BEFORE: Shia LaBeouf carries over again - these four films have been scheduled by me a few times before, but then I ran out of space last year and couldn't get to them, something had to be cut late in the year so I could get to some Christmas movies. So like many other films, they've been re-scheduled to serve another purpose, and it's to get me closer to my Easter movie. I'm going to treat this as an appropriate April Fool's Day movie, because I'm guessing that the magazine-selling thing is a scam - originally I had "Honey Boy" scheduled for April 1, I guess that could have worked, too.
Here's the TCM line-up for tomorrow, APRIL 2, in their "31 Days of Oscar" programming:
6:45 am "Around the World in 80 Days" (1956) - SEEN IT
10:00 am "Au Revoir Les Enfants" (1987)
12:00 pm "The Awful Truth" (1937) - SEEN IT
1:45 pm "Baby Doll" (1956)
3:45 pm "The Band Wagon" (1953) - SEEN IT
5:45 pm "Being There" (1979) - SEEN IT
8:00 pm "Ben-Hur" (1959) - SEEN IT
12:00 am "The Best Man" (1964)
2:00 am "The Big Chill" (1983) - SEEN IT
4:00 am "The Birds" (1963) - SEEN IT
Still doing very well - another 8 seen out of 10 brings me up to 15 seen out of 22, or 68% seen. Maybe there's something to this year's list after all. It's funny, TCM is running "An American in Paris" today, while I've programmed "American Honey"...
But where I live, in the "Land of Linking", if things go according to plan, here are the upcoming links for April, after Shia LaBeouf: Elias Koteas, Casey Affleck, Rooney Mara, Chiwetel Ejiofor, James Earl Jones, KiKi Layne, Veronica Ngo, Chadwick Boseman, J.K. Simmons, June Squibb, Jamie Foxx, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Sacha Baron Cohen, Mike Pence, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Donald Trump, Walt Disney, and Oprah Winfrey. I know, that's only 20 people, but that should get me to the end of April.
THE PLOT: A teenage girl with nothing to lose joins a traveling magazine sales crew and gets caught up in a whirlwind of hard partying, law bending and young love as she criss-crosses the Midwest with a band of misfits.
AFTER: OK, the first big problem with this movie is the length, it's two hours and 43 minutes long, that's way too long for any film where the Titanic isn't sinking, or Avengers aren't fighting Thanos. Somehow I made it through, but this was a struggle, because there's just not enough plot to fill up all that movie time. And yet this film is leaving Netflix in just a few days, I can't imagine why. Like, be a good movie or be a bad movie, just don't waste so much of my time.
Really, it's just the same stuff, over and over, drive to the next city and repeat. There are no real twists, there's no resolution, it doesn't really end but just STOPS. And if there was no point to be made in this film, then why couldn't it have not made that point in a much shorter time-frame? Seriously, a whole HOUR could have been cut from the middle of this film, and it wouldn't have made a damn bit of difference.
I think I was right about the magazine selling, it's a scam, right? I mean, they never really come right out and SAY that here, but they use so many different sob stories about trying to win a trip to Florida, trying to earn college tuition, or build a new athletic field for their college, so they're all clearly untrue. So these kids are the human equivalent of e-mail spam, so I don't like them - was I supposed to? I live in a city where people ask me for money every day on the street, and I know better than to give them any, because clearly they're not responsible to do proper things with it, they're only going to get drunk or get high with it. We've had something of a break in NYC because they rounded up most of the homeless people during the pandemic and stashed them in the city's hotel rooms that tourists are not staying in, which must be costing the city a lot of money, but I suppose that's better than spreading COVID around even worse than it is. But soon if the numbers keep going in the right direction, eventually tourism will come back, and they'll have to release the street people back to the streets. (Do they, though?)
This nomadic band of teens, traveling across the Midwest in a van, living day-to-day, under the thumb of a ruthless taskmaster, scamming people all day long to buy magazines that I'm sure never arrive by mail, what kind of life is this? Who would choose this, if they had alternatives? Also, how long can it go on? How long until people collectively get together and realize this is a scam, and the law enforcement in the next town is waiting for them to arrive? Or do they drive far enough away each time that word doesn't properly spread? Didn't those cowboy guys ever report their car as stolen, so how could it possibly be OK for Jake to keep driving it?
Basically, I didn't like any of the characters here, not at all, from the very start when we see Star being a "freegan", aka dumpster diving, and coming away with a clearly unfrozen chicken. OK, yeah, good luck with cooking that, I hope you enjoy salmonella. Then when we meet the merry band of magazine sellers, I hated them even more, so I kept hoping that their van would somehow overturn on the highway, or when two of them were sticking out of the sunroof that the whole vehicle would travel under a low bridge. No such luck.
But hey, it looks like maybe Shia LaBeouf worked through his personal issues, and this time he's only playing a disreputable character, instead of being one for real. Oh, wait, I'm going reverse-chronologically this week, it seems, so this film was released in 2016, three years before "Honey Boy". Never mind.
Also starring Sasha Lane (last seen in "Hearts Beat Loud"), Riley Keough (last seen in "Lovesong"), Arielle Holmes, McCaul Lombardi, Crystal Ice, Chad McKenzie Cox, Garry Howell, Kenneth Kory Tucker, Raymond Coalson, Isaiah Stone (last seen in "Winter's Bone"), Dakota Powers, Shawna Rae Moseley, Christopher David Wright, Verronikah Ezell, Will Patton (last seen in "Breakfast of Champions"), Sam Williamson, Daran Shinn, Bruce Gregory, Johnny Pierce II, Laura Kirk, Kaylin Mally, Summer Hunsaker, Brody Hunsaker, Chastity Hunsaker.
RATING: 2 out of 10 horny oil rig workers
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