BEFORE: OK, I've reached my Fourth of July film, as planned. It looked a little touch-and-go there for a while, I had to work at the movie theater on the holiday, but then it turned out that not many people showed up for movies tonight, so they let me out early. Sure, I could have stayed in Manhattan and watched the fireworks over the river, but ehh, you've seen one fireworks show, and you've seen them all, am I right? Maybe such things still hold excitement for young kids, but I'm not really a fan. Living in a major city like New York for a few decades can really turn you off regarding most major holidays, like on Thanksgiving there's that damn parade and around Christmas there are too many people visiting that stupid tree in Rock Center.
Last year, during the pandemic there were so many illegal fireworks going off around the city, starting in June, that there was a major crackdown, and as a result for once the city didn't sound like a war zone on July 4. After public opinion demanded action, I thought, "Great, other people are FINALLY coming around to my way of thinking regarding fireworks, in other words, let's start making some arrests." But here we are, a year later, and there's the sound of mortar fire in my neighborhood once again, and my cat's been hiding under the bed for about 6 or 7 hours. It's not fair to pets or to veterans with PTSD that on this day, once a year, it's nothing but triggering noises. The colorful displays just aren't worth being such a-holes for - I realize that everybody is desperate to party, but find another way. Or, just blow yourselves up and don't endanger anybody else.
This racket continues until about 3 or 4 am, and police are not enforcing any guidelines this year. I'd go out and patrol the streets myself if the miscreants didn't, you know, possess a whole bunch of explosive devices.
Scott Glenn carries over from "The Virgin Suicides".
THE PLOT: Carnelle wants to escape her dreary life, so she enters a local beauty contest, much to everyone's dismay.
AFTER: After today, I start going on a diet - no, not that kind, a movie diet. I can't keep consuming movies at the pace I've been working at all year, not while juggling two jobs and also trying to maintain some semblance of a human sleeping schedule. I've been over-filling my months, watching more movies than there are days in any given month, all year until June, when I took a few days off. If I keep this up, I'll also run out of movie slots before I run out of calendar days, and that would mean taking a whole month off from movies in November, and that's tough to do as well. So, the solution is to cut back to maybe four movies a week, five maximum, until I hit the horror chain - and even then, I've got 23 movies planned for October instead of 30 - that's fairly typical, though, because I usually leave room for New York Comic-Con.
I've spaced it out on some calendar pages for July, August and September - and I can still hit a Fred Willard film before October 1, no worries there, but even with cutting back to five movies per week, I still get there about two weeks before needed, so either I go on vacation or I cut back to four per week. No worries, on those nights I don't watch a movie I'll catch up on "Loki" or "The Queen's Gambit" or something - or I'll still be working nights at the theater, and maybe it will all work out.
When I say that "Miss Firecracker" is a weird film, it's not like the usual weird, as in "two aging rock stars traveling through time trying to write a song that will save the universe" weird, or even "man raised by fake parents who kidnapped him and controlled him by teaching him lessons through a homemade TV show" weird - this is a look at small-town America, the fairs and the carnivals and the beauty contests that have been a staple across the country in decades past, before there was Twitter and Instagram and streaming movies. I'm guessing you can maybe find these sort of events out there somewhere in the square states, but they can't possibly be the same sort of deals they were in the 1970's and 1980's. Now everybody has to worry about exploitation and equality and sexual harassment, so the very concept of a beauty contest is incredibly suspect these days. What is beauty, anyway, isn't that totally subjective? And since there are no male beauty pageants on the same level as the female ones, isn't this just a holdover from the patriarchy being in control? How very outdated the whole concept seems.
But this film is really about the people on the fringes in those same smalltowns - this is set in Yazoo City, Mississippi, but they don't really stress that fact, so it could be Anytown, U.S.A., where Carnelle Scott works in a fishing cannery (?) but dreams of winning the Miss Firecracker pageant, held, of course, on the Fourth of July each year. Her cousin, Elain, won the competition years ago, and has been invited back to appear at the pageant and, I don't know, announce the winner? Elain's other cousin, Delmount, has a job scraping dead dogs off the highway, and apparently spent some time in an asylum, but his dream is to sell the family house (where Carnelle lives) in order to start fresh somewhere else. Carnelle is upset about losing her residence at first, but then when Delmount offers her half of the money, she realizes that if she gets this money AND wins the pageant, she can also make a fresh start. NITPICK POINT: Why does she need for BOTH of these things to happen? Why isn't the money enough? It seems to me like an either/or proposition, but for some reason she needs both things, that's weird.
Much fuss is made over a red dress, Carnelle wants to wear the same red dress in the pageant that Elain did when she won years ago, only she's gone through the whole house and she can't find it. Delmount then goes to Popeye Jackson's dress shop and tears it apart, looking for a red dress of equal or greater value, and this is also quite confusing - why does the dress need to be red? Why does Delmount need to throw all the non-red dresses on the floor and make a huge mess? Can't he see which dresses aren't red and just leave them all alone? Plus Popeye, the dress designer, is already working on outfits for Carnelle to wear in the pageant, did Delmount think that somehow she had the perfect dress in her shop and she WASN'T going to let Carnelle wear it? Nothing in this scene makes any sense...
Carnelle waits a long time to hear from the pageant coordinators, past the deadline, even - but then something happens to one of the entrants (it's a bit unclear, the information comes on the other half of a phone conversation, which we can't hear...) and suddenly there's an opening, so Carnelle gets it. (Was she in sixth place out of all the contestants? Also unclear.) Again, she looks for the red dress, why is that damn dress so important? For that matter, why is entering this pageant, in her last year of eligibility, so important? We are given some answers at the very end of the film, but by then the film had asked these same questions so many times that I no longer cared at all.
The important thing here is that Carnelle's talent act in the pageant involves tap-dancing (or as Delmount put it, stomping her feet to the music) to the tune of "The Star-Spangled Banner", and that's enough to make this count as the best film to watch today. Then, of course, there's a fireworks display at the end of the night. That'll do. But, as I said before, if you've seen one fireworks display, you've basically seen them all. I'm not sure how this tradition has kept people's attention for hundreds of years, now that we have streaming movies and phone games and so much porn. I guess it's all to keep the kids entertained for a few minutes, or to satisfy people who just love explosions - what is wrong with those people?
NITPICK POINT #2 - I don't see the point of watching the fireworks display from the town observatory, it only looks about ten feet high, and the fireworks are way up in the sky, those ten feet aren't going to make much of a difference.
I guess it's the perfect film to celebrate Independence Day - but although I love the USA and what the holiday stands for, I just don't really get behind the way most people celebrate it. I'm down with beer, county fairs and BBQ, but not beaches, fireworks and beauty pageants. To each his own, I suppose.
Also starring Holly Hunter (last seen in "Manglehorn"), Mary Steenburgen (last heard in "The One I Love"), Tim Robbins (last seen in "City of Ember"), Alfre Woodard (last heard in "The Lion King" (2019)), Veanne Cox (last seen in "You've Got Mail"), Ann Wedgeworth (last seen in "Sweet Dreams"), Trey Wilson (last seen in "Great Balls of Fire!"), Amy Wright (last seen in "Breaking Away"), Kathleen Chalfant (last seen in "Bob Roberts"), Robert Fieldsteel, Greg Germann (last seen in "I.Q."), Avril Gentles, Bert Remsen (last seen in "Nashville"), Angela Turner, Lori Hayes, Barbara Welch, Mitch Saxton, John Burgess, Christine Lahti (last seen in "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood"), Brent Spiner (last seen in "Independence Day: Resurgence"), Murray L. Cain, Earle Ingram, Joyce Murrah
RATING: 3 out of 10 floats in the town parade
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