investigating Carmen's suicide.  In doing her case-work, she interviews someone at a hospital, who turns out to be the L.P. from the third segment - and the blind sister goes on some dates with the bank employee who had a fling with the bank manager in the second segment.  Finally a theory is proposed over the timeline of the deceased woman, and a short montage gives us a little update on all of the central characters, like a little capper or a coda for each one.

In the wrong hands, this anthology could have been even more confusing.  If somebody like Paul Thomas Anderson or Robert Altman had turned this into a "Magnolia" or "Short Cuts"-like film, the temptation was probably there to cross-cut between all five segments, and that would have been a mistake.  The Tarantino approach of bending time to give each segment room to breathe was, I believe, the correct choice.  But it's an interesting topic for debate - were different editing techniques tried for this and rejected, or was this the only framing method that was considered?  What, if anything, was the common theme across all the segments - loneliness?  A desire to connect with others?  Sacrifice?  The fact that women are complex, complicated creatures that resist all efforts to figure them out?  (OK, maybe I'm projecting on that last one.)  Or are female lives so complicated that we shouldn't even try to quantify these stories in such basic, commonplace terms?

There was a time, not that long ago, when there were no female doctors, no female police detectives, no female bank managers.  I know that we still haven't reached a point of equality in the workplace, not even with how much women are paid when compared to men, but progress has been made.  Once upon a time women could become nurses, but not doctors, it's hard to believe.  I rewatched that "RBG" documentary while taping it last week and editing out the ads, and Justice Bader-Ginsburg made a whole career out of striking down the laws that were keeping women from applying for the same jobs as men, the same college courses, and receiving the same benefits along the way.   Even when I was working at a movie theater in the early 1990's, the managers would only hire males as ushers and females to work at the concession stand.  I personally didn't feel like suing the theater over this point, but I could have.

Perhaps I'm overthinking things.  The film's title comes from something that's said about the suicide victim - what the detective and the coroner have to do is tell something about the woman just by looking at her (and, umm, maybe also there's the toxicology report) and it's also what we in the audience have to do, we have to determine some things just by looking at these characters.  Maybe that's all that's required here, and maybe in the end that should be enough.  But is it?  I'm not sure.

Oddly, this was made as a theatrical film that was eligible for the Emmys - Holly Hunter was nominated for an Emmy for this back in 2000.  Did it not have a theatrical release in the U.S.?  After playing at the Sundance Festival in 1999, it appears to have gone straight to Showtime, thus qualifying it for the Emmys, and not the Oscars.  I'm thinking there's a story there, perhaps it's just as simple as some male film executives not thinking there was an audience for a female-centric film.  It made some money in theatrical release overseas, but there's zero U.S. box office.  Well, if you don't put a film in the theaters, then the audiences can't go out and see it, and this then becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, doesn't it?

Also starring Cameron Diaz (last seen in "The Box"), Calista Flockhart (last seen in "A Midsummer Night's Dream"), Kathy Baker (last seen in "The Ballad of Lefty Brown"), Amy Brenneman (last seen in "City of Angels"), Valeria Golino (last seen in "Frida"), Holly Hunter (last seen in "Trespassing Bergman"), Matt Craven (last seen in "Dragonfly"), Gregory Hines (last seen in "The Muppets Take Manhattan"), Miguel Sandoval (last seen in "Sid and Nancy"), Noah Fleiss (last seen in "Brick"), Danny Woodburn (last seen in "The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas"), Penelope Allen (last seen in "The Thin Red Line"), Roma Maffia (last seen in "Holes"), Mika Boorem (last seen in "Riding in Cars with Boys"), Irma St. Paule, Juanita Jennings, Jacob Avnet, Elpidia Carrillo.

RATING: 5 out of 10 parking meters

The Wilde Wedding

Year 12, Day 250 - 9/6/20 - Movie #3,646

BEFORE: Well, if I moved yesterday's film (and tomorrow's) out of next year's romance chain into September, then I might as well take this one with it, too - if I leave it in the romance category it doesn't connect to much there, just one film, and two connections are the minimum required.  This one feels like the most romance-heavy film of the three, so I'm not totally sold on the idea of moving it, because there's always the chance that another film will turn up to make the connection on the other side, so what to do?

I did a quick pass through the (very rough) plan for next February, after removing these three films and three others that I excised in order to make my September connections - thankfully I'd already highlighted any actors and actresses that appear more than once in bright green, so I'd know all the other possible options for connections, other than the ones I was already using.  I can't be sure just yet, because it's still so super early, but it seems like I still have plenty of options - removing these six films from the mix could actually make next February's chain tighter and more focused - and maybe less reliant on finding new films to bridge the gaps.  It's an odd concept, like if you knocked out a couple of bricks from a wall and somehow made the wall stronger in the process - but I've seen this happen before with my horror chains.  Just a week or so ago I moved "Replicas" to October and used it (along with "Birds of Prey" and "Doctor Sleep") to bridge a gap that otherwise would have required renting 3 films from iTunes that I wasn't crazy about, I think moving these three Glenn Close films from February to September is along those same lines.

Now, next question, because I don't HAVE to move this one with the other two, I could drop this one and the gap would close up around it, and that would free up one more slot for 2020 - so is there any film that's begging to be added, with an actor that I'm already using as a link, so it could be added in right between them?  Again, a quick search through my cast lists of the actors I'm going to use as links - and nope, nothing seems like an obvious omission, so I'm going to stick with the plan and proceed.  Just for fun, here are my links for the rest of September - after Glenn Close comes Holly Hunter, Vanessa Hudgens, Will Smith, Karen Gillan, Jimmy Tatro, Allison Janney, Tammy Blanchard AND Maddie Corman, Tom Hanks, Karen Gillan (again), Dan Stevens, Will Ferrell, Joe Manganiello, and Chris Hemsworth.  If you're ambitious enough to search the IMDB, you might even figure out my September schedule - but why would you want to?

Glenn Close carries over, for the next-to-last time this year, from "The Wife".

THE PLOT: A retired film star's wedding to her fourth husband brings chaos when their families (and her ex-husband) show up for the festivities.

AFTER: I think I made the right call by moving this one out of February - it's not really about romance, well it is and it isn't, I'll get more into that in a bit.  It's really about a crazy family, or two crazy families, and a bunch of shenanigans before a wedding.  There's relationship-y stuff, but mostly between exes, which would sort of grandfather it in under "relationship" issues, but I think the focus here is on comedy, not some kind of intent to examine the nature of relationships, or instructions on how to maintain proper co-parenting relationships with ex-partners.  Plus, as a bonus, this is the third film appearance this year for John Malkovich, Patrick Stewart and Minnie Driver, so they'll all make my year-end countdown now.  Another little indicator that maybe I'm on the right track, if there even is such a thing.

But there seems to be a huge divide here between those top stars and, well, the rest of the actors.  I feel like I can tell you EXACTLY how many of these actors got their own trailer, and, well, it's four.  The other actors feel like they're straight out of central casting, maybe one or two exhibit that "Hey, it's THAT guy" effect, but mostly I've never heard of these actors, and for me, that's saying something.  I think there's one actress that I've seen 3 or 4 times, but I mainly know her because my boss follows her mother on Facebook, and she posts something every time her daughter is in a new film, even if it's a tiny role.  She means well, but it's also a bit much.

The other problem, and this is sort of tangential to the last one, is that there are WAY too many characters here.  Sometimes more is not more, more is just too much - somebody wanted to show how crazy these two families are, and logically more characters means more craziness, only comedy is not always logical.  If there are two many characters it can be hard to keep them all straight - if they were all actors I was familiar with it might be a bit easier, but that's not the case.  So we have the lead character, her ex-husband and her prospective husband.  She's got three sons with the first husband, and two of those sons have daughters, one of those daughters brings a friend (girlfriend?) and then there's another kid on that side, but I can't even tell who his father is, it's unclear.  Then one son's ex-wife shows up (the mother of one of those daughters) and she's also got a son, but from a different father.  Geez, I'm exhausted already trying to keep this straight, and that's only the bride's side of the guest list.

The groom arrives with two daughters (neither family has met before, so the introduction of everybody to everybody else takes like ten minutes, or maybe it just feels that way) and his daughter's friend who he says is "like his third daughter".  Mmm-hmm, that could be important later - it's a bit unclear at first if she's the girlfriend of one of his daughters, or what.  This film wanted so badly to be progressive, to act like gay relationships are no big deal, but it just couldn't quite make that leap - was some studio afraid of alienating the conservatives in the audience?  Or was this the point, that the twenty-somethings today are more gender-fluid, and don't make a big deal about being bisexual or having casual sexual relationships with their friends?  It's unclear, unclear, unclear to the point of being maddening.  Or perhaps this is a by-product of having so many characters that there's really no time to delve into the relationships of the minor characters, because we need to focus on the more prominent characters.  Or maybe I'm seeing things that aren't really there, these extra guests are just "family friends" and that's all, they're not important to the plot.  But if they're not important, then why are they even there?  Start trimming away the extra characters, and narrow the focus here.

I'll give two specific examples, to prove my point, and then I'll move on.  The groom's best man shows up last, and he's Italian for some reason, and naturally he's also got two daughters with him.  There's some weirdness in the car, like he's hesitant to complete the last quarter-mile of the car trip, but finally the journey is complete, he arrives at the big house, is greeted by the groom, and...well, that's it.  He seems like he might be an interesting character, like why does the groom have an Italian best friend?  What's up with his daughters?  Why did he stop the car and seem reluctant to arrive?  I've got no idea, because the movie then forgot about him and his daughters (umm, I think, again, too many characters to keep track of...) and in fact they could have cut this whole best man character out of the film, and it wouldn't have made a difference.  It might even have made things a bit less confusing.  Don't introduce characters late in the game unless you're going to DO something with them, that's a good rule to follow.

Second example - Mackenzie, the granddaughter of the bride, is the one talking directly to the audience, and she's also making a film (using a video-camera, not her phone for some reason, very 1990's) by interviewing the guests on their thoughts about love.  Though I'd say the film is very erratic, it's got no focus, and comes to no conclusion, and about halfway through the film, it feels like the director forgot that this is something Mackenzie does.  Mackenzie is attracted to her cousin, which she acknowledges is wrong, but he's not really her cousin, or is he?  This is the grandson that I couldn't track, I wasn't sure whose son he was, and it seems maybe Mackenzie's not sure either.  Here's the problem - what's his appeal?  There's no time to even give him any distinguishing characteristic, so I don't even understand why she's attracted to him.  Is it just because he walks around without a shirt on?  He barely even talks - OK, maybe she likes the silent type, but this is another casualty of the "too many characters" issue.  How did he rise above the crowd in this house to even catch her eye in the first place?

The one thing that the big crowd in the big house does create is plenty of opportunity.  There's one son on the bride's side who will screw anything in a dress, and there's so many girls to choose from that he barely even needs his box of chocolates with drugs in them.  If he gets turned down, he just moves on to the next random girl.  Another one of the bride's sons is more focused, he apparently did a lot of research on the groom's daughters, and showed up knowing about her book award nomination, and she did the same with him, because he's a former rock star and she's a fan of his music.  This relationship I could keep track of, but for the most part, there's almost too many romantic pairings that are possible, especially when they lose track of that box of chocolates and it starts getting passed around.  So much drugs and so many bottles of wine and those inhibitions start coming down - for a while I thought that things were going to get so crazy that Husband #1 was going to sleep with Husband #4.  That didn't happen - but I suppose it could have.

(There's definitely a sort of "bedroom farce" to this whole thing.  I'd like to see one of these comedies with a lot of partner-swapping where somebody sleeps with their own spouse, and it's a total accident.  That would feel sort of Shakesperean in a weird way.  Maybe it's the presence of Patrick Stewart here, but with elements like drugged chocolates and free-flowing wine, I was reminded of plays like "A Midsummer Night's Dream", where there are magical love potions and such.)

Something does happen, and I don't really want to give it away here, because I always try to be spoiler-free, but I don't think it's a spoiler to say that "something goes wrong".  If there was a film about a big family wedding and you tuned in and everything just went according to plan, that could be a very boring movie, right?  So something goes wrong, and it has to be addressed.  Unfortunately, the solution is one that appears all too commonly in movies that simply can not happen in real life - it's a problem in fact that people who write movies think that this is the way that weddings work, and, well, they're wrong.  I've said too much, but if you're a fan of a certain classic Hollywood movie from 1940 that got re-made as another classic Hollywood movie in 1956, maybe you know what I'm talking about.

I think the larger point here is that famous people are more screwed up than regular people - the bride is a famous but retired actress, her ex-husband is a famous actor, and her intended groom is a well-known author.  One of the bride's sons is a former rock star, and his ex-wife is a currently famous pop star.  They operate by different rules than regular people, so for this reason it's somehow acceptable for them all to be on their second, third or fourth marriages.  But all their kids are divorced or otherwise relationship-challenged, too, so is the point that nobody these days is able to sustain a relationship?  And the younger generation is the most confused of all, they're crossing gender lines and even hot for their own cousins - so let's face it, nobody really knows anything about love and marriage, everybody's just making it up as they go along, and that means making a ton of mistakes.  I guess each generation is trying to avoid the mistakes that the last one made, but I fear that means they're just going to make all new mistakes of their own.  Oh, well.

Reading between the lines here, the film's box office is conspicuously absent from the IMDB - so that means it bombed, right?  I can see why - too many characters and too many plot points that don't connect with the others and are just left hanging there.  One last example - in one notable romantic coupling, perhaps under the influence of those drugged chocolates, one of the young women decides to make a plaster-cast mask of that son who sleeps around a lot.  Um, OK, except this process is not a romantic thing that horny people do, in fact it's pointless unless you're a make-up artist and you're going to create a monster-mask for that actor.  The gag is that he falls asleep with the plaster on (umm, where did SHE go?) and he stands up and walks straight into a wall, knocking himself out.  Well, I guess that's one thing to do with a character, but it's a prime example of a bit that comes from nowhere, goes nowhere, and serves no practical purpose at all.  It's sort of a metaphor for the entire film.

Also starring John Malkovich (last seen in "Supercon"), Patrick Stewart (last seen in "Charlie's Angels"), Minnie Driver (last seen in "Hard Rain"), Jack Davenport (last seen in "Kingsman: The Secret Service"), Grace Van Patten (last seen in "The Meyerowitz Stories"), Noah Emmerich (last seen in "Fair Game"), Peter Facinelli (last seen in "Riding in Cars with Boys"), Yael Stone, Lilly Englert (last seen in "Little Women"), Brigette Lundy-Paine (last seen in "Bombshell"), Tim Boardman, Kara Jackson, Rob Langeder, Paulina Singer (last seen in "The Intern"), Joe Urla (last seen in "Hands of Stone"), Jake Katzman, Victoria Guerra, Juan Castano, Camila Perez, Marsha Stephanie Blake (last seen in "The Laundromat"), Elizabeth Wood, Cher Cosenza, with a cameo from Edward Hibbert (last seen in "Father Figures")

RATING: 4 out of 10 oversized bedrooms in this house, apparently