BEFORE: The calendar says that 2021 is just about halfway done, but I've only got about two weeks to go until my Movie Year is 2/3 over, when I reach 200 watched out of 300 movies for the year. How does that happen? Oh, right, because of the pandemic I've been watching just a bit more movies each month than there are days, and that really starts to add up by now. BUT, I'm planning to slow down if I can, space out my planned July movies to maybe reach into mid-August, if the chain will allow it. Five movies per week should be fine for a while, and then I'll have less time off when September and November roll around.
But, here's the question, does the math support this plan? I've programmed up to Movie 3,918, originally planned for a point in the first week of August. And the October chain is already set, though the plan for a horror chain is somewhat flexible, with multiple "outs", my favorite of the three endings results in a chain of 23 horror films, so 3,918 plus 23 is 3,941, leaving 59 slots open for late August, September, November and December.
Now, the even bigger question, can I link from the end of my current chain to the start of the horror chain on October 1, and can I do it in the right number of steps? Well, if you give me enough slots I can probably link from any movie to any other movie, so I'll give it a try - from the Arnold Schwarzenegger film "Killing Gunther" to the 1977 horror film "Salem's Lot", which means my target actor is Fred Willard... My first attempt got me there in 14 steps, which is actually too short, that would leave 46 slots open for November and December, and that's too much, I may be busy with Christmas cards and Christmas shopping. My second attempt got me there in 17 steps, which was little better, but then, still, 43 slots to fill at the end of the year.
But this was still good research, usually I'm scrambling to get to my benchmarks quickly, to avoid doubling up or cramming too many films into too tight a time-frame, it seems now I've just got the opposite problem, I've got two chains that will get me there, but I maybe need to add a few detours, some side-roads that will burn up some more slots and allow me to reach the same destination. Maybe if I take a piece of the first chain, dabble a little into Westerns, a couple silly kids' movies, and I plan to see both "Black Widow" and "The Suicide Squad" in theaters, yes, this could work. The third chain that gets me to a Fred Willard movie is 24 steps, that would leave just 36 open slots to fill in November and December. Just 18 in each month, or 20 in November and 16 in December, whatever works, I can do that. Now, if I can just get from the end of the horror chain to some kind of Christmas movie in 36 steps, then I've got the whole chain for the year sewn up, for the third year in a row. That's a nice feeling - knowing that I"ve closed the gap way ahead of schedule.
Cas Anvar carries over from "The Operative".
THE PLOT: The story of a young journalist who fell from grace when it was discovered he fabricated over half of his articles for The New Republic magazine.
AFTER: Going back to the past again today, for a film that was released in 2003, about a magazine writer who got caught up in a scandal in 1998. It seems that back in those days, a scandal was when somebody wrote a bunch of magazine articles that turned out to not be fact-based. Fifteen or twenty years later, a scandal was when someone who had their own news show or was a celebrity chef turned out to be sexually harassing all the women in their office. These days printing or broadcasting news that isn't true barely even moves the needle any more, now we just call it "Fox News" (or "fake news", if you're on the other side) and we move on.
I mean, really, seriously, what's the big deal here? I don't recall following the Stephen Glass story at the time, because I didn't read "The New Republic" or "The New Yorker", and what's his sin, printing fiction as if it's fact? If he had just created these articles as essays and printed them in a collection of fiction, there would be absolutely no harm done. 1998 was in the early days of the internet, and so it seems that this writer got caught just because people started being able to search for things on the web, and the people and organizations that he quoted and credited his information to turned out to be, shall we say, non-existent? Whoopsie! Did somebody forget to tell him that news articles need to be based on facts?
The whole structure is weird here, because in the first part of the film, Glass' character writes an article about the hijinx performed by young, horny Republican men in a hotel during the CPAC convention - and what trips him up is the fact that he wrote they were drinking tiny bottles of alcohol from the hotel minibar, and it turned out that the hotel didn't have minibars. What a very weird, oddly specific thing to get tripped up on. But then, was his mistake really a mistake, because they could have rented a small refrigerator and brought in their own alcohol, plus Glass seemed VERY apologetic over his mistake, which might not have even been a mistake. Still, if he was fabricating story elements, why wasn't this incident a clear sign to him that he should stop doing that?
His next article concerned a teen hacker who then got hired by the company he hacked, to work security for them and prevent future hacks. A great story, but very untrue, because another competing magazine couldn't find any proof that the hacker, the company or any of Glass' sources existed, so if the story couldn't be corroborated, then how in the heck did it get approved for print? Again, if he had published this as a work of fiction, it could have been a modern-day O. Henry type of ironic story - how silly of the universe to make this event not happen to bring Glass' vivid imagination into reality. But then again, if you think about it, how many teen hackers would then ACCEPT a 9-to-5 job working corporate security for a tech firm? That would leave no time for skateboarding, loitering and smoking weed, which is what all teens want to do - why skip the fun parts of life and move straight on into his mid-30's? That right there should have been enough to make the story unbelievable, so what gives?
Also, what gives the other magazine the right to poke holes in the New Republic article? Go find your own damn story, Forbes, do your own investigating on a different topic, why you gotta harsh another reporter's mallow? This forced Stephen Glass to come up with a phony phone number for the fictional people he quoted, and he had his brother waiting on the other end of the phone line to answer the call with "Vandelay Industries", I suppose. Stephen Glass was just a younger, hipper George Costanza, it turns out.
So Forbes magazine investigated the New Republic articles Glass wrote, and Vanity Fair then did an article on Glass that got turned into this movie. Probably the ultimate irony here is that we all know that most directors can't turn someone's life story into a movie without changing a few details here and there, but we call that "artistic license", as opposed to "fraud", which is what people called Glass' articles. But it's the SAME damn principle - every time a story is told or re-told, minor details may get changed, added or omitted, it's practically inevitable. Yet we give a pass to the filmmakers and hold the journalists to a much higher standard - why? Just because it's "news"? Again, there's plenty of fake news going around these days, or news told from a certain point of view or with a certain political slant, and that should be considered just as dangerous.
BTW, Hayden Christensen is still a terrible actor - he just never advanced much beyond his deadpan, unemotional performances as Anakin Skywalker in two "Star Wars" movies. Here I just couldn't really believe anything he said as Stephen Glass, he remained unconvincing throughout - but in playing a pathological liar, perhaps that was the point? I'm not sure, this maybe made him the perfect casting choice. Still, he always comes off as somebody who's trying too hard to be authentic.
Also starring Hayden Christensen (last seen in "Little Italy"), Peter Sarsgaard (last seen in "Hostiles"), Chloe Sevigny (last seen in "The Dead Don't Die"), Rosario Dawson (last seen in "Zombieland: Double Tap"), Melanie Lynskey (last seen in "Ever After: A Cinderella Story"), Hank Azaria (last seen in "The Wizard of Lies"), Steve Zahn (last seen in "Where'd You Go, Bernadette"), Mark Blum (last seen in "Desperately Seeking Susan"), Simone-Elise Girard, Chad Donella (last seen in "Taken 3"), Jamie Elman (last heard in "Ralph Breaks the Internet"), Luke Kirby (last seen in "The Samaritan"), Linda E. Smith, Ted Kotcheff, Owen Roth, Bill Rowat, Michele Scarabelli, Terry Simpson, Andrew Airlie (last seen in "Big Eyes"), Mark Camacho (last seen in "Arrival"), Lynne Adams, Caroline Goodall (last seen in "Third Person"), Sean Cullen, Louis Philippe Dandenault, Morgan Kelly (last seen in "The Lookout'), Christian Tessier, James Berlingieri, Brett Watson, Russell Yuen, Brittany Drisdelle.
RATING: 4 out of 10 conference calls
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