BEFORE: Bill Murray carries over from "City of Ember", and I had a bunch of internal debate over watching this one. To watch this, I had to sign up for Apple TV, which I did NOT want to do - that's another $4.99 a month, on top of all the other streaming services that my wife and I collectively pay for. That means premium cable, Netflix, Hulu, AmazonPrime, and now ANOTHER one? (Disney Plus is still free, I got one year with my new phone and a second year as a Christmas gift...). It's too much, I've got to draw the line somewhere. She had CBS All Access (which is now Paramount Plus) for a short while, but she got it just to watch "Picard" and didn't care that much for it, so she dropped it. I didn't have time to watch all three seasons of "Star Trek: Discovery" while she had the service, but I did watch the first season when they aired it on regular TV.
So, no new services, not until they stop charging so much and become closer to free like AOL eventually did. So my inclination was to skip "On the Rocks" and move on, just to take a stand and make a point. BUT, free trial for seven days, so I can sign up for the service, watch this movie and then cancel it right after, because there's nothing else on the service I want to see. "Cherry"? "Greyhound"? Some new Stephen King movie? OK, that last one is a little intriguing, but there's nothing else there for me, Apple. So the plan is to start my trial, watch "On the Rocks", which seems like it's possibly Father's Day themed, and then I'll cancel tomorrow, making this movie FREE. The tipping point, today is Father's Day in Denmark, so "Glaedelig Fars Dag" and Happy Bill Murray weekend.
Now, the question becomes, if I change my mind, and there's something else on Apple TV I want to watch, can I sign back on and pull the same trick again? They probably track this through my Apple ID, so I'm guessing no.
THE PLOT: A young mother reconnects with her larger-than-life playboy father on an adventure through New York.
AFTER: This film could have fit in the closing days of last year, as I ended 2020 with "A Very Murray Christmas", and both Murray and Rashida Jones were in that film/Christmas special - but I was totally out of slots at that point. Plus Apple TV had just become a thing and I hadn't yet figured out the trick to watching one movie for FREE. But, I've circled back, see how I did that? And I beat the system, umm, I think. Somehow. I'm determined to think I came out ahead on this one, even if it's not true.
If this film feels derivative, it's probably because it brings "Lost in Translation" to mind - Bill Murray plays an aging but also childlike raconteur, who has an adventure through a major metropolis at night with a younger woman. This comes from the same director, Sofia Coppola, so perhaps she's just got a style or a groove - you're allowed to rip yourself off once in a while. But there's more actual story here, as the older man and younger woman are father and daughter, and the daughter is concerned that her husband may be cheating on her. Her father, Felix, is prepared to go on stake-out and use whatever resources he has to prove that it's probably true, and he feels it's true because he's a man, and the kind of man who cheated on his wife, as he feels most men do.
The daughter, Laura, has been in a mental negative spiral since suspecting the infidelity - her husband started his own company, he's got a female assistant, there are a lot of business trips, parties to woo new clients, so he's not home a lot, he's spending time with new people, and there's obvious potential there for cheating. But at home he's toggling between perfectly normal and mentally distant, which could be behavior easily explained by the new job, or it could mean he's got something going on the side. But she can't bring herself to ask him outright, so instead she falls under the influence of her father, and they set out to follow him across the city during a night of partying with clients.
The problem is, once you start doubting your partner, you put a theory out there, it clouds the data, it tarnishes the experiment. Scientifically you're not supposed to guess how the experiment it going to turn out, it's the data that should confirm the result, one way or another. But Laura is stuck, she can't move forward with her life or her writing career until she gets some kind of answer - so that's when she goes into full-on stalker move when her husband goes on a business trip, and she travels with her father to Mexico, because he just happens to know the woman who owns the neighboring resort. Yeah, it's a bit of a stretch, but they sort of backwards-engineered him to be an art dealer, who travels in the high-class circles of people who are always either thinking about selling their Hockney or thinking about buying a Hockney. This grants him access to a certain clientele, and (one assumes) relationships with a certain class of women.
But you never know, just as you never know about Bill Murray - is Bill Murray seeing somebody? Is he, you know, happy? He can play satisfied and successful, but also depressed and down on his luck, equally as well. He's transitioned from the loser groundskeeper/army private/slacker/Ghostbuster to the more learned, erudite, professor/art dealer/aquatic expert in the last decade or so, but there's still that air of sad clown to him sometimes. Anyway, more on this topic tomorrow, I think.
They took the opportunity here to shoot at some prime NYC locations - that's clearly the Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle Hotel, I should know that by now after watching both "A Very Murray Christmas" and "Always at the Carlyle". Felix and Laura also dined at the 21 Club, which lasted for 90 years on 52nd Street before the pandemic shut it down. The owners swear that the place isn't done, but I guess it was too sad that this venerable dining institution was just scraping by on take-out orders of wedge salad and Vadouvan heirloom rice, so in December 2020 they officially announced the shutdown, and all the employees were "let go" a couple months later. This is just where we are right now, as NYC finally re-opens and tries to recover from the pandemic, we're all figuring out which of our favorite dining spots are still open. Some closed down right away last April, some transitioned to take-out only, others tried valiantly to survive for a while and then gave up the ghost. Everybody did what they had to do, I guess, and only the strong survive, you change with the times or the times change you.
I'm looking at a list now - it seems like Chinatown, the Lower East Side and Greenwich Village took the most damage. Blue Smoke BBQ, Bar Bacon, Eisenberg's Sandwich Shop, Duke's, Joshua Tree - there are many more, but those are the places I've been to that I will miss. Out here in Queens we lost Fame Diner and Ridgewood Eats, two of our regular almost-weekly go-to joints. Who knows, maybe some of these places will re-open, but it's not looking good. Some restaurants were already on that bubble - I dined at the Heartland Brewery in the Empire State Building just before Christmas in 2019, and after the meal I learned that the location would be closing in January, after a big New Year's party, I guess to clear out the kitchen and bar. They had four NYC restaurants at one time, but they were suddenly ALL shutting down due to high rents, or financial mis-management, or perhaps both. I was sad, of course, I simply love brewpubs, but then three months later EVERYTHING closed down, so it made me wonder if the Heartland management knew something in advance, or it was more like the fabled guy who overslept and had a ticket for the Titanic. Yeah, he missed the boat and never got to restart his life in America, but he was still alive. You just never know.
Anyway, I don't quite understand how anybody maintains a relationship and a job while raising two small children, especially in Manhattan. I've chosen a different path, living in Queens and maintaining a relationship and two jobs while raising NO children. This whole concept of getting up early, feeding and dressing smaller people, getting them to school, taking them to after-school activities like ballet or sports, feeding them at night, hiring baby-sitters when needed, and then still having any time for yourself after all that, it's so alien to me. I don't get why anybody would live their life THAT way if they could avoid it. Still, I have a couple friends who have kids, I don't understand it but I just let them be and live my life. Maybe they just don't spend all their money on comic books and premium cable.
Also starring Rashida Jones (last seen in "A Very Murray Christmas"), Marlon Wayans (last seen in "The Heat"), Jessica Henwick (last seen in "Star Wars: The Force Awakens"), Jenny Slate (last seen in "Obvious Child"), Liyanna Muscat, Alexandra Reimer, Anna Reimer, Barbara Bain, Juliana Canfield, Alva Chinn (last seen in "Regarding Henry"), Mike Keller (last seen in "Hustlers"), Musto Pelinkovicci (last seen in "The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them"), Zoe Bullock, Chase Sui Wonders, Elizabeth Guindi, Jules Wilcox, Natia Dune (last seen in "A Walk Among the Tombstones"), Ximena Lamadrid, Nadia Dajani, Evangeline Young, with a cameo from Kelly Lynch (last seen in "Rock the Kasbah") and archive footage of Chris Rock (last seen in "Death at a Funeral" (2010)).
RATING: 5 out of 10 corrected typos
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