BEFORE: Richard Schiff carries over from "Shock and Awe", and it's a new month. I'm waiting to hear about training for my new job, so you could say I'm a bit on edge, it kind of all depends on last weekend's box office at Manhattan's movie theaters - if there was a big turn-out, then they'll need more staff and I'll be called into service. This could affect my ability to keep this blog going, it all depends on how many hours they'll need me per week - or I may have to trim down my list if there are days where I just won't have time to watch a movie.
While I'm waiting, here are my format stats for May:
15 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Death at a Funeral (2010), Cleaner, The Samaritan, Lakeview Terrace, Freedomland, Malcolm X, Judy, The Current War: Director's Cut, Bohemian Rhapsody, Papillon (2017), A Million Little Pieces, The Professor, Nick of Time, Mortdecai, Shock and Awe
7 Movies watched on cable (not saved): Shaft (2019), Harriet, My Dinner with Hervé, Death at a Funeral (2007), Dolittle, Tenet, Midway (2019)
5 watched on Netflix: Otherhood, I Care a Lot, A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon, The Devil All the Time, 6 Underground
2 watched on Amazon Prime: One Night in Miami..., The Lighthouse
2 watched on Hulu: Shirley, Lost in London
2 watched on Hulu: Shirley, Lost in London
1 watched on a random site: The Rum Diary
32 TOTAL
32 TOTAL
That's about 2/3 of my May movies that came from cable - last month was so Netflix-heavy, but now I'm back to my usual ratios, or close to it. I cleared a BUNCH of movies off my DVR, and that's good, I need to keep working at that. I've got 27 (or so) movies planned for June, and about 15 or 16 will come from cable, so that should free up some more storage space. While trying to focus on the maximum number of films from that source, my plan is also to screen films relevant to Father's Day (my next benchmark) and also some films about school, like today's. Because June is all about Dads and grads, right? Oh, yeah, also it's Gay Pride month but I don't think I was able to work anything about that in. Maybe something on that topic slipped by me and worked its way in, I'm not sure.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Professor" (Movie #3,850)
THE PLOT: An NYC professor spends a week re-connecting with his family while defending his reputation over controversial behavior at his college.
AFTER: Man, it's tough when it feels like your whole world is in flux, that everything is transitory and nothing is permanent. I speak from experience, I just visited my parents for my father's 80th birthday, and discussions are taking place about their long-term plans, whether they should transition to some form of assisted living because my mother's losing some of her mental faculties and my father's in charge of her medications and all her doctor's appointments. At the same time, I finally got a job offer after months of applying for part-time work, and now I'm waiting to hear about training, scheduling, all that fun stuff. I look back on my life and realize that perhaps my life's always been in a state of constant change, however it usually happened at an extremely slow, nearly glacial rate. Six jobs, six apartments or houses since I moved to NYC, two marriages, friends and co-workers who have come and gone. But somehow you only become very aware of the transitions when several are happening at once.
That's where (adjunct) college professor Josh Cohn finds himself, with everything in a state of transition - his grandmother has a terminal illness, or perhaps several, he's got a girlfriend from Italy visiting him for just two months, and his job is on the line after he persuaded a student to tell a personal story of a sexual nature, and other students have informed the administration that they no longer feel his classroom is a "safe space". On top of that, his mother's starting to give away his grandmother's possessions and his father's life is so controlled by his second wife that he's barely allowed to talk to his son, and Josh's half-brother doesn't even know that they're half-brothers.
Actions have consequences, sure - eventually we hear the story of how Josh had a relationship with his brother's nanny, which led to her quitting. His sister, Jackie, starts hanging out at his apartment after breaking up with her boyfriend, so it seems like her whole life's in flux, too. Hanging out with family and friends can help, especially if there's a great bagel place they like to all go to, but eventually it comes back to dealing with the consequences of one's actions, and then handling the fallout, the transitions that are bound to follow, the best you can.
What sets this apart from the average, say, Woody Allen movie about a young man's life falling apart, is the series of knocks at P.C. culture. Somebody apparently felt that maybe all the talk these days about "MeToo" and "safe spaces" and even "Black Lives Matter" has gone a bit too far, and perhaps the pendulum has swung a bit too far in the liberal direction, which may have created a generation of overly-entitled feminist and minority Millennials who can easily fall back on generations of social injustice to win any argument or get whatever they feel they deserve. (I'm not saying this is true or what I agree with, but somebody believes it.). For example, in the film there's a student who wrote a story about his experiences at Jewish summer camp, but was told that there wasn't enough representation of minorities in the story, when most probably everyone at his camp was white. Do we need to change reality in semi-fictional stories to better represent the diversity of the world? This is a debatable point, but if we do, then we end up with movies set in, say, 18th century England with diverse casts of royals, when we all know that wasn't the case back then.
I guess the point here is that we live in complicated times. It's great that women and minorities have more opportunities than they use to, but if white men are automatically marginalized as a result, then was equality really achieved? Families are also complicated, jobs are complicated and relationships are complicated, but the prevailing argument here seems to be that there are people out there who are sensitive to issues regarding harassment and prejudice and equality, but the question then becomes, are some of them overly sensitive? I'm not sure. This film is kind of all over the place and therefore lacks a little focus, but then again, if it had focused on just one aspect of the main character's life, it could easily have been too boring.
Also starring Justin Long (last seen in "Jay and Silent Bob Reboot"), Kate Berlant (last seen in "Duck Butter"), Michael Godere, Lynn Cohen (last seen in "Everybody's Fine"), Fran Drescher (last heard in "Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation"), Silvia Morigi, Becky Ann Baker (last seen in "The End of the Tour"), Tyler Wladis, Samrat Chakrabarti, Nic Inglese, Emily Ferguson, Camrus Johnson, Kaitlyn Schechter, Emily Schechter, Schann Mobley, Michael Hsu Rosen, Dana Eskelson (last seen in "The Company Men"), Sterling Morales, Glo Tavarez (last seen in "Late Night"), Tony Macht, Bryce Romero (last seen in "Hot Pursuit"), Shenell Edmonds, Alana Bowers, Bern Cohen (last seen in "This Must Be the Place").
RATING: 5 out of 10 birthday presents
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