BEFORE: Well, this is a bit strange - within the last week, while I've been busy trying to get a short film qualified for an Oscar, while I've been trying to unlock the mysteries of Google calendar at my new part-time gig, while I've been running around town trying to get my hearing aid fixed and deal with a city-wide Mountain Dew shortage, the hit count of my blog has increased significantly. I mean, like by a factor of 20, and I'm not sure why. Sometimes my BFF will mention my blog or my unique process of organizing movies on his podcast, and I'll see a bump - but nothing like this. And in one case I got 800 hits before I even Tweeted out a link - so something's up. I can't just be successful, I can't just sit back and enjoy it, this means I've been taken over by Slovenian hackers or something who have set up a ghost site with my content and are just using a link to the site for convenience's sake. Or maybe a group of skater teens out in Colorado are sharing links and saying, "Check this out, I can't believe what a freak this guy is, he's got nothing better to do than watch movies in a row starring the same actor, what a LOSER." Or Asa Butterfield's legal team is all reviewing my content to see if they can legally shut me down... I can't just enjoy this, something's wrong, and I was perfectly content putting out reviews to entertain tens of people per day, but my brain won't rest until I discover the reason for this bump. We're very close to horror films now, and my content choices are bound to become more embarrassing over the next few weeks, this is my pledge to you, new readers.
Aubrey Reynolds carries over from "Time Freak". Let's hope her character at least gets a name in this film, after all, she is our nation's fourth most popular person named Aubrey. (And I'm not even counting Drake, born Aubrey Graham...)
THE PLOT: The time change and a case of mistaken identity result in a wonderful blind date for Trish and Parker, but is it enough to keep them together?
AFTER: Well, the good news is that this is the kind of film that should break my sudden popularity streak, so let's nip this in the bud, shall we? This film doesn't even have a Wikipedia page, so does it even exist then? Technically I watched this through AmazonPrime, but not in the main section, it's running in the IMDB.TV part, and on Tubi, which means it's FREE as long as you're willing to watch a few ads in-between. But it's FREE, so that should tell you something right there about the quality of this film, anything good these days you have to pay for, one way or another, either through a rental or some monthly subscription.
I do allow TV movies into my chain in cases of emergency, and preserving the chain is always some form of emergency. I can't tell, though, if this was made for the Lifetime channel, or maybe Hallmark, those are two platforms that feature exactly this sort of cheesy romance movie, or so I've heard. Maybe this was made to pitch to those channels, and the pitches were unsuccessful - either way, I'm intrigued, I'd love to know more, only there's not much information out there about "An Hour Behind", I wonder why? (It's terrible, that's why.). Still, I have to break it down, so please bear with me, new readers from Slovenia - just be aware that if you're in Slovenia, you're reading pirated content, and you should be ashamed of yourself.
Anyway, here's what my programming has in common with Hallmark's and Lifetime's - in addition to regular programming, there are THREE very important times of the year for specialty films: February/Valentine's Day, October/Halloween and December/Christmas. Everything else is "common time", plus I go a step further and usually designate documentary month and Black History month, though they've tended to be floating and not affixed to any particular calendar page. By all rights, this film belongs in February, however, clearly I've screwed up. I mistakenly thought for some reason, perhaps the title, that this was a movie about time-travel - and it's just not. The main plot point is Daylight Savings Time, which sets it in the spring. And possibly makes it relevant for fall, too, but we won't set the clocks back until November, which means I'm off-base, no matter how you slice it.
But I've railed in this space before with my thoughts on Daylight Savings - I'm against it. It's silly, stupid, costly, and it doesn't save energy and it doesn't protect kids walking home from school and it just doesn't do any of the things it claims to do except cost every city in America money and waste everybody's time changing their clocks. And it disrupts cable service, somehow it makes movies playing at 2 am look either an hour longer or shorter in the on-screen guide. We've had this useless process for decades, and it's accomplished nothing but given American mothers an excuse to call their adult kids and remind them to adjust their clocks forward or back twice a year. Jesus, is there NOTHING else for us to talk about? Look, I know there are a lot of problems in the world right now, this is really minor stuff compared to a pandemic and wars and climate change and immigration reform and civil rights and voting rights and reproductive rights and ending sexual harassment and curing cancer and what dress that celebrity wore to the Met Gala, all of that stuff is important too, but if we can get all that other stuff straightened out, can we then PLEASE consider ending the stupid custom of Daylight Savings Time?
Time is arbitrary, we divided up the world into 24 time zones just to make things easier for ourselves, but the truth is that all time is local, and there are really thousands of time zones, "noon" is whatever moment the sun is directly above your particular spot on the planet, so really, your 12 pm is different from 12 pm just a few hundred miles to the east or west, and everything from sundials to watches to cell phone clocks have been invented to make things EASIER, not more difficult, and Daylight Savings is the opposite, it just causes more problems than it solves (remember, it solves NONE) and it's inconvenient, makes you late for work, and STEALS an hour from your spring that you don't get back, not ever. I know, you THINK you get that hour back in the fall, but that's not the same, who wants an extra hour in November, that's a piss-poor replacement for a lovely spring hour. If you look back in my old posts and tweets, I've said I would support any political candidate willing to work toward eliminating this costly process of fooling ourselves for eight months every year - thank God Trump didn't take a stand against DST, I would have been really conflicted then. But think of it this way, we spend more time with the WRONG time on our clocks each year than we do with the RIGHT time on them - WTF? All for some imagined benefit that never really comes. It's time to end this - screw the farmers, screw the parents, if you want to get up an hour earlier, then you just go ahead and do that in your own house, leave me out of it and let me sleep.
But that's the jumping-off point for this really bland romance film - cupcake baker Trish agrees to go on a blind date arranged by her sister, which is a breakfast date that happens to fall on the spring day when we change the clocks. Clearly this film was written by committee, because they couldn't go "all in" on making Trish a screw-up, she also has to be seen as a Strong Powerful Woman who is also a Competent Business-Owner, therefore she can't just "forget" to adjust her clocks forward. That would be a fault in her character, so they had to load the deck by having a glass of water spill onto both her watch AND her alarm clock (what are the odds?) so that she'll oversleep and miss the breakfast date. Seriously? Did the director suddenly realize that he can't depict somebody "forgetting" to do something, so he had to cover his bets and throw this electrical short in as a plot point? This is really rookie, student-film type stuff - when in doubt, just double down. Suddenly that great idea for a plot is weakened by last-minute overthinking.
Trish shows up almost an hour late for the date, and Adam has already bailed - but Parker, unknowingly also wearing a green shirt, which was how she was going to be able to recognize Adam, is sitting at his usual table, when Trish sits down and goes right into the "blind date" conversation. Adam's not sure what to do, at first he just takes it at face value, that a beautiful woman has joined him for breakfast and just gone right into it. Even when she starts calling him "Adam", he doesn't take the time to correct her, because why would he? Plus, he can't seem to get a word in edgewise, and then before long, he's too far in to make the correction. You can see this one coming down Fifth Avenue, as they say. These crazy kids are going to hit it off, over their shared love of breakfast foods, and then they'll have a funny story to tell their grandchildren one day.
It's not that simple, there's 90 minutes of network time to fill, after all - when Adam finally comes clean and admits that he's Parker, and a paramedic instead of a lawyer, then despite the wonderful day they spent together, riding a pedal-craft on the lake and talking about cupcakes, she can't get over the fact that he deceived her, he took too long to reveal that he wasn't her intended date. This, despite the fact that SHE was late, SHE sat down with him, SHE made an assumption, and SHE never gave him the chance to say three words in a row. Nope, it's all on him, and let's set back the clock about chatty, irrational women a few decades while we're at it. This is a great guy, he's a life-saving public servant, he's really into the flavor combination of chocolate and peanut butter, but Trish can't help but wonder if Adam would be the better fit. Yeah, the bird in the hand can just go screw himself, right? Something better's always just around the corner or out of reach...
Parker keeps trying to get her attention, but Trish's clueless sister keeps saying that Adam's a "great guy" - only he's not, he's a self-obsessed lawyer who doesn't know a cupcake from a brownie. And he's always got to run because there's a "new development in the case", which is probably B.S., and if this were anything but a Halltime or Lifemark movie then we'd see him doing coke in the bathroom every five minutes to really drive the point home. Why the hell does it take Trish so long to see this? Oh, right, 90 minute movie and all that. Parker does the right thing, he bides his time in the Friend Zone until he can make some kind of grand gesture or there's a better opportunity to plead his case. There are more ups and downs in their rocky road to a relationship, but they're barely worth spoiling.
You can kind of tell an "A"-movie from a "B"-movie on production values alone sometimes - and believability, or the suspension of disbelief, is a big part of that. When I watch a top TV drama, like "Law & Order: SVU", it all feels real, like I'm not aware that every interior shot was filmed on a set, the squadroom is a real place, because the production spent a lot of money to make it feel that way. Maybe Dick Wolf Productions bought a building somewhere in NYC and there's a whole fake squadroom somewhere, I don't know. But then if I watch a soap opera, I'm keenly aware that every living room, every coffee shop, every boardroom is just a set. Is this the difference between 1-camera and 3-camera TV? I don't know. But that differential applies to "An Hour Behind" for sure. The bakery is CLEARLY a set, the cafe is CLEARLY a set, the law office, forget about it, OF COURSE that's a set. Which makes it all feel like some overblown student film, and very unbelievable in the end.
And obvious, obvious, obvious, there's no subtlety here, we KNOW that Trish is going to be able to open up her second cupcake shop, we KNOW that the real Adam will be revealed as a giant douchebag eventually, and we KNOW these crazy kids Trish and Parker are meant to be together. It doesn't even matter how they got together, whether it's because of DST or a shorted-out alarm clock, life's all about taking the ingredients that you're given and making something beautiful and delicious out of it, and God, just typing that makes me want to throw up. Maybe this romance doesn't even belong in February, it's just not good or subtle enough, and it's better to burn it off here, because at least this way it serves a purpose, it gets me one tiny step closer to starting the Shock-ToberFest chain.
The film's not satisfied with just getting these two together, though, it's got to twist the knife at the end - Trish and Parker encounter each other again on the occasion of another time change - though it's a bit unclear whether this is the fall time change or the one the following spring (DETAILS! I need DETAILS!). Trish screws up again and forgets (?) to change the clocks AGAIN, actually her cell phone dies this time because it got wet, leading her to be an hour early (?) for another breakfast meeting with her sister, and that puts her in position again to encounter Parker. Wait, if she missed the time change in fall, then she wouldn't fall BACK, so she'd think it was 9 am when the rest of the world had set their clocks back to 8 am. Umm, yeah, that tracks I think, but didn't she pass any public clocks on the way to the restaurant? Like on a bank or something? It's all very clunky, but I've said that a lot this week, about several movies. It doesn't seem like Trish and Parker have been on-again and off-again for a year, so I guess the last few scenes take place in fall? The Salt Lake City weather sure seems very nice for November, though...
If you are interested in watching this film, and I'm honestly struggling to think of a reason why you would be, you could do it ON the day in November when we set the clocks back. If you time it right you can then watch this film right before you change the clock, then, just maybe, you can console yourself with the imaginary feeling that you at least gained back an hour and didn't waste as much of your time as you COULD have. Just a suggestion.
Also starring Emily Rose, Barry Watson (last seen in "Ocean's Eleven"), Alesandra Durham, Casey Elliott, Scott Christopher (last seen in "Vice" (2018)), Brooklyn Brough, Shona Kay, K. Danor Gerald, Michael Birkeland, Sarah Kent, Rick Macy, Chad Wright, Channon Voyce, Nanci Wudel.
RATING: 3 out of 10 tiny peanut butter cookies with a dark chocolate drizzle.
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