BEFORE: It's Day 2 of the romance chain, but it's also Groundhog Day, one of our stupider holidays. We all know that the weather on one particular day has nothing to do with the prevailing weather coming up in the next couple of months, right? I could maybe sort of get behind this holiday if they pulled the groundhog out of his burrow and held him up to see if it was sunny or cloudy, which is still silly, but it turns out the "predictions" are on two scrolls,
at least this is the way it works in Pennsylvania - they bring poor Punxsutawney Phil over to this lectern with the two scrolls and he supposedly "picks" one for the club members to read. So, it's even stupider than I thought, a rodent who can't read sniffs one piece of paper instead of another, and then a bunch of men in tuxes and top hats read that weather prediction, as if that means something.
The other reason I never celebrate this holiday with a movie is that I've seen the only movie about the process, 1993's "Groundhog Day" - who hasn't? - so there's no reason to watch it again. In fact, watching it again at this point would kind of be weirdly ironic, because it might generate the same feeling that the main character goes through, reliving the same situation over and over again, with each repeated day being much like the last. Besides, haven't we had enough of that feeling during the pandemic lockdown? But there is a romantic aspect to that Bill Murray film, I'll admit - and there are other romance movies, like "Palm Springs", that sort of follow the same premise, but I don't have any of those movies on my list to watch. OK, that's not true, because "Palm Springs" itself is on my list, and it does connect to two romance films, but not ones that are next to each other, so working it in would mean re-ordering my list, and I promised myself I wasn't going to do that at this point. Everything for February and March is just the way I want it, so I don't want to mess with it.
Freddie Highmore carries over from "Almost Friends".
THE PLOT: George, a lonely and fatalistic teen who has made it all the way to his senior year without ever having done a real day of work, is befriended by Sally, a popular but complicated girl who recognizes in him a kindred spirit.
AFTER: The insight I had yesterday, which I forgot to mention, is that there's something inherently selfish about getting into a relationship. This goes for fictional characters as well as real people, I don't think that many people are starting relationships with the other person, or society in general, in mind. The reasons for forming that partnership bond seem to be mostly self-gratifying, in that someone is looking for happiness, pleasure, companionship, security, and some level of comfort - it's rare, I'm thinking, when two people get together and one of them is thinking more about the other person's needs than their own. Maybe it does happen somewhere out there, but I don't know. Charlie in "Almost Friends" probably wasn't putting Amber first when he chatted her up in the coffee shop, he was looking for a good time, plus using the potential of a relationship to get himself moving again, and out of his stuck situation.
"The Art of Getting By" features the same actor playing nearly the same character - OK, so his name here is George and he lives in New York City, not Mobile, Alabama, and he's still in high-school, but a lot of story elements carry over from yesterday's film. George is "stuck" also, but only because he's obsessed with the thought of dying someday, and this prevents him from doing any of his schoolwork, which in turn puts him at odds with all of his teachers and the principal. (Both characters are also children of divorced parents, living with their mothers and stepfathers, and both have shady fathers who left. Other, smaller details are also shared, like being in a love triangle and such.)
The listed plotline can't possibly be true - it posits that George has never done any schoolwork, even, but then how did he pass sophomore and junior year, wouldn't he have been held back or forced to repeat a grade if he never did any of the work? No, this simply HAS to be a recent change in his habits, something about getting close to graduating high school has made him shut down, and therefore logically he hasn't done any assignments during his senior year. The film reinforces this when in the three weeks before graduation, he finally agrees to get it all done. Which kind of works out, because after getting together with Sally, sort of, they end up on a kind of a break, and he's thus able to complete a year's worth of homework and tests in just three weeks. What a time-saver! If this were possible, and I'm not saying it is, why didn't he just do all the work in three weeks at the start of the semester, and then slack off for the rest of the year? Oh, right, nobody does that.
I was something of a math whiz in high-school, or at least somebody determined at the end of grade school that I was excellent at math - I think they gave everybody a test at the end of sixth grade and I got a perfect score or something. So in seventh grade the school allowed me to attend an eighth grade math class, and in eighth grade they sent me up to the high-school to take a tenth grade math class. Which was problematic, because the junior high and the high school weren't on the same schedule, so I often had to miss a history or english class to walk over to the high-school and attend Algebra II. In the end, I think this caused more problems than it solved, because teachers would sometimes mark me absent when I was at the other school, and then when I hit 10th grade I ended up taking Algebra II over again, because it didn't really stick. Then by the time I got to calculus I didn't even understand the course-work any more. We're doing what? Charting the area under a curve on a graph? I didn't even care.
So I kind of see where George is coming from, he's adopted a "What's the point?" attitude, and we're all going to end up there regarding all the courses we don't care about, but high-school's kind of about taking all the courses so everyone can find their "thing", whether that's wood shop or biology or music, and then focus on that if they go on to college or into the workforce. I found my "thing" sort of by accident, and if my life had been just a little different my thing could have been music or math or science, but I fell in love with movies, so there you go. And fortunately I took so many A.P. courses in high-school that I got college credits for them, and that meant I could take more film classes in college and fewer math, science and literature classes. My point is, the high-school classes are still very important, even if you don't care for them, and the time to slack off and not care is supposed to be college, so George is ahead of the curve here.
George's thing turns out to be art, since he's always drawing in every class - except for art class, for some reason. There's some logic to this, maybe it's only fun for him when he's NOT supposed to be doing it, and when he is supposed to be doing it, then it becomes a chore. I feel you, George. But then there's extra pressure to perform in art class, and whenever he tries to think about making a painting, and what the subject matter of that painting should be, he suddenly feels like he's a pretender, like he's full of crap and none of his ideas are any good. That's pretty much how I felt in film school, but by that point, the die had been cast for me and I'd chosen my field of work - so I decided that if my ideas weren't any good, nothing I'd care to present or stand behind as my own, then I'd devote my life to helping other people make their films. Makes sense, right? But I guess for a wanna-be graphic artist, that's not really an option - what's he going to do, help other people make their paintings?
He also gets his heart broken by Sally, and maybe it's better to get this over with in high-school, rather than college. The first cut is the deepest, as they say, so even though he thinks he can get something going with Sally, she may not be on the same page as him. But she offers sex and then retracts it a few seconds later, which is not cool. You can't just say, "Oh, I was kidding about that..." because now it's out there, suspended in the air between them, and for George, a guy who's never had sex, now he's got to move forward thinking he missed his opportunity because he waited 10 seconds too long and didn't take her up on the offer when he had the chance.
But hey, he's here to learn, we're all here to learn, and in your first relationship, there's bound to be a learning curve. And you can't really skip out on any of the lessons, you've got to go through them, because even if this first relationship doesn't work out, if you go through all the steps and feel all the feels, even the non-pleasant ones, then you'll be better prepared for the next time.
At least Freddie Highmore proves here that he's capable of showing emotion when he acts, he's not as deadpan here as he was in "Almost Friends" - but this film was released five years earlier, so, what, did he somehow forget that acting is about emoting? Or was that a choice made by the director of yesterday's film, to just read every line flat? And there's character growth here, too - when we first meet George he states that "We live alone, we die alone. Everything else is just an illusion." By the end of the film, he might believe that other answers are possible. (And for once, we get to SEE a painting! Too many films in January didn't allow me to see the artwork in question...)
Also starring Emma Roberts (last seen in "Billionaire Boys Club"), Michael Angarano (last seen in "The Stanford Prison Experiment"), Rita Wilson (last seen in "The Chumscrubber"), Blair Underwood, Alicia Silverstone (last seen in "Book Club"), Ann Dowd (last seen in "It Can Happen to You"), Elizabeth Reaser (last seen in "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2"), Sam Robards (last seen in "Life as a House"), Marcus Carl Franklin, Sasha Spielberg (last seen in "The Company Men"), Jarlath Conroy (last seen in "Heaven's Gate"), Andrew Levitas (last seen in "The Box"), Dan Leonard, Maya Ri Sanchez (last seen in "Motherhood").
RATING: 6 out of 10 graduation gowns
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