BEFORE: It's finally above freezing in NYC today, so that means getting out and shoveling the driveway in front of the car, so that we might have a chance of going somewhere by Saturday. Restaurants are open on Long Island, so we might drive out east just to have something to do and somewhere to go. But first I had to hack through a big pile of snow and ice on the driveway, plus when I cleared the walk on Monday I sort of threw the snow into the driveway, and it all piled up next to the car. My bad.
But I waited until the afternoon, when the sun comes around and shines on our side of the street, to help melt things a little bit. In two hours of shoveling (I never shovel into the street, like my neighbors do, I always pile it on my property) I got mostly through it, there's just one foot-high ice ridge that's still keeping us homebound for the moment, but I was shoveling water on it, which I normally wouldn't do, because that usually just makes things icier, but for now the water was warmer than the ice and I hoped to reduce the ridge by enough of a margin to make it surmountable for the car.
I hadn't eaten anything yet today, so when I was done shoveling I was really hungry, and just boiled up some water for instant ramen and I opened a can of Treet - if you're not familiar, it's Armour's knock-off of Hormel's SPAM, it's about half the price, but with a different flavor and none of the texture of SPAM. It's less solid, and I imagine SPAM fans think it's too soft, so it's an acquired taste, I guess. Somewhere between SPAM and scrapple, though I've never had scrapple? Anyway, I was hungry enough to eat half a can of this, on some open-faced white bread with American cheese on it. It's not a popular food item, maybe because of their slogan, which I think is "Hawaiian people love SPAM, but nobody, nowhere, likes TREET." I think they were going for a play on "Nobody doesn't like Sara Lee" but it seems awfully misguided.
Jane Seymour carries over from "Little Italy".
THE PLOT: A look at the science behind our romantic mishaps.
AFTER: This was supposed to be a scientific take on the romantic comedy, a film that would use knowledge of brain function and certain neuro-chemicals to explain why people act the way they do when in relationships, what causes people to make certain mistakes, and so on. But what it ended up being was more like a take on "The Love Boat". Allow me to explain.
"The Love Boat" was an ABC hour-long show in the 1970's and 80's, which itself was probably a spin on a show called "Love, American Style" that featured various comic vignettes and romantic situations - somebody clearly just pitched, "What if we did that same thing, but on a cruise ship?" And so each episode was a Caribbean cruise (once in a while they went to Alaska or something, in the later years) with new couples or singles coming on board, and simply EVERYBODY who was ANYBODY in movies or TV guested on this show. (I was a kid at the time, and I was dumb enough to think that the cast and crew went on a real cruise, which now sounds ridiculous, obviously there were ship-like sets built somewhere in a studio and all the island stuff was stock footage supplied by the cruise line.). Occasionally there'd be a "very special" episode when an ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend of one of the crew members would go on vacation, and that would end with the captain realizing that his real love is the ship, or the ocean itself, or something equally as corny.
But my point is that each week there would be three vacationing couples in crisis, and by the end of the cruise they'd either worked out their problems or (once in a while) decided to separate, but most likely they'd each found a new prospective partner somewhere on the boat. Love always won, and if you were a kid who watched too many episodes of this, that can mess up your brain and give you skewed expectations about relationships - after all, not every problem can be solved during an hour of TV, or even a week-long cruise. For a while there, the cruise-ship industry did really well, especially the Pacific Princess, with singles sailing in hopes of finding love on board, and married couples hoping to work out their problems - it makes sense, because a cruise is probably cheaper than couples counseling, and you also get to go somewhere.
So "The Female Brain" is sort of in the same vein, there are three couples with unique problems on display here, plus a scientist who's doing a study about the differences between men's brains and women's brains, and she ends up in a relationship of sorts with one of her test subjects. (It's kind of like one of those episodes where Captain Stubing fell in love.). The problem is that Julia, the scientist, narrates the dilemmas that the other three couples are having, to tell us what's going on chemically or psychologically inside their brains, and I'm not sure how she knows the other people. Were they all test subjects in one of her studies? Are they her patients, or is she somehow omniscient enough that she knows every relationship dilemma everywhere? It's really not clear.
Steven and Lisa are a couple, married for 12 years, and they're wondering if the spark is gone. They function together fine, but haven't had sex in a long while, and their brains are no longer getting dopamine from their pairing (which you only get during the first two years, apparently). After trying several things together, like taking ecstasy, they somehow land on the idea that they need to separate - not because they hate each other, they clearly don't, but it's more like they just need to have some kind of progression, and they've ruled out every other possible way to make things better. This seems like some horrible logic, but I wonder if some people in real life don't end up on this same track, just because they're so familiar with each other that they feel bored.
Zoe and Greg have been married for one year, she works in advertising and he's a basketball player, who recently got injured and is sidelined at home while recovering. He suddenly gets jealous about all the people who come and go around his own house, because he's usually traveling with the team, and then gets it in his head that he can renovate their bathroom, instead of hiring a contractor to do it. Zoe, meanwhile, wants to start her own advertising company, but is afraid of borrowing money from her husband to do this, because she doesn't just want to be a "basketball wife" and she needs to succeed on her own merits. (NITPICK POINT: Greg's NBA contract would probably forbid him from doing a construction project at home, especially after the injury he had. There would be too much chance of getting further injured while working at home, or aggravating the injury he already has, then he'd be away from the team longer.)
British Lexi and American Adam have been dating for 2 or 3 years and live together, but she's always fussing over her own looks, while also trying to get Adam to care more about his own. (Except he's played by James Marsden, who looks fine...). She wants him to straighten his hair, and she really wants to pop that pimple on his back (yes, this is a major plot point) and this leads to them breaking up - but after she visits her mother and realizes the cause of her insecurities, she promises to stop working so hard to change Adam, and they reconcile.
Meanwhile, Julia, the scientist, starts dating Kevin, one of her test subjects, even though she's seen inside his brain and determined that, like most men, he's incapable of empathy. She also comes down hard on her lab assistant, Abby, who's always self-medicating with caffeine, Ritalin, Ambien, etc. but realizes that she herself does the same thing, only by exercising to feel endorphins, cuddling with her dog to feel the effects of dopamine, and so on. So she goes on dates with Kevin, but it's more of an experiment for her, she's just going through the motions and trying to act like the humans do, it's like she's somehow just an observer in her own life. But we eventually learn that she was married before and her husband left her, which may explain why she's so detached from her feelings, but it just doesn't explain why she's so clueless about relationships.
I usually like Whitney Cummings' humor, like I watched her sitcom a few years back and I've seen her stand-up specials, but as an actress, she's only got two expressions, blank and disgusted. And I noticed that her lips don't really move much when she talks. These things were distracting - I wanted to like her, though, I guess that counts for something.
Once again, a movie's tagline is completely wrong - here the tagline is "What makes a woman swipe right for Mr. Wrong?" and that's a question that the film has no intention of answering, when it focuses on three couples that are ALREADY together. So there's no "swiping" in the film, nobody's doing any selecting of partners here. As a result the movie never gets around to answering (or even asking) why people choose THIS person over THAT person, and that might have been more interesting. Instead it just devolved into some sort of collection of "can this relationship be fixed" episodes, which again, is very "Love Boat".
It's a low-budget film from two years ago (made for about $1 million) but it only brought in $21,000 at the box office, and now it's available on Hulu. Seems about right. Up until last year, I was working on an animated film that was kind of in the same ballpark, one that showed a woman's different relationships throughout her life, but with an emphasis on describing the biological and chemical reactions in her body that would encourage her to form relationship bonds, and then the different reactions that would take place after each relationship failed. There's still a chance this film will get finished and released in the next year or two, but I'm apparently no longer involved with it, which is a shame, I worked on it for four years and I'd still like to help it get finished and screened in film festivals, if things get back to normal.
Also starring Whitney Cummings (last seen in "The Ridiculous 6"), Sofia Vergara (last seen in "The Con is On"), Toby Kebbell (last seen in "RocknRolla"), James Marsden (last seen in "Welcome to Me"), Lucy Punch (last seen in "She's Funny That Way"), Beanie Feldstein (last seen in "Booksmart"), Cecily Strong (last seen in "The Boss"), Blake Griffin, Deon Cole, Marlo Thomas (last seen in "Ocean's Eight"), Will Sasso (last heard in "Klaus"), Ben Platt (last seen in "Drunk Parents"), Adam Shapiro (last seen in "A Single Man"), Adam Korson, Phil Hendrie (last seen in "Between Two Ferns: The Movie"), Neal Brennan (last seen in "Capone"), Alysia Reiner, Angel Parker, Xosha Roquemore, Gwen Hollander, Rebeka Montoya, Andrew Schulz, Lisa Linke, Jaylin Fletcher, Vinoj Zacharia, Rachel LaForce, Beejay Hunter, Maz Jobrani (last seen in "13 Going on 30").
RATING: 4 out of 10 wine tasting samples
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