Victoria & Abdul

Year 13, Day 72 - 3/13/21 - Movie #3,775

BEFORE: I'm off to Massachusetts later today, my first trip out of state in months, and the first time I'll see my parents since late May, when I snuck up on Amtrak to visit for a combined Mother's Day/Father's Day, and back then I thought that maybe the pandemic would last a few more months at most. I didn't know I'd have to pass up on any organized family celebration of Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's.  But it is what it is, and those holidays are gone, except maybe we'll get together this weekend and cook a big turkey holiday dinner, who knows.  My Dad says they just want to order take-out while we're in town, though. We may stop at Foxwoods Casino on the way up, it's where we usually stop on Christmas Eve when driving through Connecticut, I'm pretty sure their buffet is still closed, though, but we can find another place to each lunch. 

One last movie before I get in the car -  and then I'll post the review later tonight after I arrive in Mass. Two actors carry over from "Hampstead" - Adeel Akhtar, who played a barrister, and Simon Callow, who played the judge.  On this date in Women's History, Abigail Fillmore, 14th First Lady of the U.S. was born on March 13, 1978, and Myrtle Claire Bachelder, American chemist and W.A.C. officer, known for her work on the atomic bomb program, was born on March 13, 1908. Also, Lyn St. James, one of only 9 female race car drivers who ever qualified for the Indy 500 was born March 13,1947. And Happy Birthday to actresses Robin Duke, Dana Delany and  Annabeth Gish. 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Young Victoria" (Movie #3,403)

THE PLOT: Queen Victoria strikes up an unlikely friendship with a young Indian clerk named Abdul Karim.  

AFTER: Queen Victoria lived a long time, that's for sure.  She was also Queen for a very long time, from 1837 to 1901.  We hear so much about "Victorian England", as if that's one long, distinct time period, but that's 64 years, there were probably a few different sections within that span, the world probably changed significantly several times during her reign. And her husband died in 1861, so she went on another 40 years as an older single lady.  Another movie, "Mrs. Brown", depicted herrumored relationship with a Scottish manservant named John Brown.  This film posits that after that relationship ran its course, she found some kind of favour, or at least fascination, with another servant from India, who came to England to deliver a ceremonial crown during a dinner service, accidentally made eye contact with the Queen, and was then asked/commanded to stay on.

The film can't really say that the Queen was attracted to him, no, that wouldn't be proper, but here she does show an interest in where Abdul came from, what the customs are there, and various aspects of life in India, and then an interest in the Koran and Arabic philosophy when she finds out that he's a Muslim, not a Hindu.  Victoria was the Empress of India, but according to this, she never went there.  How can a Queen rule over another nation and its people without at least visiting?  So it's really in her best interest to find out as much as she can about the far-off land of India, and she chooses Abdul as her Munshi (teacher) and instructor in the Urdu language and the Koran. 

Naturally the royal court is shocked, what is this brown servant person doing having conversations with the Queen about religion and such?  And is this even proper, what with the British monarch technically also being the head of the Anglican church?  Yeah, thank Henry VIII for that one, a man who never considered the value of separating Church and State.  He just said, "Screw it, they're basically the same thing, aren't they?  Now, who's next in line to be my wife?"  

Victoria ends up having a Durbar room built in one of her palace homes, getting carpets and mangoes shipped in from Agra, and having a replica of the famous Peacock Throne built for her.  Again, she's the Empress of India, so she's well within her rights to act like it if she wants to. 

For anyone who's been shocked by a recent notable interview during which is was revealed that there still may be racist attitudes at Buckingham Palace, just watch this film and see how the royals like Victoria's son (Edward VII, aka Albert Edward, but here just called "Bertie") and the Prime Minister, plus the hangers-on at the court and the royal staff treat a person of color.  And really, it's not that many steps from Victoria to Elizabeth II - Edward VII was succeeded by his son, George V, who was succeeded by HIS son, Edward VIII (see "W.E") who abdicted and was replaced by his brother, George VI (see "The King's Speech", a different British king nicknamed "Bertie").  And George VI, of course, was the father of Queen Elizabeth II.  So that makes Queen Victoria the, umm, great-great-grandmother (?) of Queen Elizabeth.  Right? 

That's just five generations from then until now - changes in attitudes on race take a long time to change, probably longer where royalty is concerned.  Victoria forming a friendship with a man from India doesn't mean that she wasn't racist, same goes for her being interested in or fascinated by Indian culture - she was still an entitled white person surrounded by other entitled white people who had no impetus to be inclusive in any way, or change the system to benefit people of color.  India and its people were just another asset to be exploited at that point. 

This is mostly a true story, there was a real Abdul Karim who attended to Victoria during the last 14 years of her life. Some details have been changed, of course - in real life Abdul and fellow Indian Mohammed Buksh served the Queen breakfast after arriving in England, not a ceremonial coin during a dinner. Karim did end up teaching Victoria a few words of Hindustani and Urdu, and he made her some excellent curry. And his presence did disrupt the Royal Household, creating jealousy and discontent. Abdul did return to India to bring his wife and mother-in-law to England, and he traveled with Victoria on trips to the French Riviera and on Christmas holiday. The film messes with the timeline a bit, and doesn't include all of Abdul's trips home to India, but other than that, it seems fairly spot on. 

Also starring Judi Dench (last seen in "Notes on a Scandal"), Ali Fazal, Tim Pigott-Smith (last seen in "Flyboys"), Eddie Izzard (last seen in "The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years"), Michael Gambon (last seen in "Johnny English Strikes Again"), Paul Higgins (last seen in "Greed"), Olivia Williams (last seen in "Seventh Son"), Fenella Woolgar (last seen in "Mr. Turner"), Julian Wadham (last seen in "Churchill'), Robin Soans (last seen in "The Queen"), Ruth McCabe (last seen in "Philomena"), Sukh Ojia, Simon Paisley Day (last seen in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), Amani Zardoe, Sophie Trott, Penny Ryder (also last seen in "Notes on a Scandal"), Trevor Fox (last seen in "Billy Elliot"), Joe Caffrey, John Stahl (last seen in "Mary Queen of Scots"), Tim McMullan (last seen in "The Woman in Black"), Jonathan Harden, John Rowe. 

RATING: 6 out of 10 gelatin desserts

Hampstead

Year 13, Day 71 - 3/12/21 - Movie #3,774

BEFORE: Alistair Petrie carries over from "A Little Chaos", and a rare Birthday SHOUT-OUT to Lesley Manville, who appears in tonight;s film - born March 12, 1956.  Also born on March 12 were First Lady Jane Pierce in 1806, painter Elaine de Kooning in 1918, Australian feminist author Anne Summers in 1945, Liza Minnelli in 1946 and Senator Tammy Duckworth in 1968. And on March 12, 1912, the Girl Guides were founded, which later got renamed as the Girl Scouts.  

THE PLOT: An American widow finds unexpected love with a man living wild on Hampstead Heath when they take on the developers who want to destroy his home. 

AFTER: It's kind of hard to get a read on this film, like is it a romance or not a romance?  There's romance in it, but it's a very weird one.  And which character is the star of the film, the hermit squatter played by Brendan Gleeson, or the widow who lives across the street, who watches him through binoculars and finds herself weirdly drawn to him?  You can't really divide the film up 50/50, at some point the director really needed to make a decision here about who the lead is.  

The squatter, called Donald Horner here, is based on a real person named Harry Hallowes, who camped out on a piece of abandoned land beginning in 1987, after being evicted from his flat in Highgate.  Yes, I said "flat", not "apartment", remember that the British don't speak our English, they've got different words for a lot of things - like they call cookies "biscuits" and they call our biscuits "scones" or something.  They call our fries "chips", and they call our chips "crisps", because they're crispy, which is almost as bad as calling cookies "cookies" because they were once cooked.  Why don't we Yanks call them "bakies", that would make about as much sense.  Honestly, I'm not even sure I favor American English over Brit-speak - they call soccer "football" which makes perfect sense because you use your feet all the time in that sport, and American football players hardly ever kick the ball, so really, WE should come up with a new name for American football, only it's far too late for that.  And I'm going to steal a joke from Hannah Gadsby here, they call gasoline "petrol", which is short for "petroleum", and that makes perfect sense.  Shortening it to "gas", as Americans frequently do, makes no sense, because it's a liquid, not a gas.  I think if I moved to the U.K. I'd be all caught up in a week, but I probably still wouldn't call a truck a "lorry" or an elevator a "lift". What do they call an escalator, a "stairsy-wairsy"?  Or a "moving apples and pears"?

Anyway, while we're on the subject of things with different names in the U.K., here in the U.S. there's a thing called "squatter's rights", which makes it very hard for building owners and landlords to evict people, even if those people are behind on their rent, or don't pay any rent at all.  In the U.K. they call this "adverse possession", which is a principle by which somebody occupying a piece of land for a long period of time, and the property owner does not exercise their right to regain possession of the land, the person possessing it gains a form of ownership of it.  It's kind of like "possession is 9/10 of the law" combined with "Finders keepers, losers weepers".  That's what happened to Harry Hallowes, who ended up owning the half-acre he was living on, supporting himself by doing odd jobs for locals, including director Terry Gilliam.  

There's no record of him having a relationship with a flighty American widow, so that whole part of the film could be a Hollywood addition to his tale.  There's so much about her story that I found very confusing, like, for example, what's her deal?  And, why does she have money but also shows no understanding of how to make more, or how to hang on to the money that she has?  Why does she keep falling further and further into debt, to the point where she eventually has to auction off her things and sell her flat?  And what is the deal with that flat, anyway, is it a condo or a co-op or a converted hotel?  It's very unclear.  She lives in part of a giant complex and she serves on the planning committee, but I'd still like to know what the specifics are, it's got a desk clerk working, like a hotel would.  And I guess maybe her dead British husband owned it and so she inherited it, but since her only job is working in a "charity shop" (I guess that's what they call antique stores or thrift stores over there...) that job's not going to pay for the upkeep on her flat for very long.  

So, really, her main concern SHOULD be to get a job that pays a little more so she can keep living the way she's accustomed to, but no, she'd rather get close to the man who lives in the rundown shack - is she genuinely interested in him, or just looking for an escape from her pending personal bankruptcy?  The film makes a point of mentioning that Donald doesn't SMELL like a typical homeless person would, perhaps because he swims every day in the river next to his ramshackle house.  And where IS this house, exactly?  They talk about it as if the house is "on the heath", but doesn't that mean out in a field, or in the woods?  How can Emily's building be just across the street, if his shack is out on the heath?  And then why do people talk about the property he's on by calling it "the abandoned hospital", did it used to be a hospital, and if so, what happened to that building, where did it go?  Do they really mean "the empty lot where the hospital USED to be, only it's not there any more, but we still think of it as the hospital, just so we all know what we're referencing?"  That seems stupid.  

I mean, if the hospital's been gone since 1987, probably a lot of people who remember it aren't even AROUND any more, and even if they are, they've probably known it as an empty lot much longer than they knew it as a hospital, so then call it "the empty lot", right?  Oh, sorry, Brit-speak - call it "the tract" or "the patch" or whatever. More language barriers here - Emily and Donald spend time together in the "loft", which is what an American would call an "attic" - and in the U.S., there are entire apartments just called "lofts", which is an apartment without any walls separating the rooms - another stupid definition because a loft should mean an upper region, or the upper part of a multi-level place, and so in some loft apartments, there is no loft. See? American English is so dumb. But it's a bit weird that there's even an attic at all in this building, like does each unit have an attic? No, there's one big shared attic, umm, loft, where all the residents keep their spare stuff.  Awkward. 

There's not even a plot summary on Wiki for this film - I know it's running on cable now, but considering how little box office this film made in the U.S. in 2017, I get the feeling that practically nobody has ever seen this film.  That can't be true, but I keep thinking that one day I'm going to stumble on to a film that absolutely NOBODY has seen, and it wouldn't be for lack of publicity, it would just be this little film that's so far under the radar that even the people who had heard of it would think, "Oh, sure, I'll get to that film someday, there's no rush..." and then they'd all just never follow up.  Then I'll come along and watch it and be the first, and then maybe some of my loyal tens of readers will follow suit, and then I'll have taken this tiny film with no traction and increased its viewership tenfold.  It's bound to happen one day, I just need to find the world's most obscure film, which isn't easy to do. 

My all-time favorite headline from the New York Post - the newspaper that was responsible for "Headless Body in Topless Bar" and "Huma Cuts Off Weiner" (Anthony Weiner, that is") - ran when the police found out that a homeless man had been living between the supports of the Manhattan Bridge, he'd built something there that looked like a treehouse, a little shanty that had a bed, a makeshift stove, a pantry and a reading lamp.  But the police had to tear down his little rent-free non-apartment, because of the danger that it would fall apart and pieces would block the bike lane.  This led to the headline "Bridge Over for Troubled Squatter". Genius. 

Also starring Diane Keaton (last seen in "Morning Glory"), Brendan Gleeson (last seen in "Paddington 2"), James Norton (last seen in "Little Women"), Lesley Manville (last seen in "Maleficent: Mistress of Evil"), Jason Watkins (last seen in "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote"), Phil Davis (last seen in "Notes on a Scandal"), Simon Callow (last seen in "They'll Love Me When I'm Dead"), Peter Singh (last seen in "Johnny English Strikes Again"), William James Smith (last seen in "Greed"), Rosalind Ayres, Brian Protheroe, Alex Gaumond (last seen in "The Hustle"), Hugh Skinner (last seen in "Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again"), Adeel Akhtar (last seen in "Murder Mystery"), Deborah Findlay (last seen in "Jackie"), Stavros Demetraki.

RATING: 5 out of 10 petition signatures

A Little Chaos

Year 13, Day 70 - 3/11/21 - Movie #3,773

BEFORE: Well, I was really making progress on my Netflix queue there for a while, I think I had it down to about 57 movies, which was a vast improvement - but then a few days ago I took a scroll through the recommendations on both Hulu and Netflix (I'd gone through Disney+ and HBO Max last month) and now it's huge again, up over 120.  Should keep me busy for a while, provided I can get to most of them before they scroll off the service and end up on Tubi.  I just wish Netflix would tell me when each film got added, and when each one is likely to disappear so I could make better plans. 

Today's film perfectly fits in with Women's History month, though it seems to be all fictional, I'm not sure someone in the early 1680's would hire a woman to oversee an architectural garden project at Versailles, but let's roll with it.  On March 11 in Women's History - Michelle Bachelet was inaugurated as the first female president of Chile, and it's the birthday of Margaret Oakley Dayhoff (born in 1925), a pioneer in the fields of mathematics and biochemistry. Also Gale Norton (born in 1954), the first woman appointed as U.S. Secretary of the Interior. 

Helen McCrory carries over from "Becoming Jane". 

THE PLOT: Two talented landscape artists become romantically entangled while building a garden in King Louis XIV's palace at Versailles. 

AFTER: Well, a little research tells me that there was a real André Le Notre, landscape architect and chief gardener for the Louis XIV's palace at Versailles.  And of course the king and some of the royal figures depicted here were real, but Madame de Barra seems to be a completely fictional invention for this script.  I'm getting really good at smelling B.S. before I fall for it, like those movies that are set in the 1600's or 1700's and depict several people of color among the royals and in their court.  I think the recent interview Meghan and Harry had with Oprah is all the proof I need to say, "It just wasn't that way..."

But we're here to hear a story tonight, and for the romance story to be mixed in with the garden construction project, then there sort of needs to be a woman hired as the designer of the project.  Le Notre rejects her designs at first, after she botches her interview and doesn't agree with him about gardening being all about creating order out of chaos.  Later, the garden becomes a metaphor for a relationship, where two people can grow together like plants and slowly bend each other in a positive direction, similar to the way some people can get plants to grow into certain pleasing shapes.  OK, sure, if that's the way you want to look at things - it beats that jewelry metaphor about how everybody's looking for diamonds, and needs to learn to settle for other semi-precious stones instead.  

There's also a lot of other dramatic things tied into the story of the construction of the "outdoor ballroom" at Versailles - Mme de Barra is still reeling over the death of her husband and young daughter in a carriage accident, and she's locked those emotions away, but she'll never get closure and be able to move forward until she deals with them.  Le Notre is in a somewhat open marriage to Francoise, who sleeps with all the nobles on the French court and claims to be doing this to keep her husband's job secure - but I think maybe she just liked sleeping around.  He's also stuck, unless he should happen to develop an attraction to the widowed landscape artist he's hired.  And then King Louis has to deal with the sudden death of his queen - sure, he's got a mistress (who doesn't, in this film?) but he comes to realize that's a poor substitute for having a wife who genuinely cares about him.  So there's a lot of room for personal growth in this isolated palace setting. Duke Philippe (the king's brother) even lives in a thrupple sort of situation, he's got a wife and a boyfriend and everybody's pretty OK with it - pretty forward for 1680. 

King Louis also bonds with Mme. de Barra after she finds him relaxing in his private pear garden, and she mistakes him for the gardener.  He's happy to continue the ruse, just to see how the commoners live for a short time, but he can't really turn off the regal attitude, so the jig is up fairly quickly.  But since he's the king, he can command her to keep pretending, at least for a little while.  This is an interesting plot point, but I'm not sure it rings true, would it really go down like this between a king and one of his subjects?  It almost felt like they were setting these two up as a romantic pairing, but of course it could never be that way. This gets Mme. de Barra an invitation to the King's summer home at Fontainebleau, and also leads to André's wife trying to sabotage the fountain portion of the garden project. 

I didn't really understand the bit about Mme. de Barra defending the properties of the Four Seasons rose to King Louis while in his court, but Wiki tells me that symbolically, she was putting in a good word for the King's mistress, whom he'd started to lose favor for.  OK, thanks for that, but why did everybody have to be so damn obtuse about everything here? 

I'm very close to the end of the romance chain now, I'm sort of in mid-transition now to a string of period dramas/European material, which should culminate in an Ireland-set film for St. Patrick's Day.  Then the rest of the month will be sort of free-form, with some action movies, crime comedies, two films based on 1970's TV shows, and a film about Abbie Hoffman - only not the one everybody's talking about right now.  Should be an interesting month, if nothing else. 

Also starring Kate Winslet (last seen in "The Reader"), Matthias Schoenaerts (last seen in "The Laundromat"), Alan Rickman (last seen in "Eye in the Sky"), Stanley Tucci (last seen in "Burlesque"), Steven Waddington (last seen in "The Imitation Game"), Jennifer Ehle (last seen in "The Professor and the Madman"), Rupert Penry-Jones (last seen in "Match Point"), Paula Paul, Danny Webb (last heard in "Locke"), Phyllida Law (last seen in "Miss Potter"), Pauline Moran, Cathy Belton (last seen in "Philomena"), Morgan Watkins (last seen in "Kingsman: The Secret Service"), Adrian Schiller (last seen in "Tolkien"), Adrian Scarborough (last seen in "1917"), Angus Wright (last seen in "Official Secrets"), Alistair Petrie (last seen in "The Duchess"), Henry Garrett, Jamie Bradley, Adam James (last seen in "Hunter Killer"), Ben Fox, Mia Threapleton, Lois Wright, Fidelis Morgan, Kristin Milward. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 sluice gates

Becoming Jane

Year 13, Day 69 - 3/10/21 - Movie #3,772

BEFORE: Great news, I've figured out a way to get from my Easter film to "Palm Springs", a film that I was unable to fit into the romance chain, but is also another time-loop film.  I just made it my next target, after Easter, and made a little flowchart with the circles and arrows and laid out all the possible links, and I can get there in 6 or 7 steps.  This increases my planned unbroken chain until April 11 or so, and in a few weeks maybe I'll just pick another film I want to see as the next target and go from there.  It's a long way from April 11 to Mother's Day (or the release of "Black Widow" in theaters, whichever) so pretty much any target in-between should work.  This system is working out for me so far this year - pick a film I've been itching to get to, like "Parasite" or "Warrior" or the entire Bergman filmography, and then just work out how to get there. It's the initial identifying of the target, asking myself, "What do I WANT to watch?" that's the tough part for me. But once I have it, all the rest is just details to be worked out - as long as I believe there must be a path to the next target, then I just have to find it. 

Anne Hathaway carries over from "The Hustle". Happy Birthday to actress Anna Maxwell Martin, appearing in today's film as Cassandra Austen. It's also the birthday of Hallie Quinn Brown (1849), African-American educator, writer and activist, who founded the Colored Woman's League of Washington DC and spoke at the Republican (!!) National Convention in 1924. Also Lillian Wald (1867) who supported American community nursing, campaigned for suffrage and racial integration, founded the Henry Street Settlement and was involved in the formation of the NAACP. And Clare Booth Luce (born in 1903), American politician, ambassador to Italy, and author of the 1936 play "The Women", with an all-female cast. Don't forget Kim Campbell (born in 1943), the 19th Prime Minister of Canada, and the only woman to hold that position. 

THE PLOT: A biographical portrait of a pre-fame Jane Austen and her romance with a young Irishman. 

AFTER: Well, it's the third Jane Austen-related film I've watched this season, first came "The Jane Austen Book Club" and then the most recent filmed version of her novel "Emma", now it's a bio-pic about the author herself.  Perfect for Women's History Month, right?  And also it's therefore fitting that watching a film about Austen gets me one step closer to "Wonder Woman 1984" - but I suppose you're just going to have to trust me that it does, somehow. Just give me about two weeks to get there.  

The film is primarily concerned with Jane before she was a successful author, as the child of a preacher/farmer who faced the common (I'm guessing) problem of how to become successful in life, when burdened with femininity, and being constantly told that women couldn't own property, hold down a job, or support themselves - and therefore most didn't even try, so really it was a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way.  The only thing a woman could do was to marry well, and Austen here gets a proposal from Mr. Wisley, who is the caretaker for his rich aunt and therefore due to inherit her fortune some happy/sad day.  The only problem is that Jane doesn't care for him, he's not exactly an exciting guy, not like the mysterious Mr. Lefroy from Ireland, who is not only a failing lawyer, but also engages in bare-knuckle boxing (the new fad in the U.K., it was like the MMA of its time.)

Tom Lefroy gets off on the wrong foot with Jane, by criticizing her writing, which she reads at a social gathering he attends.  It's quite possible that Lefroy had some valid points, after all Austen's family were the only people familiar with her work at the time, and they were probably much less likely to give her valid criticism.  Lefroy challenged her, which is a good thing, because her world needed a little rockin', if you know what I mean.  But this sets up a love triangle worthy of one of Jane's own future novels, one man who has proposed marriage that Jane feels no affection for, and another she's enthralled with who's just not the marrying kind, and also has no money set aside for marriage.  

Over time, they fall in love (or so they believe, because Jane's never been in love before - so HOW DOES SHE KNOW?) and they travel with Jane's widowed cousin, who's a French countess, to see the judge who is also Tom's uncle, in hopes of getting him to approve marriage, and maybe come up with a little bit of cash to help support them for a while.  But someone mysteriously sends a letter to the judge to inform him that Jane Austen's family is poor, and the deal is off.  One good thing, though - while traveling to London and staying with the judge, Jane's inspired to write the first draft of what will one day become "Pride and Prejudice" (which is all about young girls marrying rich men to help support their family, get it?)

Tom tells Jane he can't marry her, but then after returning home she learns that he's become engaged to another woman, and this was arranged by his family. What's the problem here, don't young renegade bad-boy lawyers make any money on their own?  Jane accepts the marriage proposal of Mr. Wisley, because it's the best deal she's going to get, but then when Tom and Jane next see each other, they fall back together.  I get it, they're both engaged to others, so getting back together is just so wrong that it feels right - so they make plans to elope and catch the next carriage back to Ireland. But when Jane finds a letter that details how much of his money he sends back to his mother, she realizes that she can't marry him, because he's stuck financially, supporting his parents.  She's in the same boat, with hopes of supporting her own parents through her novels, so she heads on back home.  

Jane gets one last proposal, but that's basically a non-starter - she remains unmarried by choice, which would only be a problem if she were an author who chose to focus on love and romance and people getting engaged and married.  Oh, wait.  This is a major problem with Austen for me, are people supposed to read her books and take her storylines seriously, when she had no personal experience with marriage, except for broken proposals and a failed elopement?  Don't they always say, "Write what you know"?  Jeez, romance novelist Jackie Collins was married twice and engaged a third time, that's somebody that probably knows a bit more about relationships than Jane Austen did.  Austen writing about romance was a bit like the "MyPillow" guy, who was a former drug addict, taking part in influencing politics last year - stay in your damn lane.

The truth is that there are many details of Austen's life which are unknown, so this film is probably largely speculative.  There is a record of Mr. Lefroy visiting town in late 1795 or early 1796, and at least according to Wikipedia, after he left town, Austen never saw him again.  But that's not enough closure for a Hollywood film, so this movie has Lefroy visiting years later, with a teenage daughter who's a big fan of "Pride and Prejudice".  However, Jane at this point has taken to not doing readings in public, and in fact trying her best to remain anonymous - which is strange, because she put her name on the popular book, and everybody seems to know how to find her, so that's not really being very anonymous, is it?  (Ah, the IMDB points out that this is a movie GOOF, Austen's works were published without her name on them during her lifetime, so she did remain anonymous, more or less, AT THE TIME.  Her name was added to her novels after she died in 1817.)

Also starring James McAvoy (last seen in "It: Chapter Two"), Julie Walters (last seen in "Billy Elliot"), James Cromwell (last seen in "The Laundromat"), Maggie Smith (last heard in "Sherlock Gnomes"), Lucy Cohu, Laurence Fox (last seen in "The Professor and the Madman"), Joe Anderson (last seen in "Horns"), Ian Richardson (last seen in "102 Dalmatians"), Sophie Vavasseur, Anna Maxwell Martin (last seen in "Philomena"), Leo Bill (last seen in "Alice Through the Looking Glass"), Jessica Ashworth, Eleanor Methven (last seen in "The Boxer"), Helen McCrory (last heard in "Loving Vincent"), Tom Vaughan-Lawlor (last heard in "Avengers: Endgame"), Michael James Ford, Elaine Murphy, Gina Costigan, Chris McHallem, Michael Patric.

RATING: 5 out of 10 powdered wigs

The Hustle

Year 13, Day 68 - 3/9/21 - Movie #3,771

BEFORE: I'm slowly tapering off of romance films, really, that's the only way to do it - I don't want to stop too quickly, because I'll get the bends or something.  So a film with female con artists seducing men and taking their money, that's a pretty unstable thematic connection, perhaps.  But here in the post-February part of the chain, that's sort of OK.  I've got some more high-brow European-style material starting tomorrow, and it should carry me through to St. Patrick's Day. 

Also, I got my second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, so in a few days I'll be as immune as I can be, until somebody finds out that there's a variant that's somehow immune to THAT.  We'll see, I guess, but I'm done with the vaccines, and frankly I'm done with the pandemic, except that I'm not, because it's still going on.  I still have to wear a mask and wash my hands and do all that other stuff, for appearances' sake, because it's too rude to carry around my vaccination card and shove it in people's faces to excuse my behavior.  But at least I can travel now, socialize and go visit my parents, maybe go see a movie, and I hope in a couple months everybody else can join me in doing those things.  It will be a gradual process of progress, I'm sure.  

Rebel Wilson carries over from "Isn't It Romantic". And today's Women History Milestones - on March 9, 1959, the Barbie doll, created by Ruth Handler, was introduced.  On March 9, 1863, American suffragist Mary Harris Armor was born. And on March 9, 2010, political activist Doris "Granny D" Haddock, who campaigned against nuclear testing in Alaska and advocated for campaign finance reform, passed away.  (Also, she walked across the entire U.S. between the age of 88 and 90!)

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" (Movie #89)

THE PLOT: Two con women - one low-rent and the other high-class - team up to take down the men who have wronged them.

AFTER: Well, I suppose if they can gender-flip "Ocean's 11" then they can do the same thing with "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels". Honestly, it's been so long since I watched that Michael Caine/Steve Martin movie that I barely remember it.  That was almost 12 years ago!  I should probably re-review the plot of that movie to see how close this one came to it, what got changed and what stayed the same.  Hmm, the stories are remarkably close, except for the gender swaps.  They kept some of the same scams, including the main one, they kept the name of the fake doctor, the name of the French Riviera town, and so on.  The main update seems to be that the con artists' mark is now an internet millionaire/app developer, famous for creating the insult app "YaBurnt". 

You might think that this one would have the whole #Metoo thing going for it, and I'm betting that the filmmakers naturally assumed that the audience would all be rooting for the women here just because they ARE women, and their gender has been mistreated, underpaid, and denied so many opportunities over the years.  But I'm not sure that's what happened. Is that enough to get me to root for the criminals, the con artists, just because they're somehow taking back a bit of what they feel that their gender deserves?  Just because they think of this as some sort of reparations, does that excuse criminal behavior?  It's a very tricky question. 

And it's almost like somebody changed their mind about this, because when all is revealed at the end of the big scam, it's not like the women exactly came out on top here. It seems a little bit contrived that the scammers got scammed, like, if they're so good why didn't they see that coming?  But there are elements of the final switcheroo that just don't make any sense, here's where things really start to fall apart, which is a shame.  Sticking so close to the original storyline requires these con artists to do several dumb things, which honestly seems very out of character, after being told for the whole film what an expert con artist Josephine is.  Penny, I get it, she was blinded by emotion, but on the whole, it's two steps forward for the ladies here, but then also one step back.  They're allowed to be con artists, but not allowed to win the game, or as Howard Jones once sang, "You can stick your foot in the pool, but you can't have a swim.  You're the fastest runner, but you're not allowed to win." I'd say that no one is to blame, but clearly it's the patriarchy.  

NITPICK POINT: Shortly after Penny sits near Josephine on the train, she blatantly admits to being a con artist.  Is this information that a true con artist, even an amateur one, would give up so quickly? I think not. 

It's a bit hard to understand how the same film could be nominated for a People's Choice Award for best comedy, and also nominated for a Razzie Award for worst actress (Rebel Wilson). I guess opinion on this one is split?  Also, why single out Rebel Wilson when Anne Hathaway is at LEAST just as terrible here? 

Also starring Anne Hathaway (last seen in "Serenity"), Alex Sharp, Ingrid Oliver, Emma Davies, Dean Norris (last seen in "Death Wish"), Timothy Simons (last heard in "Ralph Breaks the Internet"), Rob Delaney (last seen in "Bombshell"), Tim Blake Nelson (last seen in "Angel Has Fallen"), Nicholas Woodeson (last seen in "The Death of Stalin"), Casper Christensen, Raffaello Degruttola (last seen in "Unlocked"), John Hales, Francisco Labbe, Aaron Neil (last seen in "Tolkien"), Hannah Waddingham, Rebekah Staton, Jocelyn Jee Esien, Alex Gaumond.

RATING: 4 out of 10 casino chips (Coincidentally, I was in a casino today after getting my vaccine shot at the racetrack next door.  But I couldn't find any slot machines I wanted to play - I only play quarter slots with multiple paylines - so I left without gambling.)

Isn't It Romantic

Year 13, Day 67 - 3/8/21 - Movie #3,770

BEFORE: March 8 is International Women's Day, part of Women's History Month, and look, I've got a film with a female lead character, one that pokes fun at romantic comedies and points out how unrealistic they all are - it's really random happenstance that this coincided with the holiday, but I'm very willing to roll with it.  It's also International Collaboration Brew Day, which is when a bunch of female brewmasters get together (or remain apart, I'm honestly not sure) and brew the same collaborative beer in their respective breweries around the world. This is a holiday celebration I can get behind.  It's run by the Pink Boots Society and the revenue raised goes toward educational scholarships and member programming.  Check the Pink Boots Society web-site to find if your local brewery is participating, and if so, what their female brewmaster did with the hops that they received.  Or use the hashtag #pinkbootsbrew on Instagram or Twitter to find out.  

The earliest version of International Women's Day was organized by the American Socialist Party (umm, ok...) in 1909, and then German delegates at the 1910 Socialist Woman's Conference proposed an annual celebration (wait, German Socialists? hold on a sec...) And then after women gained suffrage in Soviet Russia in 1917, IWD was made a national holiday, and they settled on March 8, as the first IWD protests in Petrograd on March 8 marked the beginning of the February Revolution. (Yeah, you read that right, apparently March 8, 1917 in our current calendar was February 23 on the Julian calendar, which was being used at the time.  Confused? I sure am...)

Yeah, I'm just learning now that the history of this holiday seems a little tied to Socialism in Russia and Germany - that's a bit close to Communists and Nazis, isn't it? Nazis were German Socialists, too...  Look, I'm glad that the ball is rolling now on this holiday, but maybe you don't want to dig too deeply into how this all started, that's all I'm saying.  The United Nations didn't start celebrating the holiday until 1975, with a strong focus on women's rights - big picture here, that's a really good thing overall. 

Adam Devine carries over from "When We First Met"

THE PLOT: A young woman disenchanted with love mysteriously finds herself trapped inside a romantic comedy.

AFTER: The good news is that this is a fairly strong comedy with a confident actress in the lead role, and in real life Rebel Wilson stands for body positivity and is also a writer, producer, singer with a great track record, excelled at math in school, studied acting at the Australian Theater, also at Second City in New York, had a breakout role in "Bridesmaids" before appearing on some sit-coms, did voice-work in the "Ice Age" series, then broke out AGAIN in "Pitch Perfect". But then there's sort of a stretch where she played characters with "Fat" right in their names, and even though she was a weight loss and nutrition spokesman for Jenny Craig in Australia, there have been times where producers supposedly forbid her to lose weight - what was going on there?  Sure, bigger women are funnier, but it's not a hard and fast rule, skinnier women can be funny too, there's not a direct connection.  Unless the producers were casting her as a fat girl just to make fun of her...Hmm...I'm not sure how I'm supposed to feel about that. Recently she's been publicly talking about working out and losing weight again, honestly I'm fine with whatever size anybody wants to be. I don't want to add to anybody's pressure to lose weight to meet some kind of impossible standard - I surrendered in that fight myself a long time ago.  You do you, Rebel, if you want to get healthy and lose weight, you do that, but if you don't want to, then please don't - you're funny and fine either way.  

The best thing about this movie, I think, is that nobody talks about her size, including her - it just is what it is, which feels a bit like the way it should be.  Just like there was a transgender actress in "Can You Keep a Secret", and it was never mentioned, never part of the plot, not used as a plot point, it just WAS.  This is a sign of progress, believe it or not, because on some level it's just acceptance (or the Conservatives would say "normalizing"), either the audience knows that the actor playing the middle-level company manager is trans, or they don't - it doesn't matter either way, nor should it.  I didn't even feel the need to mention it, because it didn't matter to the enjoyment of the movie.  Except for the fact that if you know, then every aspect of that character is sort of magnified, under a closer microscope, just because it's all still a little new to most people.  If that boss is a mean or unfair boss, then the movie's kind of saying that all trans people make unfair bosses.  If that boss is incompetent, then trans people are incompetent.  Do you know what I mean?  That's really where gay characters were in the movies about 30 or 40 years ago - check out any gay character in a film from the 80's, and they're made up of mostly worn-out stereotypes.  (The sole exception from that time may have been Billy Crystal's character on "Soap".)

I bring this up today because "Isn't It Romantic" has an extensive middle section that takes place in a fantasy world, it's the main character's mental version of a romantic comedy, while she's in a coma after a head injury.  And in that world, Donny, her gay neighbor is super-gay, or the Hollywood rom-com version of the gay best friend/fashion adviser/interior decorator type.  Is this OK, in a movie made in 2019, to fall back on all these old, tired, super-expressive, lispy and effeminate stereotypes for a gay character?  I'm not sure that it is.  Later, when Natalie comes out of the fantasy, she learns that Donny really is gay, only less queeny than he was in the fantasy.  Now, it's pretty convenient that in a dream sequence we're not really responsible for what we dream about - but just know that in Natalie's head, a gay man is super-queeny.  Even though that stereotype might have been fixed into place by watching too many Hollywood rom-coms, and therefore cinema society is to blame, but it's still THERE, in her head, and she's holding on to those tropes.  

The rest is largely OK, you can get away with a lot when you set scenes in this fantasy world - there doesn't need to be a rational explanation why a crowd of strangers would suddenly break into a dance number that they all somehow know, or why Natalie's best friend IRL would be her strongest competition in the office (because that's what many rom-coms do, pit two women against each other), or why the executive she met briefly in her pitch presentation suddenly has an Australian accent in the fantasy world.  It's her crazy, damaged brain trying to recover, and jamming a bunch of pieces of the real world together, mixing them up with bits of movie techniques, and trying to make sense of it all.  But she also gains some insight to the fact that she's been "Friend-zoning" her co-worker Josh, and even though he's got a hot model/yoga teacher girlfriend in the fantasy world, maybe Josh deserves some consideration as a romantic partner in the real world, if she can ever figure out how to get back there. 

Natalie's initial thought is that she can only get out of this fantasy world by finding true love, but what does that even mean?  And who is she supposed to find it with?  And, more importantly, by being so meta- about the process and being so open about featuring all these rom-com tropes, does that, in itself, forgive using them again in THIS movie?  Again, I'm not sold on this as an idea, but I bet a lot of people let this slide, because it's all done with a knowing wink to the audience - "Oh, THIS is what we're doing now."  I hate to mention this, but once back in the real world, there's one more spontaneous musical number, which COULD mean that Natalie never really escaped from the fantasy world.  That's a bit of "Isn't It Inception", perhaps?  When you finally wake up from a long, complicated dream - how can you be sure that you HAVE woken up?

This is a very sneaky way to make a film that ends up being (nearly) error-free.  All of those typical movie "goofs" can be explained away by the setting of a fantasy world where anything is possible. I can't point out, for example, that Natalie's apartment managed to grow much larger, while her apartment BUILDING remained the same size, at least on the outside. Doesn't matter, fantasy world, anything can happen, and it frequently does.  My only NITPICK POINT might concern the karaoke scene, where Natalie begins singing with the track to "I Wanna Dance With Somebody", only to have someone trip over the cord to the karaoke machine and unplug it, forcing her to sing a cappella, if only for a few bars before three women in the audience chime in with harmonized backing vocals, and rhythm and percussion gets provided by the sounds of beer taps and salt shakers from the bar.  It's a great idea, and someone clearly intended for the music track to continue with help from these sources.  But I guess that proved to be impossible, because the music comes BACK very quickly, and maybe somebody plugged the karaoke machine back in, but would it start up again with the same song, only 1 minute further into the song than when it got unplugged?  I know, fantasy world, don't overthink it, except that's what I do.  

It's cool that the fantasy New York looks so much cooler, brighter and more magical than the real thing.  We've all come to expect this from movies, so it's nice to see a film that gets some humor out of the difference.  AND it's a good positive message that Natalie doesn't NEED a partner to find true love in the fantasy world in order to escape.  Everybody should have a romantic partner, if they want one, but not everybody should NEED one.  There should be more romantic films, perhaps, where people remember to love themselves, too.  No, not THAT way - you know what I meant, why did you have to go and make it sound all dirty?  

Also starring Rebel Wilson (last seen in "Jojo Rabbit"), Liam Hemsworth (last seen in "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2"), Priyanka Chopra (last seen in "Baywatch"), Betty Gilpin (last seen in "Stuber"), Brandon Scott Jones (last seen in "Other People"), Jennifer Saunders (last heard in "Sing"), Jay Oakerson (last seen in "Hustlers"), Raymond Anthony Thomas, Zach Cherry, Sandy Honig, Tom Ellis, Esteban Benito, Seth Barrish (last seen in "Two Days in New York"), Michelle Buteau (last seen in "Always Be My Maybe"), Bowen Yang, Alex Kis, with archive footage of Julia Roberts (last seen in "Wonder"), Richard Gere (last seen in "Norman"), Larry Miller (last seen in "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang"), Drew Barrymore (last seen in "Going the Distance"), Adam Sandler (last seen in "Uncut Gems")

RATING: 6 out of 10 soup dumplings (God, I really miss soup dumplings....)

When We First Met

Year 13, Day 66 - 3/7/21 - Movie #3,769

BEFORE: Alexandra Daddario carries over again from "Can You Keep a Secret?".  And too late, I've realized my mistake - there's another time-loop film called "Palm Springs", with Tyler Hoechlin in it - and he was in both "Hall Pass" and "Can You Keep a Secret?"  Perhaps the correct viewing order for me would have been to fit "Palm Springs" in between those two films, then save "The Layover" to come later, in between two of these films with Alexandra Daddario.  That way I could have had two time-travel sort-of romance films in the same week.  I've got a bunch of time-travel films that I've been trying to get to, I would have loved to knock off two of them.

BUT, I'm in a bit of a time-crunch myself right now, especially if I want to hit St. Patrick's Day right on the button, and with luck I'll be visiting my parents next weekend, so I may be short on time for that reason, too.  So I've already squeezed in one extra film this weekend, I'd really be pushing things if I squeezed in two, right?  I made a bit of a linking mistake, but who knows, maybe everything happens for a reason, even my mistakes - for all I know, I'm going to need an extra slot at the end of the year to work in something else - and I'll be glad then that I didn't double up again in March.  I'll just try to work in "Palm Springs" later, and it doesn't even have to be in February/March, OK? 

THE PLOT: Noah meets Avery at a Halloween party and falls in love but gets friend-zoned. Three years later, she's engaged to someone else, but Noah returns in a time machine to fix things. 

AFTER: Believe it or not, this isn't my first film that straddles the genres of time-travel and romance.  Before this there was "About Time", and to a lesser extent, "The Time-Traveler's Wife", which took a slightly different tack.  And I've still got so far to go - there's "Paradox" and "Project Almanac" and "Synchronicity" and "The Butterfly Effect" 2 and 3, there are even THREE more films on my list that (I think) are specifically time-travel romances, and those do link together, so who knows, maybe next February, if I can't work them in before then.  Then, of course, there's "Tenet", which links to "Paradox", and I may want to focus on getting to those two somehow.  

Today's film sort of takes elements of "Groundhog Day", "Frequency", "The Butterfly Effect" and even "Big" and mashes them all together - the main character finds that he can travel back in time, to the day he met the girl he's fixated on, by putting a coin in the photo-booth in the bar, while drinking a beer and thinking about Halloween three years earlier.  Noah discovers this, of course, after attending the engagement party of Avery and Ethan, and his one regret is that he blew his chance with Avery after the Halloween party, he ate all her cereal instead of kissing her, and the next day while she was buying more cereal in the grocery store, she met Ethan. So all he has to do is go back to Halloween 2014, meet Avery again for the first time, and NOT eat her cereal.  

Things go well at the party (I note that this is the THIRD time this year where a potential couple met at a college Halloween costume party - this also happened in "Made of Honor" and "Life Itself", so it's possible that screenwriters are very lazy people...) except that Noah stays too long at Avery's place, her roommate Carrie comes home, and Noah had a bad interaction with Carrie earlier in the day, before he figured out he was time-traveling.  So Carrie pegs him as a stalker, he's chased out of her apartment, and when he wakes up back in 2017, he and Avery are not even friends.  

But that's OK, as long as the photo booth is still working, he can just go back and try again, only the second time doesn't really work, either.  He tries to be a real confident a-hole type, the type women go for, and that time he wins Avery over, only this time he finds that in the present, he's an a-hole for real, sleeping with Avery casually, but there's no solid relationship there. OK, third time's the charm, he lands a solid job at his friend's company this time, gives up playing in the piano bar, and becomes the type of guy who can really provide for her.  But now he's not happy in the present, because work is so much, well, work.  Back to the photo booth...

It's not really a time-loop, because it doesn't connect back with itself like a pure time-travel movie should - it's more in the vein of "Groundhog Day", because Noah keeps trying to make that one day of his life perfect, over and over, with the mistaken belief that's going to make things better.  But "Perfect is the enemy of good", as they say, so you may start to wonder if he'd be better off just trying to get a good result, or better yet, maybe learn to live with things the way they are.  If someone can't be happy, as they define it, maybe it's better to shoot for contentment - that may be the way to inner peace, accept the things you can't change and all that.  

This model of time-travel is a bit more like the one recently seen in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where if someone goes back in time via the quantum realm and changes the past, they don't necessarily create a different present, but instead create a parallel timeline where things are different, then in order to get back to their own reality, they just have to travel forward from a point before the divergence.  Umm, wait, is that right?  It doesn't really matter since there is no time travel (well, there IS but we can't control the direction or the speed...) so let's just roll with it.  I also haven't seen a time machine before that just jumps back and forth between two particular days, that may be unique.

There is some cleverness to this all, and it's also (eventually) easy to understand why Avery put Noah in the Friend Zone in the first place, and this also, by extension, jibes with that feeling of sharing a lot of things in common with someone when you first get together with them, and then later you might tend to focus on all the differences between you, and over time it may get harder and harder to get that old feeling back.  Noah's convinced himself that initial commonality was a clear indicator, even though Avery perhaps never saw it as such, and he's based his whole philosophy on the concept that things aren't the way they're meant to be.  But maybe things aren't meant to be any way at all, and we're the ones in control of our fates by our actions. Placing an intent on the random happenstance of the universe might just be an illusory feeling. 

That being said, when we wake up each day, how do we know for sure that the last day we experienced was yesterday?  We could all be jumping through the days of our lives in random order and not know it.  Or maybe we sometimes jump back to a day three years ago if there's an important lesson that we learned that day that we need to remember again.  Who's to say?  Oh, right, we invented calendars and computer clocks so we could keep it all straight.  Plus there are so many things we do, like study for tests the night before, that seem to confirm that we're living our lives in a linear fashion, more or less.  It just gets harder as you get older to remember what you did or ate the day before, if someone should ask you that. 

Anyway, the point of this film seems to come from Noah learning that you have to become friends with somebody before you take the relationship to that next level - it's a valuable lesson as I enter the final week of the romance chain (which is now 41 films instead of 40, c'est la vie). Also, you can't force a relationship to happen, you've got to just let it develop naturally, also great advice, even if you don't have a time-traveling photo booth. 

Overall, though, the "time loop" moniker seems to be the closest one, the one most commonly used, even if this isn't a "loop", like in, say, "Looper". But "time loop" seems to cover "Source Code", "Edge of Tomorrow" and so on.  But there's a certain irony in some filmmaker essentially re-making "Groundhog Day", right?  Or what do you call it when you've watched "Groundhog Day" too many times?  

Also starring Adam DeVine (last seen in "Game Over, Man!"), Andrew Bachelor (ditto), Shelley Hennig (last seen in "Roman J. Israel, Esq."), Robbie Amell (last seen in "Cheaper by the Dozen 2"), Dean J. West, Tony Cavalero, Chris Wylde, Noureen DeWulf (last seen in "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past"), Daryn Kahn, Peter Jaymes Jr., Martin Bats Bradford, Chelsea Bruland, Adam Henslee, Tenea Intriago, Kyler Porche, Audrey Bishop, Bill Rainey.

RATING: 6 out of 10 flavors of Red Bull

Can You Keep a Secret?

Year 13, Day 66 - 3/7/21 - Movie #3,768

BEFORE: This is a last-minute drop-in, I realized this is currently airing on cable, it fits in with the theme, and I've been ignoring this film when scanning through the on-screen guide.  It means I may have to double-up, and watch an extra movie this month, but sometimes I just have to follow where the linking leads me.  Alexandra Daddario carries over from "The Layover", and she gets an upgrade now to a 4-film chain.  Come on, let's finish this year's romance chain strong so I can move on to other topics...

Let's do a quick check-in on This Day in Women's History - March 7,1894 was the birthday of Ana Maria O'Neill, Puerto Rican educator, author and advocate of women's rights.  March 7, 1917 was the birthday of Janet Collins, one of the pioneers of Black ballet dancing and choreographer, and also Betty Holberton, one of the six original computer programmers of ENIAC. On March 7, 1938, Janet Guthrie was born, she was the first woman to compete in both the Indy 500 and the Daytona 500. 

THE PLOT: Thinking they're about to crash, Emma spills her secrets to a stranger on a plane.  At least she thought he was a stranger, until she later meets Jack, her company's young CEO, who now knows every humiliating detail about her.  

AFTER: We live in an age of wonders, if you think about it - we got a COVID-19 vaccine made in record time, and though distribution has been a little slow, it's been steady and speeding up.  The original timeline that said it would take nearly 10 years to vaccinate a majority of the population (based on December's vaccination rate, of course) has now been revised, first to ten months, then eight months and now it's more like two more months. Fantastic. Once we get this sorted out I wish we could then, as a species, turn our attention to solving something else like climate change or overpopulation or saving endangered species with the same determination.  And once things return to normal-ish, we can do things like travel again - and appreciate the fact that each day thousands of people fly in airplanes and the vast majority of them survive the process.  I don't think that gets enough appreciation, that we climb on board big crafts made of metal that are heavier than air and somehow defy gravity and get us across the country in a matter of hours, because 100 years ago that wasn't even possible.  Life in 2021 hardly even resembles life in 1921, except for the whole recovering-from-a-pandemic thing.  

So who's to fault poor Emma Corrigan, who deals with a little airplane turbulence by vocalizing all of her regrets and failures and secrets, because naturally she assumes that she's about to die?  Ehh, it's still a bit of a stretch - mostly a contrivance here, I mean we've all heard about people with guilty consciences confessing things when they think they're about to die - the most noted in film was probably that scene in "Almost Famous" where the band is on a small single-engine plane (notoriously responsible for the death of notable rock legends) and when they encounter turbulence, all the personal secrets and confessions come out.  It's also very contrived, especially because the co-pilot prompted it to happen, when it could have been spontaneous, but it's still a funny scene.  Still, I'm guessing this sort of thing happens more in movies and in urban legends than in real life.  I mean, you've held on to these deep, dark secrets for years, at that point what's a few more minutes?  

Why, it's almost like the character lets loose with all these embarrassing details about her life, regrets and mistakes she's made, just so they can be used against her later on. Ya think?  She also keeps on going, after the turbulence is over, right up until the plane lands, and the man next to her never stops her?  His excuse is that it seemed like she really needed to open up to somebody.  Can the life of a mid-level marketing coordinator for a line of organic foods and beverages really be all that dramatic and intriguing?  Sorry, millennials, on the whole your entire generation is just not that interesting, you sad entitled bitches. Go post something on Instagram or bitch about how there was no oat milk for your latte on TikTok. 

In a contrivance that could only happen in a movie (or, umm, the book this movie is based on), the man in the seat next to Emma turns out to be the silent partner CEO of the company she works for, and somehow she worked at that company without ever knowing what that man looked like - how convenient that his recently-departed business partner was the public face of the company while he stayed out of the public eye.  And how convenient that Emma got upgraded to the first-class section of the plane without even requesting it, which I don't think is a thing that even happens, not this way.  Sure, planes want to fill all their seats, but isn't it much more likely that if first-class seats were available they would make some kind of pre-boarding announcement to try to get some of the coach passengers to spend money or miles to get into those seats?  Wouldn't some of the coach passengers have probably asked to be on the standby upgrade list?  The flight attendants don't usually pick a passenger at random, somebody who looks like they'd really add some class to first-class and give them an upgrade for FREE, so once again we learn that screenwriters don't really know much about how airports work. (It's also the second film in row where Alexandra Daddario's character has some kind of romance with a man she meets on a plane.  Sure, love can blossom anywhere, but when I'm on a plane the first concern is not dying, and the second concern is then arriving on time, and the third concern is getting to baggage claim before somebody walks off with my bag. Security doesn't check claim tickets at baggage pick-up any more, why is that?)

This quickie review of her life and regrets is a wake-up call for Emma, and she realizes that she's only going through the motions with her boyfriend, and a lot of his actions actually annoy her, and perhaps she's never really been in love.  Hmm, or maybe sitting next to a more handsome stranger on that flight just kind of put things in perspective?  Potato, po-TAH-to. There's one last attempt to put the spark back in her current relationship, and when that doesn't work, it's splitsville.  Extremely also-conveniently, this is when the boss sees fit to ask her out - he knows all of her secrets by now, and surprisingly there are no deal-breakers in the mix, so why not? 

I'll tell you why not - dating the boss is a terrible, terrible idea. Misguided at best, but then again so is nearly everything in this film. The balance is off from the get-go, with him knowing everything about her and her knowing almost nothing about him.  Plus there's the whole power thing - didn't women collectively learn anything from the #metoo movement?  I mean, sure, men shouldn't abuse their power in the workplace, duh, but also women should maybe take care to not set up situations where those powerful men have the opportunity to do that - and that means that dating the boss is a huge no-no.  Plus, as the movie correctly points out, any success she has at the office, any promotion or bonus or opportunity that she gets, even if rightfully earned, is going to be viewed differently by anyone who knows that she's in a relationship with the boss.  She'll have to work twice as hard now to deserve everything she's offered, and who wants that?  Better to just nix the situation in the first place, turn him down, or if the relationship means that much to her, change jobs and then date him. 

Everything here is so clunky, so awkward and it appears to be intentionally so - the good news is that this is where Alexandra Daddario excels as an actress, her characters tend to be awkward and almost desperate to be liked, somewhat clumsy and unconfident.  This can be appealing in a comedy, but only up to a point, really.  If it's overdone then the awkwardness can spill over to become annoying, especially when the film states every point three times and really draws out the awkward scenes to be much longer than necessary.  

Screenwriters also appear to have no idea how business meetings work either, they're a cowardly lot, it turns out.  Instead of researching a pitch meeting or a strategy session, they just make characters sit around a table and say, "We've got to align our core competency with our demographics and maximize our profitability by building on our corporate image. Questions, anyone?"  Yeah, I've got a question, what the hell did she just say?  Maybe this is just there to make the main character sound brilliant when she suggests, "Hey, we could sell to older people!"  Because apparently the marketing department was so focused on landing millennial buyers that they forgot that baby boomers and Generation X eat food, too?  Fire those people.

Emma also has too many confidants, she's got the two roommates, plus the male friend - it's like having too many animal sidekicks in a Disney movie.  I shouldn't have to work to keep track of what she's told to each one of her friends, and what relationship advice she got from whom.  There are also way too many side-plots that go nowhere, from the roommate that dresses inappropriately to the dancing lawyers to the other friend who helps women fix up their apartments. We. Just. Don't. Care.

Also starring Tyler Hoechlin (last seen in "Hall Pass"), Sunita Mani (last seen in "Wine Country"), Laverne Cox (last seen in "Charlie's Angels" (2019)), Kimiko Glenn (last heard in "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse"), Bobby Tisdale (last seen in "Between Two Ferns: The Movie"), Kate Easton, David Ebert, Robert King, Sam Asghari, Judah Friedlander (last seen in "Star Wars: The Force Awakens", wait, what?)

RATING: 5 out of 10 overhead compartments