Year 13, Day 350 - 12/16/21 - Movie #3,997
BEFORE: I took a couple days off from movies, just to see if that would help. In other words, are the movies the problem, or am I the problem? I guess we'll find out. I binge-watched "Hawkeye" and caught the season finale of "Survivor", but I couldn't squeeze in the "Masked Singer" finale. Maybe tomorrow night, if I can avoid spoilers on the internet until then.
But now I'm in a funk because we may not be going to see my parents for Christmas after all, my sister already changed her travel plans because there's been another positive test at the facility where my parents now live, so she was afraid that they'll be under lockdown again, and it made no sense to travel up there if she and her family won't get to interact with them in person. I feel the same way, if I can't see them in person there's no point in traveling up, so we may be at home for a second Christmas in a row, and we'll drive up some weekend in January when there are fewer people on the roads, and have some form of Christmas then. Still, it kind of sucks that other families are getting together this year, but our plans are curtailed. I'll double-check in a couple of days to see what the visitation rules will be for the holiday weekend.
Until then, I've got a Movie Year to finish, so Tom Skerritt carries over from "Lucky".
THE PLOT: A failed American sales rep looks to recoup his losses by traveling to Saudi Arabia and selling his company's product to a wealthy monarch.
AFTER: This film's on a totally unique topic, but yet it still shares a few things with the previous two films, "Lucky" and "The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot". All three films are about male lead characters who are getting older, and find themselves at a point in their lives where every day is much like the one before, there's sort of a "Groundhog Day" motif going on in all three films. There's always a daily routine, but these characters are all sort of caught in ruts that they can't seem to escape - that routine is clearly annoying them, but it's also comforting and perhaps even keeping them motivated, keeping them alive. Perhaps this just seems all too familiar, here in the 20th or 21st month of an ongoing pandemic.
For Alan, a washed-up sales executive (?) trying his hand at something new, this means (after getting accustomed to the rules and traditions of Saudi Arabia), waking up, realizing that he's overslept, shaving, showering, calling his driver to take him to KMET, checking in with his team, trying to get in touch with his Saudi contact, failing to make progress, learning that the King isn't likely to arrive for his pitch anyway, getting into trouble, drinking too much, and passing out. Repeat over and over - only each time, there's just enough difference in what trouble he gets into to distinguish one day from the next. This fish out of water keeps testing the boundaries of the new tank that he's in, but he keeps bumping up against the glass, so to speak.
He's also got a strange growth on his back, which I thought at first came from the fact that he kept breaking or falling off of the office chairs he encountered, perhaps it was a bruise or some internal bleeding, but it's really perhaps something medically much worse. (If this were a David Lynch movie, it could have been something REALLY weird...). So on top of everything else, he's got to navigate a foreign country's medical system in order to figure out what's going on with his body - it turns out this thing isn't just a giant pimple that he can pop.
I couldn't help but think about the business trips that I've been on, most of which involved working at the San Diego Comic-Con. I've had a couple of medical issues while traveling, and really, they're the worst. OK, the worst was probably a kidney stone I had on the first day of the New York Comic-Con in 2010, and I had to leave the con by ambulance - but after a hospital visit and some pain meds, I was back at the booth two days later. One time in San Diego I was pissing blood, and thankfully I had an assistant who could cover the booth that first night while I found a clinic, which happened to be in a neighborhood I knew very well. I got myself some antibiotics, as it turned out to just be some kind of UTI. I found that I frequently got sick near the end of each con, we used to call it the "Nerd flu", and it most likely came from spending five days inside of a convention center with poor ventilation, and about 120,000 people in that space, a portion of whom are bound to be sick with something, even in California in July.
Anyway, our hero here has a lot of anxiety concerning the upcoming presentation, plus being a stranger in a strange land, where there are very strict rules about alcohol, women's rights, religious customs and so forth, and then there's always the possibility of terrorism and the American image of Arab culture, which has been not particularly positive over the last couple decades, and then the perceived Arab attitude toward American culture, which of course is a giant question mark for us. Alan thinks he has what it takes to overcome all this, but does he really? His daughter's future at college is uncertain, and he feels he needs to make this sale in order to pay her tuition and get her back into school.
(We've all been there, some of us very recently, right? The money still needs to keep coming in, you've got to do everything you can to keep that job, or say "yes" to a new one, because the bills keep coming and the rent or mortgage still needs to be paid and so even if it means taking a job out of town, or changing careers, well that's just what has to happen.)
Alan also gets a bit caught up in the personal lives of his driver, and his female doctor (a rarity in male-oriented Saudi Arabia) and he just can't help himself, this is who he is, or maybe it's just because he's played by Tom Hanks, or maybe this is WHY you cast Tom Hanks, so you'd really believe that this guy means well and has other people's best interests at heart, not just his own. Even though he's still pretty messed up by his divorce, he knows that if he keeps being a good person, (maybe) good things will happen. And they do, only not necessarily in a way that he expected. Hey, that's life. It's almost worth forgiving a story for being this erratic and confusing because that's the way life can sometimes be. Almost.
There's certainly more of a purpose here than "Lucky" had, in that the lead character actually has a goal and a plan to reach that goal, even if he keeps messing up. Lucky didn't seem to have much of a purpose at all, therefore the film didn't really have much of a point to make, because really, it had no place to GO. All's good in this pandemic year, we have to appreciate characters who live by routine, because that's what most of us have been doing. Routine will keep you alive, but at the same time, it will slowly kill you - I guess there's some irony there.
I've got no room for "News of the World", another film with Tom Hanks. Just three slots left, and they're all spoken for, so maybe next year. C'est la vie. Tom Hanks will still be showing up in the year-end countdown, it just wouldn't be the same without him.
Also starring Tom Hanks (last seen in "Spielberg"), Alexander Black (Omar Elba), Sarita Choudhury (last seen in "Just a Kiss"), Sidse Babett Knudsen (last seen in "Inferno"), Tracey Fairaway (last seen in "Enough Said"), Jane Perry (last seen in "Genius"), Michael Baral, Lewis Rainer, David Menkin (last seen in "Florence Foster Jenkins"), Christy Meyer (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them"), Megan Maczko, Ben Whishaw (last seen in "Bright Star"), Eric Meyers (last seen in "Woman in Gold"), Khalid Laith (last seen in "RED 2"), Amira El Sayed, Waleed Elgadi, Dhaffer L'Abidine, Zaydun Khalaf (last seen in "Wonder Woman 1984"), Boughara Mohamed, Jay Abdo (last seen in "The Way Back"), Atheer Adel, Mohamed Attifi, Jon Donahue (last seen in "An American Pickle"), Janis Ahern (last seen in "Guardians of the Galaxy"), Rolf Saxon.
RATING: 4 out of 10 receptionists making excuses
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