The Layover

Year 13, Day 65 - 3/6/21 - Movie #3,767

BEFORE: I spotted this film over a year ago, while scrolling through Hulu looking for more material.  But I couldn't work it in to last year's chain, so I just tabled it, then found it to be very useful when putting together my 2021 chain.  Surprisingly, it's still on Hulu, so let me watch it and clear it off the list, and shorten one of my streaming queues by just a bit.  I'm due for another scroll through the various streaming services, but I fear that things have exploded since the last time I did that.  Just looking through everything on HBO Max and Disney added like a hundred films to my list, and I haven't even had time to chip away at going through those cast lists yet.  

So thanks to the streaming boom, I'm starting to realize that I will NEVER be done with this project, even though the pandemic might have slowed things down a little bit, there must be hundreds of (probably mediocre) films that have migrated to all the new platforms - can there possibly BE any films out there that haven't found a home yet on some streaming service?  I've talked my wife into not dropping Hulu because I've still got my list there (even though each time I visit, I see more films from my list are "no longer available" - umm, so why not remove them from my list, if I can't watch them, like Netflix does?).  

The sad truth is that everything has an expiration date, and most of the time when I finally do circle back to a film that once interested me, it's now in a different place.  And honestly, Google and all those "Where to Watch" sites just can't keep up - there are THOUSANDS of movies, after all, and I've found that after a search it often seems like a film's available on Hulu or AmazonPrime, but when I go to watch it, I'm told I can only watch it if I pay extra for "Cinemax on Hulu add-on" or "Amazon Premiere Super-Prime Rip-Off Subscription". That's not going to happen, Amazon, so either make the film available or not, quit trying to upsell me.

Alexandra Daddario carries over from "Hall Pass" - and today in Women's History, March 6 is the birthday of poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806), pioneering Black female pharmacist Ella P. Stewart (1893) and Valentina Tereshkova, Russian general, pilot and cosmonaut (1937).

THE PLOT: Two friends on vacation compete for the affections of a handsome man when their flight is redirected due to a hurricane.  

AFTER: Here's a film that's sure to set the women's movement back by a bit - it's on the too-common trope of two female best friends competing over a man.  (Total Bechdel test fail!)  What is it that drives two "friends" to put each other down and belittle each other when a man enters the picture?  Is this only in movies, or is this very common IRL, too?  Perhaps this just derives from one big male fantasy, to have two women want him so badly that they'll fight with each other, tear each other apart just to get at him. Keep dreaming, fellas, they don't really need us that badly, it turns out.  This one's so over the top in using this device that I was starting to wonder if these two girls didn't secretly have a thing for each other, and the guy just got caught in the middle.  Nah, that would have been a whole different film, I suppose - but I bet that's the plot of some movie somewhere. 

To be fair, these two girls were fighting with each other from the get-go (and we all know that hate's not the opposite of love, right?) because they're roommates, and very different people.  Meg's always shopping, engaging in random hook-ups and generally getting herself into trouble, while Kate's the more responsible one with a teaching job, seems to have a tougher time finding relationships, and is always bailing Meg out of trouble.  Oh, and Kate likes shopping, too, because don't all women?  Kate's the more down-to-earth responsible one, while Meg's the hot one, that's the important difference to keep in mind.  So when Kate appears to have been fired from her teaching job, Meg somehow cashes in Kate's frequent-flyer miles and books them on a last-minute trip from Seattle to Fort Lauderdale.  (Though, like "Crash Pad", those Seattle scenes were filmed in Vancouver.)

They barely make the flight (Meg cuts the entire line by flirting with the desk agent, which doesn't work, but then somehow it does) and then has trouble with the TSA because she has a soda, but instead of throwing it away, she chugs the whole thing - why is THIS an important plot point?  Just so she can burp on the plane, and apparently her burps stink. Refined comedy, this is not. The premise gets fixed in place when Ryan is put in the middle seat between Kate's window seat and Meg's aisle seat.  It's not clear why Meg got two seats that weren't together, I guess she wanted the extra room in their row, but that never works - you know they're going to try to fill every seat on the plane, right?  Ryan chats up both women, as a polite man might do, but Kate's taken too many anti-anxiety pills so she can relax during the trip, and before long, she's knocked out - which leaves Ryan with Meg, and I'm not really sure why he didn't just request changing seats with somebody.  

Fate intervenes when a hurricane prevents the plane from reaching Florida, where Ryan's supposed to attend a wedding.  All the passengers end up in St. Louis, staying at the same hotel until the weather in Florida clears up.  This sets up more competition between the women for Ryan's time and affection, and they keep having to go to greater lengths, and wearing skimpier and more revealing swimsuits, to do that.  (See what I mean about setting back the women's movement?). Meanwhile there's a convention of jewelers in town, and a mostly male crowd of them staying at the hotel, all vying for time with the girls, who only have eyes for Ryan.  And it's not that Ryan's such a great prize, or either of the girls is really that into him, but they each just want him because the OTHER girl does, and so it's all about winning.  Ryan, meanwhile, doesn't mind being treated like a prize and having two women fight over him - but he's still got that wedding to attend.  

So Ryan finds Craig, a jeweler from Florida and hitches a ride - conveniently the convention is over and Craig's headed in exactly the right direction.  Both women charm their way into the car also, and now we've got a game, the love triangle is now a square, with Craig trying to hook up with the girls (either one, he's not picky) and the girls trying to hook up with Ryan, and as many unlikely hijinks as the filmmakers could squeeze into a 17-hour car ride.  Yes, that checks out, but I do recommend that the drivers take shifts, only Craig thinks he can do it all. He's wrong, because the girl's competitiveness of course throws a spanner into the works.  They only make it about halfway (?) to Florida before they're forced to find a motel, and this is really just a convoluted way to get these characters near some bedrooms to take the competition to the next level.  

Craig uses a jewelry analogy to try to end the competition, and insert himself into the mix - most of his customers are only interested in diamonds, but there are a lot of other precious stones for sale.  Even if Ryan's a diamond (umm, he's not) maybe Meg should consider a ruby or some jade instead of competing over just one type of gem.  It's a solid argument, and you'd think it would end the girls' feud, only it doesn't.  Lessons get learned here, but only after the fact - I guess some characters just have to make their mistakes in order to advance. What a shame.  But the good news is that Kate didn't lose her job, she either misunderstood the school principal, or perhaps he was unclear.  And Meg decides to move out because she'll never grow as a person if Kate's always helping her out - so maybe they can be friends again someday, if women ever learn to work together towards common goals.  (Don't blame me, it's the movie making this point...)

NITPICK POINT: Once again, it appears that movie screenwriters have no idea how airplane tickets, frequent flyer miles, or airport procedures work.  You can't cash in someone else's miles, you can't get a plane ticket on a moment's notice unless you fly stand-by, and you can't cut in front of 100 people in line at the airport without somebody complaining, or getting a beat-down.  And once people HAVE those impossible-to-get, last-minute, non-refundable tickets, and they find themselves in St. Louis, they're GOING to use them to get to Florida. They're not going to just abandon those tickets and suddenly take a car ride instead.  After a couple days in St. Louis, their trip was probably half-over already, PLUS the hurricane was just about to clear, so why waste another 2 days on a long car drive instead of salvaging whatever was left of the trip by flying on to Fort Lauderdale?  Unless the airline suddenly offered these women a refund or a few thousand miles in compensation in addition to the free hotel - but I don't think this happened, because the airline's not responsible for bad weather (act of "God") so most likely they would only book them on the next possible flight to Florida and that's it.  

Back in October 2017, my wife and I ended a road trip in Nashville and we had Sunday morning tickets back to New York - but a tropical storm (Philippe) was approaching the East Coast, and we kept getting e-mail alerts from the airline that we could change our flights for free if needed. We debated what to do - the safest thing was to switch to an earlier flight on Saturday, but that meant giving up our whole planned day tour of Nashville - we decided to not move our flight, make the most out of our Saturday in Tennessee, and roll the dice on getting back home.  By Sunday, the tropical storm had been downgraded, and when it reached NYC it was just some heavy rain, thankfully.  My point is that when traveling, sometimes panicking and making desperate moves is not the right thing to do - if Ryan here had just hung out in St. Louis another few hours, it's very possible he could have flew to Florida on time.  A 17-hour car ride over a 3-hour or 4-hour flight doesn't seem like a smart trade-off.  But I get it, then the film wouldn't have so many hijinks set in gas station bathrooms!

Also starring Kate Upton (last seen in "The Other Woman"), Matt Barr (last seen in "The House Bunny"), Matt L. Jones (last seen in "A Merry Friggin' Christmas"), Rob Corddry (last seen in "How to Be a Latin Lover") Kal Penn (last seen in "Once Upon a Time in Venice"), Molly Shannon (last seen in "Jay and Silent Bob Reboot"), Jennifer Cheon, Eric Gibson, Carrie Genzel, Michael Benyaer (last seen in "Deadpool"), Alvin Sanders (last seen in "Hot Rod"), John Cassini, Roark Critchlow, Mary Black, David MacKay (last seen in "The Shack"), Ross Linton.

RATING: 4 out of 10 road trip mix playlists

Hall Pass

Year 13, Day 64 - 3/5/21 - Movie #3,766

BEFORE: Before starting this movie late on Thursday, I watched the pilot of the new "Superman and Lois" show on the CW. Or is it the WB? Nah, that was the old name for that network and nobody else remembers that.  Of course I'm going to keep up on any Superman-based TV shows, because I watched the hell out of "Smallville" for all its seasons - but "Superman and Lois" is unfortunately no "Smallville". This new version stars Tyler Hoechlin (who also appears in "Hall Pass", quite coincidentally) as an older Superman, married to Lois and father of two teenage sons.  Apparently there's some debate over the existence of two sons, since Superman only has ONE in the comic book, and only one in the TV world until some "Crisis on Infinite Earths" TV crossover re-booted and changed reality, or Earth-38 combined with Earth-Prime or something like that. TV viewers, if you don't read the comics, welcome to the frustrating world of the multiverse, where each new writer can just change what came before on a whim, just by saying, "Oh, it's a multiverse, and there are many realities - HERE's the one we're pushing now."

Look, I've been reading comics (and watching TV) for a long time.  I get it, you work with what you have, and if it's not working, you try to change it around so it does.  But making Clark Kent a parent who's AFRAID to tell his sons that he's Superman, that just doesn't work - Superman shouldn't be AFRAID of anything, let alone the truth.  Remember "Truth, Justice and the American Way"?  Yeah, lying to your kids is a violation of truth, even if he did it for their own good. One of the teens has Social Anxiety Disorder, plus he didn't want to foster resentment between the kids if one develops powers in the future and the other doesn't. This is some weak sauce, because lying is lying, and Superman shouldn't lie - in the comic books, he told the whole WORLD about his secret identity for this same reason, and I hope the TV show and/or the DC Movie Universe catches up with that, even if it takes a while. Big Blue should be an honest superhero, above all.

(I know, this show is part of a larger DC TV universe, which includes "Flash", "Green Arrow", "Supergirl", "Black Lightning", etc., but I don't watch any of those shows.  Marvel's got my TV attention right now with "Wandavision" and very soon, "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier".  Though I may consider watching "Legends of Tomorrow" on Netflix, because it's all about time-traveling through the DC universe, and I hear there's like a TON of Easter eggs.)

Christina Applegate carries over from "Crash Pad".  And for Women's History month, on March 5, 1882, Dora Marsden was born - she was an English activist in the Women's Social and Political Union, and founded a journal, The Freewoman, in 1911 to showcase the voices of the women's movement, occasionally critique the Suffrage Movement, and promote a radical (at the time) feminist view. In 1920 she withdrew from the literary scene and spent 15 years in seclusion to complete her magnum opus combining elements of philosophy, mathematics, biology, physics and theology - so don't let me hear you complain about just one year stuck at home during the pandemic when you could be working on your own magnum opus.  

THE PLOT: Two husbands who are having difficulty in their marriages are given a "Hall Pass" by their wives: for one week, they can do whatever they want. 

AFTER: If you look below, you'll see that this film features a lot of actors making their second appearances in this year's February (and March) romance chain.  Hey, there's the lead actor from "A Good Old Fashioned Orgy" again, and that actress was a lead in "The Giant Mechanical Man".  Richard Jenkins showed up twice, but honestly it would be a little weird if Richard Jenkins DIDN'T show up twice in February, that guy gets around.  (But it's the first appearance this year for Owen Wilson, who appeared in EIGHT films last year, that's just how it goes...)  So you might ask, why wasn't this film placed next to those films, or "Happythankyoumoreplease" or "Paper Heart", for that matter?  Well, it's true, I had a lot of options with this film, it could have gone just about anywhere - but I NEEDED it to go here, as the only possible lead-out from "Crash Pad", and the connective tissue to tomorrow's film.  Makes sense?  There's a certain science to this linking thing, which only took me about a decade to properly learn. 

There's quite a bit that carries over from "Crash Pad", along with Christina Applegate. Yesterday's film and "Hall Pass" are both (mainly) about two men going out to clubs and trying to get laid, in "Crash Pad" one of them is married and in today's film, both men are.  In both cases, Ms. Applegate plays the wife who's aware that her husband is stepping out for this purpose, only in one film she's OK with it, at least at first. Oddly, both films also use the same song, "Tighten Up" by Archie Bell & The Drells, though I think "Hall Pass" uses a cover version - still, I don't think I've ever heard this song before yesterday, and it's quite distinctive.  

Overall, I think this film could have been a lot worse - and given the way this Movie Week has been going, I was expecting a lot worse.  Sure, there are parts of this film that are flat-out stupid, but there are also parts that are somewhat funny and the message is (almost) sweet.  Trouble begins when the female part of a two-couple friendship notices that their husbands are checking out other women, and when they hang out with their single male friends, talk inevitably turns to discussing under what conditions they would cheat on their wives.  Maggie learns this about her husband, Rick, thanks to a convenient accidentally switched baby monitor, and she overhears their card-game conversation.  (Actually, the husbands here get in trouble TWICE because they're unaware that they're being monitored, it's a cheap method of mining almost the same exact set-up for more "comedy".). And this was made five years before the "locker-room talk" that failed to get our last President not elected...

There are other problems in the two relationships - Rick gets caught by police pleasuring himself in his own car, outside his own house (for God's sake, why not pull the car into the garage - does he not have a garage?).  Fred wonders why Rick can't just lock himself in the bathroom like most people, but there's some flimsy excuse that Rick "loves cars", another lame way to shoehorn in an embarrassing situation, when someone doesn't realize that he can be heard or seen by others.  That appears to be the go-to source of most of the humor here.  But essentially, both wives are tired of their husbands getting into trouble - or is it that they look at other women?  The film can't really seem to decide here which is the worse marital sin. 

Anyway, it's all an excuse to set up the premise, where the wives grant their husbands a "hall pass" - it really should be called a "free pass", because in school if you get a hall pass, you can use it to go to the bathroom or the school nurse, and that just doesn't apply.  This film was titled "Free Pass" in some countries, I guess those countries don't have such regimented school hall-walking systems.  They should have just called it "Free Pass" in the U.S. too, it would have made more sense.  They've got a "Hall Pass" or free pass for one week to do whatever they want, even sexually, while the wives take the kids to Cape Cod to visit family.  (Normally I'd make some N.P. here about this, but I grew up in a Boston suburb where many families had a summer home on the Cape, so driving down there for a week, especially during the summer, seems like a very common thing to me for people to do.  I guess some people in Providence, R.I. might also have 2nd homes on the Cape, but isn't Rhode Island known as the Ocean State, most places would already be near some kind of beach.  Just saying...maybe it's a Providence thing too.)

Yes, the film is set in Providence, as were most of the early Farrelly Brothers films, you can always count on that as a setting in their movies, along with casting a lot of their friends who had very little acting ability, and also the use of gross-out humor.  Eventually these guys grew up somewhat and one of them directed "Green Book", but back in 2011 they were still making films similar to "There's Something About Mary", focused on bodily fluids, getting laid and strange sex-based anatomical mishaps. Oh, also awkward people making awkward jokes that don't really land, that seemed to be right up Jason Sudeikis' alley at the time.  He got a lot cooler by the time he made "A Good Old Fashioned Orgy", but his character there was also much more of a douchebag. Still, Jason's character here (Fred) shares a lot of DNA with the guy in the Hamptons (Eric) - well, both films were released in the same year. 

It's worth noting, however, that the wives who agreed to this "Hall Pass" idea were only doing it so their husbands would learn a lesson - the theory was that after a week on their own, probably trying to get laid and failing miserably, they would appreciate the good situation they had, beg their wives to come back and never think about straying again.  Eh, it's an OK theory - the foil character here who gives Maggie and Grace the idea says she tried this with her own husband, let him chase other women to get it out of his system, and as a result, her marriage got stronger.  However, she neglects to clarify if her husband was successful, cheated and came back, or was unsuccessful and therefore stopped trying.  There's a notable difference there, some people claim that men are only as faithful as their options - and it's easier for a man to be faithful if he believes he has none.  

The wives also fail to mention whether the Hall Pass applies to them, too - and perhaps they don't decide that it does until they each meet men on the Cape they enjoy spending time with. For Grace that's a younger baseball player, and for Maggie it's that guy's coach.  OK, so they want in on this Hall Pass idea, but shouldn't they at least have a conversation with their husbands before acting on it?  That seems only fair.  

Meanwhile, the husbands ARE failing at their attempts to take advantage of their freedom - the first day they just hang out with their buddies and load up on appetizers at a chain restaurant, leaving them too full to go out clubbing that night.  Then they get high on pot brownies while golfing, and that also ends badly.  They almost manage to get through the whole week before they start looking for potential sexual prospects.  The one thing that the movie does get right, even though it's a stereotype, is that the men here go out looking for sex, and there's no real emotional component to it, while the women form emotional relationships first with potential partners, and the sex is part of the equation, sure, but it's more like an afterthought.  

But the whole thing sort of runs off the rails when the barista who's competing with Rick for Leigh's affections starts busting up their car windows outside the motel where Rick's babysitter's aunt is trying to seduce Fred because she thinks he's Rick...meanwhile Grace has a car accident and the whole thing turns into a giant ridiculous chase scene with everyone speeding from Providence to Cape Cod.  Slapstick takes over at some point, which is a shame when we were getting so close to exploring the mysteries of spouse-approved infidelities.  We're just never going to progress as a species if we consistently keep settling for the cheap jokes. 

I want to believe this was based on some kind of French film, because those French couples cheat on each other all the time, and they all seem to find a way to deal with it.  And then I could believe that some American filmmakers tried to re-make it for U.S. audiences and screwed it all up.  But I don't think that's the case.  Let's face it, collectively we'll just never be as cool as the French are. 

Also starring Owen Wilson (last seen in "Drillbit Taylor"), Jason Sudeikis (last seen in "A Good Old Fashioned Orgy"), Jenna Fischer (last seen in "The Giant Mechanical Man"), Nicky Whelan, Joy Behar (last seen in "Gilbert"), Bruce Thomas, Alexandra Daddario (last seen in "San Andreas"), Alyssa Milano (last seen in "Little Italy"), Derek Waters (last seen in "Paper Heart"), Kristin Carey, Tyler Hoechlin (last seen in "Everybody Wants Some!!"), Stephen Merchant (last seen in "Jojo Rabbit"), J.B. Smoove (last seen in "Top Five"), Larry Joe Campbell (last seen in "Killers"), Richard Jenkins (last seen in "Happythankyoumoreplease"), Rob Moran (last seen in "Movie 43"), Lauren Bowles (last seen in "The Heartbreak Kid"), Dwight Evans, Bo Burnham (last seen in "The Big Sick"), Christa Campbell (last seen in "Sisters"), Macsen Lintz, Carly Craig (last seen in "Dumb and Dumber To"), Danny Murphy (ditto), Kaliko Kauahi, Andrew Wilson (last seen in "Father Figures"), with a cameo from Kathy Griffin (last seen in "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work")

RATING: 5 out of 10 horrible pick-up lines

Crash Pad

Year 13, Day 63 - 3/4/21 - Movie #3,765

BEFORE: OK, I took my first stab at organizing my horror films for this year, and I'm taking the same approach that's worked before with the romance chain - putting little mini-chains together of two or three films, whenever I notice that films on the list share actors.  Now I've got seven mini-chains of two or three films each, but I've also got a 6-film chain, a 7-film chain, and after noticing a convergence between three different franchises ("Scream", "I Know What You Did Last Summer" and the "Scooby-Doo" films) I've got one larger chain of 11 films.  Well, it's a start.  I could just watch the 11-film chain and leave it at that - or if I keep adding more films, like maybe the "Purge" series, something bigger could come together, coalesce.  I need to do this in March, because "Godzilla vs. Kong" is coming to theaters and airing on HBO Max at the end of the month, and it will only be streaming for 30 days.  So do I need to watch that film?  Will it fit into my chain?  Umm, maybe - it links to a couple films already on my list, but it's going to take me a few days to really land on something that will take up most of October, with a start point and an end point.  It doesn't have to be 30 days long, because there MIGHT be a New York Comic-Con this October, so my chain can be shorter to allow me to work at the convention.  Longer hours could mean I fall asleep as soon as I get home, so it's better to skip movies during the week of the convention - if it happens. Last year's convention was of course cancelled, but right now the 2021 edition is up in the air. Possible, if not likely.  

Thomas Haden Church carries over again from "All About Steve". Tonight's film used to be on Hulu, but I took too long to watch it.  It's one I couldn't schedule last February or March, so it might have been on my list for two years or more.  I had to track it down on Tubi today, so you know what that means. It's probably not a great film if Tubi's streaming it for free.  With ads, but still free.

Oh, right, Women's History Month - on March 4, 1917, Jeannette Rankin of Montana became the first female member of the U.S. House of Representatives.  And on March 4, 1933, Frances Perkins became the U.S. Secretary of Labor, the first female cabinet member in the country.  If I can keep this up, I may be able to apply for some kind of educational grant...

THE PLOT: A hopeless romantic, who thinks he's found true love with an older woman, learns that she's married and that the fliing is merely an instrument of revenge against her neglectful husband. 

AFTER: I'm trying to recover from the horror that is "All About Steve", but it's not going to be easy.  Try that one out on your boss - say you watched a terrible movie and you need a day off to recover, and let me know how that goes.  But maybe movies are a bit like relationships - if you have a bad one, it's best to jump right back on that horse, as they say, and get yourself out there again, even if it's just to restore your faith in the process.  I've got just over a week to go on this topic, and now it feels like a bit of a slog to make it through the final 25% of relationship-themed films, but maybe that's because I'm working through the "It's Complicated" part of the chain.  

Today's film drops us right into the middle of the situation - Stensland has spent almost two days in bed with an attractive older woman he met in a furniture store - thankfully the film doesn't flash back to their meeting and then do any kind of split-timeline thing - but later we do find out why he likes to loiter in the furniture store.  Morgan has just dropped the information that she's married, and she only slept with Stensland to get back at her husband, who has cheated on her.  It's a lot to take in, for both Stensland and us, but it ends with him storming out of her house, and feeling like his heart was broken.  He's really wanted a girlfriend for some time, supposedly he's ready for it and sees it as an important part of his growth process, on the way to becoming a curmudgeon.  

But in many ways he's been stuck - sitting on the couch, getting high and re-watching "Dawson's Creek", which is his comfort zone.  Stensland has a lot of comfort zones.  But his roommate soon moves out, because who wants to follow an unnecessary character (this feels a bit clunky, the character is introduced JUST to leave, and create a space in the apartment) and Stensland is soon visited by Morgan's husband, Grady.  In a bad reaction to the break-up of his two-day relationship, Stensland had threatened to blackmail Morgan for $15,000 or he'd tell her husband about the affair.  Morgan then raises the stakes, and Grady tracks down Stensland in order to kill him, or at least beat him up, or at least threaten him.  

But Grady sees a bit of himself in lonely bachelor Stensland - once he was that guy, sitting in a messy apartment, eating mulligan stew straight from the can. (Jesus, can't they even heat it up first?)  So Grady takes pity on Stensland, leaves his wife, moves into the apartment, and takes Stensland under his wing, also uses him as a wingman in order to get laid.  Grady's plan is to cheat on his wife, even the score, and then maybe go back to her.  Or maybe make a new life plan, that's a bit unclear.  But either way, the plan involves clubbing and binge-drinking every night in order to get laid.  This is a terrible plan, because you can't just quit your own life, and isn't Grady just returning to his own comfort zone, being a former expert on alcohol and non-committed relationships?  There's no way this ends well, right?  

Along the way, there are just too many distracting details, most of which were unnecessary.  It's fine for a character to have a couple of quirks, but Stensland just has way too many.  There's the Dawson's Creek thing, the furniture store thing, all the old-man stuff, the wearing weird clothing, and then they drop the Billy Ocean stuff in late in the film, and by then it's just too much. I still don't have a solid read on the character, after all that time I've invested.  Sure, one day he's going to spread his wings and fly like a condor, but don't you have to walk before you can fly?  Everybody here just wants to skip a bunch of steps in the personal growth department and not do the work involved, and that's just not going to get them there. 

The director of this film has a lot more credits on IMDB as an editor, like thirty years worth and I think that's something of an insight.  This is a well-edited film, in that it took a lot of disparate material and information and found some way to weave it all together. However, there's more to directing than editing, right?  An editor only has to decide what to leave in, what to leave out, and where everything goes, and on the surface level that sounds a lot like directing.  But a director also has to ask tough questions like, "Does all this information add up to something bigger?" and "Are we throwing too many different elements into the mix here?" and "Is this film, you know, any good or are we all just wasting our time?"  That's what seems to be missing here, nobody looking at the big picture to determine if there's an overall point being made. 

Really, what's the takeaway?  Don't sleep with a married woman, unless you're a slacker who could really use the boost of confidence that (eventually) provides?  Don't let your girlfriend's husband move in with you, except that he will pay the rent and take you on a binge-drinking emotional journey that will (eventually) be beneficial for all involved?  Don't spend all your time getting high and watching "Dawson's Creek" because that's preventing you from landing that job at the furniture store?  It's just so tough to land on the proper through-line here.  

Also starring Domhnall Gleeson (last seen in "The Kitchen"), Christina Applegate (last seen in "Going the Distance"), Nina Dobrev (last seen in "Flatliners"), Dan Gill, James Yi (last seen in "The Interview"), Balinder Johal, Britt Irvin (last seen in "Hot Rod"), Anna Van Hooft (last seen in "Warcraft"), Anja Savcic (last seen in "Life" (2015)), Aliyah O'Brien, Nils Hognestad (last seen in "Overboard" (2018)), BJ Harrison, Brenda Crichlow, Candus Churchill, Angela Moore, Vladimir Ruzich, Chris Nowland, Julian Christopher, Bill Croft with archive footage of James Van der Beek (last seen in "Jay and Silent Bob Reboot"), Katie Holmes (last seen in "Ocean's Eight").

RATING: 4 out of 10 expensive suits (where did they come from? Grady moved in with just two small suitcases...)

All About Steve

Year 13, Day 62 - 3/3/21 - Movie #3,764

BEFORE: I just found out that March is Women's History Month - so that's a great way to justify my romance chain carrying over into March, right?  I don't have to call it "March Marriage Madness" like I did last year, I can just say I'm celebrating Women's History - or is it Herstory?  I've got "Wonder Woman" coming up in March, can that count?  OK, I'm being facetious here, but maybe some of my programming is close enough to qualify, I'll have to take a look.  Today in Women's History - on March 3, 1913 thousands of women marched in the first suffragist parade in Washington, DC.  And on March 3, 2005, Margaret Wilson was elected as the Speaker of the New Zealand House of Representatives, and for the next 17 months, all of that country's highest political offices were held by women (including Queen Elizabeth II).  

Thomas Haden Church carries over from "Lucky Them". 

THE PLOT: Convinced that a cable news cameraman is her true love, an eccentric crossword puzzle maker trails him as he travels all over the country, hoping to convince him that they belong together. 

AFTER:  And almost 11 years ago - on March 6, 2010, Sandra Bullock attended the Golden Raspberry Awards in Hollywood, which traditionally nominates the WORST films and acting performances of each year.  She WON (if you can call that winning) 2 awards for her work on "All About Steve", Worst Actress and Worst Couple.  But she showed up and handed out DVD copies of the movie, promising that if everyone watched it and it was truly the worst, she'd show up at the ceremony again the following year.  Then the next day she won an Academy Award for "The Blind Side", so I'm pretty sure she had the last laugh there. 

That being said, the Razzies were well deserved, this is a terrible movie, with terrible characters and a terrible storyline, also terrible dialogue.  I don't even know where to start, but Bullock's character is as good a place as any.  Mary Horowitz is a cruciverbalist - that's a crossword puzzle creator - for a small Sacramento newspaper.  She only has to create one puzzle a week, but she wants to do seven per week, getting harder each day like the New York Times puzzles do.  This is to show us that she has ambition, but we soon come to realize that she also dreams big, and doesn't know her own limitations - somehow this is because her brain is filled with all the (mostly) useless facts one needs to know to create crosswords, like the NENE is a Hawaiian goose and the BESSEMER process is important to making steel. Since she lives in this world of words, she's fairly clueless about normal interactions with humans - so being smart actually makes her dumb?  Yeah, this doesn't really track. 

She's also an adult who still lives with her parents, and has no personal life - so when she's set up on a blind date, she sets her expectations WAY too high - it's just a date, it barely means anything, but to her it means EVERYTHING.  So this leads me to conclude that she's got some weird developmental thing, maybe she's autistic or somewhere on the spectrum, but I've met really nerdy girls who have relationship problems, trust me, they don't look anything like Sandra Bullock.  But what do you expect from a screenplay that thinks putting a female character in a short skirt and thigh-high boots counts as introspection?  Anyway, she totally blows it on her date with Steve - and she practically rapes him in his truck, they never even get to the restaurant?  She definitely doesn't know how to play it cool...

Now, to most guys this would seem like a windfall, getting to second base before the date even starts - but Steve is a normal, together guy, for the most part - not because some screenwriter made him that way, it feels more like they forgot to assign any kind of personality to him.  But things are clearly moving too fast for him here (honestly, I can't decide if this plot point was believable or not) so he calls off the date and says he just got called to work in Boston - Steve's a camera-man for a cable news show, like "Inside Edition" or CNN or something. Which is more unbelievable here, that a woman would cluelessly initiate sex before the first date starts, or that a man would reject it?  I don't think this makes sense from either angle, but unfortunately, it's what we're given to work with today.  

Clearly Steve just wanted to be rid of her - he listened to her talk for five minutes, I get that. She's a lot, and she never stops talking about USELESS stuff - OK, the stuff is only useful if you're writing crosswords, so if you have a friend or potential mate who writes crosswords, by all means, dump them now, because they'll never stop and they have no boundaries, plus no cruciverbalist has ever managed to become a respectable member of society, they all live in their own little worlds. (This may seem a little unfair, to paint all "word nerds" with the same brush, but don't blame me, I'm just extrapolating from what this movie is laying down.). Have you met Will Shortz, and managed to have a meaningful conversation with him?  I didn't think so.

Mary writes the next week's crossword all about her date with Steve ("All About Steve", get it?) only the problem is that none of the newspaper's 44,000 readers know who Steve is, so the puzzle is unsolvable - again, Mary has no filter, no boundaries and no clue, because being so smart makes her really dumb.  So since apparently there is NO EDITOR checking her work before printing it (that's a NITPICK POINT if ever there was one...) Mary loses her job.

So when left alone in the tub to think about thingss, Mary somehow concludes that when Steve says, "I wish I could take you with me..." that he was being sincere (he wasn't) and since she no longer has a job in Sacramento, she takes off to find him, somewhere in America.  Because that's what you do when you love somebody, you watch the news channel they work for to find out where the news is, and then you just go there.  That's super dumb - by the time she gets there, he's moved on to the next story!  

But then she does catch up with him, at a rally for some controversy over a baby girl born with an extra leg - which I don't think is a thing that happens.  The reporter who works with Steve wants to keep Mary around because she's a useful dispensary of useless facts that he can quote on air, or maybe he just wants her around because this annoys Steve, or maybe just because he's a dick, it's tough to say.  Seriously, this screenplay is all over the damn place and has no focus.  Mary and her rally friends then encounter a tornado while trying to catch up with Steve again, only this plot point really goes nowhere, also.  The tornado destroys the car she was riding in, only it still sort of works, so what was the damn point?  

Then, in Colorado, a group of deaf kids has fallen into an abandoned mine-shaft while running across a field to attend a county fair - so Steve and crew are off to cover the story, and Mary and her clueless friends eventually show up there, too, because nobody seems to have anything better to do with their lives but follow around three reporters?  And Mary is so excited to see Steve that she runs toward him, only there is a GIANT HOLE in the ground in between them which she somehow DOES NOT SEE, and she falls in the hole.  I wish I could say that was the end of the story, but it's not. It gets worse...

Somehow her useless knowledge allows her to not panic while in the abandoned mine, find the last missing deaf child who somehow got left behind by the rescuers, and communicate with her.  Only Mary SAYS that she knows sign language, but then NEVER USES IT - she just keeps talking to the deaf girl in English, only louder, which is positively useless.  There was a chance here to make Mary a smart character who saves the day by knowing ASL, but this got bungled too.  All they had to do was teach Sandra Bullock a few signs, and that didn't happen - the character could have talked and signed at the same time, that was possible, thereby communicating to both the deaf character AND the audience at the same time.  Nope, that was apparently too much for the film to handle.  So I'm left wondering how the deaf girl understood Mary at all - the girl signed at Mary, and Mary just spoke back to her.  In English. STUPID.

The reporter guy also jumps into the mine for some reason, because he feels responsible for Mary being there in the first place, and not knowing that she was so dumb that she'd walk straight toward a giant hole that's right in front of her.  Because why not make the problem worse?  But then some arcane knowledge about how a pulley works, and using the weight of a mine car rolling down a track, they're able to rescue themselves.  Which is good, because the hundreds of professional rescuers gathered around the giant hole in the field really had no game.  Are you kidding me? 

There's no payoff, either - we don't find out that Steve suddenly appreciates Mary for the weird, quirky nice girl that she really is, who just happened to try to make out with him on the first date.  We don't find out that he never saw her again, either, so I guess it's up to the viewer - only, would that have been so hard to resolve, one way or the other?  Did Mary learn anything about maybe not chasing a guy around the country when he's not that into her?  I guess we'll never know, because the movie just sort of forgot to tell us anything.  It doesn't so much end, instead it just stopped.  Which is fine, I couldn't any much more of it, anyway.

Everything's just a bit shy of horrible here - like the big revelation about why she wears those boots.  Spoiler alert, it's because they're comfortable. Why does it just feel overall that nobody making this film was trying to do well, not even a little?

Also starring Sandra Bullock (last seen in "The Blind Side"), Bradley Cooper (last heard in "Avengers: Endgame"), Ken Jeong (last seen in "Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween"), DJ Qualls (last seen in "The New Guy"), M.C. Gainey (ditto), Katy Mixon (last seen in "State of Play"), Beth Grant (last seen in "Jackie"), Howard Hesseman (last seen in "Heat"), Luenell (last seen in "Dolemite Is My Name"), Jordan Morris, Keith David (last seen in "Night School"), Holmes Osborne (last seen in "Cheaper by the Dozen"), Jason Jones (last seen in "Chuck"), Kerri Kenney (last seen in "Other People"), Noah Munck, Rachel Sterling, Jackie Johnson, with cameos from Geraldo Rivera (last seen in "The U.S. vs. John Lennon"), Hari Kondabolu, Charlyne Yi (last seen in "Always Be My Maybe"), Eddie Jemison (last seen in "War Dogs")

RATING: 2 out of 10 carved apple heads (also, for NO reason whatsoever)

Lucky Them

Year 13, Day 61 - 3/2/21 - Movie #3,763

BEFORE: Format problems again tonight - this one used to be on Netflix, but it is no longer - I think maybe I spotted it on Hulu, but it's not there either. No worries, I believe it's on AmazonPrime, only wait, what's a premium subscription?  We've got AmazonPrime, but that doesn't get us access to every movie?  What are we paying for then?  All right, there's always iTunes as a back-up, but this movie better be worth the $3.99 rental price, then.

Got another two-fer today, Ryan Eggold and Amy Seimetz carry over from "Lovesong". 

THE PLOT: A rock journalist is assigned to track down her ex-boyfriend.

AFTER: I liked this one, it did turn out to be worth the $3.99, and not just because that keeps my chain alive.  It feels really real, somehow, and according to the IMDB trivia section, it's based on the personal experiences of Emily Wachtel in the music and dating arenas. She also appears in the film, and she used "Ellie Klug" as her pseudonym as she wrote columns for the Fairfield Weekly and several other magazines.  This was back when there were magazines, and music was on CDs, and also people went to see music concerts in person. 

But this leads to an important question, was there a real Matthew Smith?  Ellie Klug in the film had a relationship with the fictional Matthew Smith, who disappeared in Washington State and was assumed to have committed suicide - but Ellie knew he was afraid of heights, so she's believed for years that he wasn't dead, only then, where was he?  So when she checks the internet message boards and finds people who also claim to have seen him in various locations, she pitches a story idea to her editor at the floundering Stax magazine, and tracks down a man who claims to have footage of Smith performing in a club.  

That footage turns out to be a dead-end, but should it have been?  My major NITPICK POINT with this film is that Ellie looks at the footage several times, and makes no effort to figure out exactly where it was filmed.  There's a very distinctive logo on the stage, which reads "Hart of Steel", I think, and there simply can't be many clubs with that sign on the stage.  Why not Google that phrase, or ask around on the club circuit, show that footage to a few other club owners, maybe somebody would recognize that?  Any band who played there would also probably be able to identify it, so why not check in with any of the many musicians that Ellie knows, show them the film and say, "Hey, where is THAT?"  But nobody in this film thinks to do that, even though several characters claim to be good at investigating things.  I mean, I can go on the web and get a list of every club in the Seattle area, or a list of the locations where "Lucky Them" was filmed - why couldn't Ellie think to do the same? Maybe "Hart of Steel" is the band name, and if so, maybe start by finding that band? 

But the film is really about Ellie's relationships - she never got closure with Matthew Smith, and as a result we're left to posit that she's had many short-term flings over the years with the exact same kind of man, the talented rock guys who are trying to become famous.  I guess they all used her like a stepping stone, then ditched her when they got recording contracts, or maybe even faked their own deaths to get away from her, what does that tell you?  Perhaps this is just part of being a musician, or any famous person like an actor.  Do famous people just seem to have more relationship problems, and therefore shorter and more frequent hook-ups, or does it just seem this way since they're famous, and the problems that anyone and everyone can have just get more media coverage?  

Anyway, Ellie's also juggling a budding relationship with a street musician, who's starting to appear in clubs, and Ellie feels drawn to him, even kissing him during their first interview (very unprofessional!).  Lucas even seems really into her, but she's been down this road so many times that she can't bear to go through it again, so she keeps rebuffing him.  Jeez, Ellie, it's OK to have a type, even if it's not going to last long it still might be worth exploring...  But to find Matthew for her article she enlists the help of Charlie, a man she dated five years ago, who isn't her type but does have a lot of money.  He offers to fund her search if he can also shoot a documentary about it at the same time.  

Charlie and Ellie have that sort of "When Harry Met Sally" thing going on - they tried to date, it didn't work out, they became friends and over the course of the film they come to rely on each other.  They even double-date when Charlie connects with Charlotte, and how that happens and what happens next is too crucial to the movie to talk about here, but most of it is funny, in a dry slice-of-life kind of way.  Charlie's sort of removed from it all, but he's driven by the impulse to keep trying, again and again and again.  And again.  

Charlie happens to also be the complete opposite of Ellie's type, which is probably why they work well together as friends, and are thus able to work together towards a common goal.  And they might have accomplished something, too, if Ellie didn't constantly let her personal hang-ups get in the way of meeting her deadline.  That's unfortunate, because there was a real chance here to show a professional woman who works for a magazine, and might be, you know, pretty good at doing her job.  Sadly, it's a bog blow for feminism today, since the main character is mostly defined by the men she's slept with over the years and her emotions, largely concerning the men she's slept with over the years.  Total Bechdel test fail, because even when Ellie is confiding in her lesbian bartender friend, guess what they're always talking about?  

Still, it's a mostly-enjoyable mostly-positive film about a woman who's been through some things and is trying to do better in the future, but first she's got to stop and look back before she can move forward, which happens from time to time.  A lot of festival films have popped up lately, "Duck Butter" won an award at Tribeca Film Festival, "Results" got a Grand Jury Prize nomination at Sundance in 2015, and "Lovesong" got the same thing a year later. "Lucky Them" was screened as a special presentation at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival (as did "12 Years a Slave", "Dallas Buyers Club", "Enemy", "Don Jon", "Gravity", "Philomena", "Prisoners", "Third Person" and "Only Lovers Left Alive").

So yeah, this film has that festival-film feel to it. Not a Sundance feel, but a general festival feel.  I only went to the Toronto Festival once, back in 1997, but I was impressed by the line-up of films - more films used to go there when they already had distribution deals in place, or were ready for release in the fall and didn't want to wait for a possible Sundance screening in January.  (I was a producer on one of the few films that played in both Toronto and Sundance, because I read the rules carefully and realized that Sundance only required a U.S. premiere, and playing in Canada didn't disqualify a film.)

As for the true identity of "Matthew Smith", it's a tough nut to crack. Northwest musicians like Elliott Smith and Kurt Cobain are good guesses, but neither one really fits with the premise here. (Though Ellie has a fish named Kurt Cobain who dies at the start of the film, which is a nice change from all the "woman with dying dog" films I've seen this year...).  Digging through articles on Emily Wachtel, it seems more like the missing musician character is more based on her own father, who traveled a lot for work, and a younger, now-famous musician she once had a relationship with, whom she steadfastly refuses to name. 

Also starring Toni Collette (last seen in "Unlocked"), Thomas Haden Church (last seen in "Smart People"), Ahna O'Reilly (last seen in "Elvis & Nixon"), Oliver Platt (last heard in "I'm Thinking of Ending Things"), Lynn Shelton, Nina Arianda (last seen in "Richard Jewell"), Johnny Depp (last seen in "Dead Man"), Louis Hobson (last seen in "Laggies"), Tony Doupe (ditto), Conner Marx, Jake Robards (last seen in "Cadillac Records"), Wally Dalton, Gary Gulman (last seen in "Joker"), Emily Wachtel (last seen in "We Don't Belong Here"), Sean Nelson, Evan Mosher, Linas Phillips, and the voice of Joanne Woodward (last heard in "The Age of Innocence").

RATING: 6 out of 10 cool neon signs in the magazine's office

Lovesong

Year 13, Day 60 - 3/1/21 - Movie #3,762

BEFORE: Welcome to March, it always gets here earlier than you think, and there's still nearly two weeks left of romance films.  Believe it or not, I'm already working on NEXT year's romance chain, and I'm starting that process by reviewing all the films on my list (either saved to a DVD or my DVR, or available on streaming) that couldn't fit into 2021's 40-film chain, and figuring out how they may all fit together - or not, as the case may be.  But I've got a jump on things because I've already got a 9-film linked chain, an 8-film chain, a 6-film and a 5-film.  If I can connect them, that's nearly a whole month's worth of programming already!  I've also got 7 or so little 2-film or 3-film chainlets I can use as connecting material - and I'm still on the hunt for more that will tie everything together. 

What I SHOULD be working on, however, is October's horror chain, in a similar fashion, because October's going to be here before next February is, and knowing where the October chain could start is the best way to set a target, where I need to aim for in September.  OK, I'll get working on that in just a couple days.  I'm due to review what's new on Netflix, Hulu and Amazon at the start of every month, anyway.  But just like with the romance chain, the trick will be finding horror films that aren't currently on my radar, but will link together the chainlets that I already have. It's lucky that actors who appear in one horror film (or one romance film, for that matter) often tend to appear in several, that makes things somewhat easier for me. 

Brooklyn Decker carries over from "Results", and Kevin Corrigan will be back before the end of the month.  Here are my upcoming links for March, in case you want to try to figure out my chain: Amy Seimetz and Ryan Eggold, Thomas Haden Church, Christina Applegate, Alexandria Daddario, Adam DeVine, Rebel Wilson, Anne Hathaway, Helen McCrory, Alistair Petrie, Simon Callow, Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Emily Watson, Kerry Condon, Harry Dean Stanton, Forest Whitaker, John Finn, Connie Nielsen, Natasha Rothwell, Jimmy O. Yang, Michael Peña, Vincent D'Onofrio, Kevin Corrigan, John Hawkes, and Shia LaBeouf.  Good luck!

THE PLOT: The relationship between two friends deepens during an impromptu road trip. 

AFTER: No celebrity birthday tie-ins today, though it's the birthday of Zack Snyder, Ron Howard, Javier Bardem, Tim Daly, Catherine Bach, David Niven, Harry Belafonte, Justin Bieber, Roger Daltrey and my ex-wife.  The fact that I'm back on a film with a lesbian theme is probably a little scheduling in-joke from my subconscious - this also happened two years ago when "Jenny's Wedding" also landed on March 1.

Unfortunately, this film's just not as interesting as "Jenny's Wedding", nor does it contain anything as shocking as what's in "Duck Butter".  It's a rather simple story about a married woman who has a fling with her friend, then spends the second half of the film (three years later, they see each other again at the friend's wedding, to a man) trying to understand her feelings. While it's not your typical film by any means, that doesn't mean that it isn't quite boring, because it is. 

In the first half, Sarah spends long days taking care of her daughter while her husband, Dean, is traveling for work, one long trip after another.  We never really find out how Dean feels about Sarah, but I suppose it doesn't really matter, he isn't there, so they're physically apart and that leads to being emotionally distant, either intentionally or not.  Sarah calls Mindy to go on a roadtrip, and the two women bond over late-night games of "Truth or Drink" and some form of intimate encounter, which is not seen by the audience.  Then Mindy abruptly buys a bus ticket back to New York, and Sarah's left to wonder what it all meant.  

Then the film skips ahead to Sarah's wedding in Tennessee, and it's all the standard traditions, from dress-fitting to a rehearsal dinner and a very wild bachelorette party.  Except Sarah and Mindy get drunk again, and that means they're gonna kiss again. Then they have to spend the whole next day figuring out what that means, and whether they both love each other, which they do, and then what to do with THAT information.  

Of course, with my experiences I'm going to naturally lean toward seeing this from the husbands' perspective (both of them), and also I'm going to wonder if it's fair to either of their husbands for them to get together on the down low. Also, are they truly lesbians, or only when alcohol is involved? And does that make a difference?  But maybe the universe or my subconscious brought this film to me on this day for a reason - maybe I need to think back on my first marriage and be reminded that in some ways, maybe I wasn't as present as I could have been, and would that have made a difference, or was she always headed in a certain direction toward her future and my actions (or inactions) could only speed up or slow down the inevitable?  Something to think about. 

But this film is such a bad study of "Show, don't tell."  There's just not enough "show" here, and to be honest, there's not much "tell" either.  The main characters spend too much time NOT talking about what they should be talking about, there's too much quiet time, with people just thinking about stuff.  And yes, this is another Sundance Festival film, it premiered there in January 2016, got a nomination for the Grand Jury Prize, but did not win.  Yeah, that feels about right - that was the year that "Birth of a Nation" won, but also nominated were "Other People", "Tallulah", and "Swiss Army Man". 

Also starring Riley Keough (last seen in "We Don't Belong Here"), Jena Malone (last seen in "Life as a House"), Amy Seimetz (last seen in "Alien: Covenant"), Marshall Chapman, Ryan Eggold (last seen in "Fathers & Daughters"), Rosanna Arquette (last seen in "Billionaire Boys Club"), Cary Joji Fukunaga, Jessie Ok Gray, Sky Ok Gray, Neal Huff (last seen in "Motherhood"), William Tyler.

RATING: 3 out of 10 fake mustaches

Results

Year 13, Day 59 - 2/28/21 - Movie #3,761

BEFORE: OK, last film for February, and March looks to be another full month, 31 films in 31 days coming up, including a St. Patrick's Day film, and hopefully "Wonder Woman 1984" are going to be in the mix.  But first I've got to finish the romance chain, 28 down and only 12 more to go, I think 40 is a nice round number for this year's total. 

Before I forget again, here are the format stats for February: 

8 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Made of Honor, Like Crazy, A Good Old Fashioned Orgy, The Jane Austen Book Club, Third Person, The Seagull, Hope Gap, The Bookshop

3 Movies watched on cable (not saved): The Art of Getting By, Emma., Chaos Theory

5 watched on Netflix: Always Be My Maybe, Duck Butter, Blue Jay, The One I Love, Results

1 watched on iTunes: Manglehorn
9 watched on Amazon Prime: Almost Friends, Little Italy, The Giant Mechanical Man, Happythankyoumoreplease, I'll See You in My Dreams, Paper Heart, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, Life Itself, Rio I Love You
2 watched on Hulu: The Female Brain, Destination Wedding, 

28 TOTAL

Cable is still the preferred viewing format, not by much this month (11 films to AmazonPrime's 9) but WAY ahead for the year, 30 films out of 61, just about 50%.  Looks like I'm still not going to be cutting that cord anytime soon. My Netflix list is down to just 55 movies, and I should be checking off another 5 of them in March, but I'm overdue to go scrolling through Netflix (and Hulu, and AmazonPrime) looking for new contenders to add to my lists.  I'm going to need more romance films again next year, after all.  

Constance Zimmer carries over from "Chaos Theory". 

THE PLOT: Two mismatched personal trainers' lives are upended by the actions of a new, wealthy client. 

AFTER: I've been to Sundance three times - back in 1998, 2001 and 2004, and there are still films I saw there that just don't seem to pop up anywhere, on any cable channel or streaming service.  Like "Regeneration", which was a film about World War I soldiers recovering from PTSD - OK, I guess that one's on AmazonPrime now, but it took a LONG time.  And then there's "I Like Killing Flies", a wonderful little documentary about a NYC diner called Shopsin's... OK, that's on YouTube for free.  But what about "Scotland PA", which was a film that moved the plot of "Macbeth" to a Pennsylvania fast food restaurant - whoa, that's on YouTube now too.  Hey, maybe we ARE getting close to the point where every film ever made is available somewhere, that would be nice.  When "Breakfast of Champions" and "The Young Poisoner's Handbook" are streaming, I'll consider that maybe we've arrived.  

"Results" feels like a little indie, maybe a festival film (Yep, I'm right, this one played at Sundance in 2015), that didn't do much business when it was released (Yep, I'm right, this one only grossed $104,000 in the US), if it even GOT released, and now at least it's available on Netflix, so maybe finally it will reach some eyeballs. Does it deserve to?  That's really not for me to say, only I guess in some way it is. What's that line from "Casablanca" about how the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world?  That's about where I find myself tonight, wondering if this story about a gym owner, a fitness trainer and a rich client add up to a hill of beans.  Not really for me, because I'm a conscientious objector in the world of exercise - run if you want, or lift weights, or do yoga poses, I don't care as long as you leave me out of it. 

I guess there's something redeeming here, romance-wise, in that Trevor and Kat tried having a relationship once, it didn't work out, and then they kept working together, content to keep each other at arm's length, and somehow in a crazy way it takes the influence of Danny to get them back on the same page. It seemed like Danny was trying to get something going between himself and Kat, only that didn't really work, because it's a bit unprofessional for a trainer to have sex with their client.  And it's problematic after that, I'm guessing.  But then easygoing Danny must have realized his mistake at some point, became friends with Trevor instead, and then made plans to get Trevor and Kat back together.  

So as Trevor is expanding his gym to a larger space, with plans to have a bigger juice bar, a gathering space for seminars from fitness experts, and much more gym equipment, Danny invests in the new gym, then sells his 50% interest to Kat at a very low price.  But does Trevor want to be in business with Kat?  He offers to buy the shares for ten times what Kat paid, but at least this got them talking again, and then after realizing that they've been driving each other crazy all this time for no good reason, maybe these crazy kids are going to be OK.  Danny's going to be OK, too, as long as he has money and can throw parties that sorority girls will attend.  Look, I'm not sure that was the best advice, but it's a better track for him than getting back together with his ex-wife.  

I don't fault people for going to gyms or wanting to get in shape, but I would argue that restaurants and movie theaters should be more open right now and gyms should be more closed.  People sweat more in gyms, they breathe more in gyms, they touch shared equipment, it's just not good all the way around.  And we've proven already by our vaccination guidelines that grocery and restaurant workers are "essential", while trainers are just not. That may be my opinion, but it's also the government's.  But I don't fault anyone for working at a gym, as long as they're really into it. 

I'm going to go back to that documentary "I Like Killing Flies" to prove my point.  Restaurant owner Kenny Shopsin (the late Kenny Shopsin as of 2018) said, "Pick an arbitrary, stupid goal, become totally involved in it, and pursue it with vigor, and what happens to you in that pursuit is your life."  Kenny was a wise man. Every movie that gets released, on theater screens or home screens, is someone's arbitrary, stupid goal, so congratulations?

Also starring Guy Pearce (last seen in "The Catcher Was a Spy"), Cobie Smulders (last seen in "Spider-Man: Far from Home"), Kevin Corrigan (last seen in "The Next Three Days"), Brooklyn Decker (last seen in "Battleship"), Giovanni Ribisi (last seen in "Selma"), Anthony Michael Hall (last seen in "War Machine"), Tishuan Scott, Zoe Graham (last seen in "Secret in Their Eyes"), David Bernon (last seen in "Adult Beginners"), Elizabeth Berridge, Katie Folger, Elizabeth McQueen, Zack Carlson, Greg Dorchak, Lindsay Anne Kent, with a cameo from Paul Qui. 

RATING: 4 out of 10 kettle bells