Death at a Funeral (2010)

Year 13, Day 121 - 5/1/21 - Movie #3,825

BEFORE: Danny Glover carries over from "The Color Purple", and it's been a rather odd week - perhaps there's no rhyme nor reason to it, having covered life, death, racism, sexism, Walt Disney, Andy Kaufman, Action Park, being and non-being and everything in between.  Maybe life is a big theme park where you struggle for your place in line and you die on one of the rides, I don't know.  Who can say? But I'm going to wrap up the week with a funeral, so maybe that's appropriate for this weird week.  

There are two versions of this film, one released in 2007 with a British cast, and this one, released in 2010 with an American, mostly African-American, cast.  They share an actor, so the most logical thing to do is watch them back-to-back - well, I'm not going to do the logical thing, because then I couldn't line up a film for Mother's Day, believe me, I tried.  So I WILL watch the other version of "Death at a Funeral", but it will be in about a week and a half, OK?  It's all going to work out, I'm used to my chains looping back on themselves, it happens - as long as there's one solid through-line it doesn't really matter. 

First, here are my format stats for April's movies: 

7 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): American Honey, The Greatest Game Ever Played, The Killer Inside Me, Mary Magdalene, 21 Bridges, Beloved, The Color Purple

8 watched on Netflix: The Old Guard, Da 5 Bloods, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Project Power, The Trial of the Chicago 7, Becoming, Knock Down the House, Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond

2 watched on iTunes: Ain't Them Bodies Saints, The Accidental President
5 watched on Amazon Prime: Coming 2 America, I'm Not Here, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, All In: The Fight for Democracy, Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump
1 watched on Hulu: Palm Springs
3 watched on Disney+: The Lion King (2019), Soul, Walt & El Grupo
2 watched on Tubi: The Brothers Bloom, Rigged: The Voter Suppression Playbook

2 watched on HBO MAX: John Lewis: Good Trouble, Class Action Park
1 watched on a random site: Walt: The Man Behind the Myth
31 TOTAL

It sure was a big month for Netflix, but that's good, because my watchlist on that service was getting huge.  Dipping into documentaries for a week and a half helped cut that list down - but I can't recall the last month where I watched more films on Netflix than on cable.  Maybe that's the future for me, but I think the May schedule will be more cable-heavy, I've got to clear some space on the DVR to make room for new stuff, that's the new goal.  Plus I haven't even logged in half of the new films on Netflix yet, and I can't exactly link to them before I log them in, now, can I?  I'm working on it, typing just as fast as I can.  

What's weird is that this version of "Death on a Funeral" has been in my Netflix queue for some time, I think I added it about 6 months ago, and it's just been there, patiently waiting for me to find a way to link to it.  I put May's schedule together in maybe late March or early April, but now, of course, it's GONE from Netflix, just before I planned to watch it.  No worries, there's always iTunes, even though I'd have to pay $2.99, whatever preserves the chain, right?  But the film just started running on Showtime, like it premiered TODAY, that's an odd coincidence - yet also a bit reassuring, if a film disappears from one service, that could mean it's about to pop up on another. It's a formula that I just can't quite figure out, maybe nobody can - still, weird. 

THE PLOT: A funeral ceremony turns into a debacle of exposed family secrets and misplaced bodies. 

AFTER: This one started out with a lot of promise, as the various family members gather for a patriarch's funeral, the funeral director misplaces the body, the wrong casket is delivered.  It's a solid start, but as things wear on, it's one wacky mishap after another, and they become more and more unlikely, which causes a sort of comedy de-evolution.  At some point, more isn't better, it's just more, and that's too bad.  A little less might have been more here, because too many unlikely things, even in comedy, starts to border on impossible.  

Sure, there are conflicts between brothers, or between mothers and sons, fathers and daughters, mothers and daughters-in-law, and between fathers and potential sons-in-law.  All that's to be expected when nobody feels they can live up to the previous generation's expectations.  Somebody's got to pick up their no-good little brother, someone's got to pick up Uncle Russell and his wheelchair from the nursing home, and everybody's got issues to work out.  The white boyfriend can't possibly meet the expectations of his girlfriend's father, especially when he's perceived as a screw-up, compared to her previous white boyfriend, who's also been invited to the funeral.  No, that won't be awkward at all.  

Let's face it, the whole funeral's a big pile of awkward - already funerals are uncomfortable places where nobody really wants to be, and then when you throw a bunch of family issues, race issues, and a mislabeled vial of "not valium" into the mix, stuff's going to go down.  Does it put the "FUN" back in "funeral"?  Initially I thought it might, but then as things got crazier and crazier, I realized I'd have to lower my expectations...

It's not that the jokes aren't funny, some of them are, I laughed out loud a few times at first - but with so many plotlines going on simultaneously, time after time every conversation felt stuck in second gear, with one character or another excusing themselves because of that OTHER thing going on, or saying, "Just one minute, I'll answer your question, but I have to handle this..." I began to realize that nearly everything was a delaying tactic.  Wait two minutes and the scene would shift back to another room where another emergency was being mishandled, and by that point it's just like a bedroom farce only without any sex.  Bouncing back and forth, trying to keep so many comedic balls up in the air at the same time, it feels like it takes forever to get anywhere.  For God's sake, just stay on that character long enough for him to answer a question or decide on an action, without cutting to the other thing in the other room!

No lie, there's one character who took the mislabeled drug and is stoned out of his mind, the ovulating wife who somehow thinks the day of a funeral might also be a good time to conceive a baby (no, it just isn't...), there's the crazy old uncle complaining about the lack of potato salad, the Reverend who's missing two other funerals because of all the delays at THIS one, and then there's the whole mysterious stranger who shows up and calls everything the family knew about the deceased into question - and I'm only really scratching the surface here, because NO SPOILERS.  But a lot goes down, and it's a lot to take in.  Danny Glover references his "Lethal Weapon" by stating he's too old for this shit, and I'm starting to feel the same way.

This sort of started out like a "6" but it really didn't finish that way.  Now I'm not sure if I want to watch the original - I mean, sure, I will, but I hope it's a lot different.  If this remake just copied all the plotlines from the original that's not going to excite me.  I mean, I'll muddle through and watch it, but will I enjoy it?  Is that even possible at this point? 

NITPICK POINT: Some of the comedy points are only possible because the funeral was held at the family home - but does anyone really DO that?  Don't we have funeral homes for a reason, so we don't have to have dead people in our houses?  I can see people having a wedding in a big home, but these days, who has a big drawing room that will hold a crowd like this?  

Also starring Chris Rock (last seen in "A Very Murray Christmas"), Martin Lawrence (last seen in "Bad Boys for Life"), Tracy Morgan (last seen in "Coming 2 America"), Peter Dinklage (last seen in "Between Two Ferns: The Movie"), Loretta Devine (last seen in "Welcome to Me"), Regina Hall (last seen in "The Hate U Give"), Zoe Saldana (last heard in "Missing Link"), James Marsden (last seen in "The Female Brain"), Columbus Short (last seen in "The Losers"), Luke Wilson (last seen in "Zombieland: Double Tap"), Keith David (last seen in "21 Bridges"), Ron Glass, Kevin Hart (last seen in "Jumanji: The Next Level"), Regine Nehy, Bob Minor. 

RATING: 4 out of 10 folding chairs

The Color Purple

Year 13, Day 120 - 4/30/21 - Movie #3,824

BEFORE: Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover carry over from "Beloved" - and MAN, I've managed to avoid this film for a VERY long time.  It came out in what, 1985?  That was over 35 years ago, and I've had ample opporunities, it just never appealed to me, or I forgot about the fact that I hadn't seen it.  Damn, 11 Oscar nominations that year and not one win, what does that tell you?  This Spielberg guy must be a hack or something...but since I'm doing follow-up Black History this year I'm going to cross this one off tonight.  Yeah, that's my excuse, I never watched this film because I'm always busy in February watching romance movies, and then by the time I'm done with them, Black History month is always over!  So this year I've moved it to part-April and part-May, with a break in between for political documentaries, but even then, we discussed voter suppression, the Obamas and John Lewis, and that's all part of Black History, too.

Final stats - tomorrow is May 1 and that means it's the last day of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, here's the line-up:

7:15 am "Watch on the Rhine" (1943)

9:15 am "Waterloo Bridge" (1940)

11:15 am "Weary River" (1929)

12:45 pm "West Side Story" (1961) - SEEN IT

3:30 pm "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" (1962) - SEEN IT

6:00 pm "White Heat" (1949) - SEEN IT

8:00 pm "The Wizard of Oz" (1939) - SEEN IT

10:00 pm "Wuthering Heights" (1939)

12:00 am "The Year of Living Dangerously" (1982) - SEEN IT

2:15 am "The Yearling (1946)

4:30 am "Z" (1969)

Another 5 out of 12 isn't a majority, but it won't sink me at the last minute.  I finish with 145 seen out of 361, which is 40.1%.  Well, t's not half, but at least I finished above 40 percent.  I'll have my format breakdown for April ready by tomorrow. 

THE PLOT: A black Southern woman struggles to find her identity after suffering abuse from her father and others over four decades. 

AFTER: Maybe it's the white guilt, but I'm just not sure what to do with a film like "The Color Purple" - obviously it means something to a whole group of people, but I'm not in that targeted audience, so I just sort of have to process it for what it is.  It just seems designed to remind us all, over and over, that African-Americans got the shitty end of the stick for a long, long time in this country.  But this film is set in the early half of the twentieth century, decades after the Civil War, so it's not all just white people keeping black people down.  A lot of this is black people keeping black people down, like husbands and fathers dominating their wives and daughters, so freedom for black women didn't catch up for another hundred years or so.  And these were religious people, what happened to the Golden Rule, love one another and all that?  I never really understood how patriarchal Black America became, even after racial equality was in the books, the struggle for gender equality continued.  

Celie is a black teenager who's become pregnant twice by her own father, with the children sold off to hide all evidence of the incest and abuse.  Her father sets his sights on her younger sister, Nettie, and marries Celie off to a man who was more interested in Nettie.  Man, that's the roughest possible beginning - again, I'm not going to argue with an author of a best-selling novel, but I just wonder if it doesn't feel a little forced, like piling on for the sake of drama.  Then once Celie is married off to "Mister" she basically belongs to her husband, like property, and she isn't allowed contact with her sister, she's forced to take care of her husband's children, do all the chores, and be his sex object and punching bag.  Slavery ended on paper in 1865, but somebody forgot to tell the married men, it seems. 

Years later, after Celie's had all the fight beaten out of her, Mister's son Harpo has a relationshiph with Sofia, she's pregnant with Harpo's baby, but Mister is against the wedding, claiming the baby is not his son's - perhaps he just doesn't want to think of himself as old enough to be a grandfather?  But when relationship troubles develop, Celie gives Harpo the horrible advice that he needs to beat Sofia to keep her in line.  Is this supposed to be funny, an abused woman giving the advice that her stepson should beat his wife?  The advice fails, because it was horrible, and the marriage fails, possibly because of the advice.  Harpo instead decides to turn his house into a "Juke joint", which is a bar and concert hall.

There are parts that are supposed to be funny, you can tell that Spielberg is not great at directing comedies - because most of the jokes just don't land.  Harpo constantly falling through the roof, or out of the rafters, not funny.  This is not "The Money Pit", or a "Three Stooges" short.  Albert not knowing how to use the stove in his own house isn't funny, either, and it's especially not funny when he tries to boost the flame with some kerosene.  I'll say that Sofia working for Miss Millie is a little funny, because Millie insists on driving and weaves all over the road - but this bit is cut short when she drives Sofia to visit her kids on Christmas, and tells her she can spend all day with them.  But then Miss Millie can't drive the car away without Sofia's help, and when the black men rush to help Millie out, she thinks she's being attacked by a gang of thugs. Yeah, implied gang violence based on white racism kills the humor here, as does the fact that then Sofia is forced to drive away with her, and misses her family time on Christmas, for the 8th year in a row.  Not funny at all. 

(Does it seem a little strange that Oprah is in this film and her character marries a man named Harpo?  Obviously one name is the other spelled backwards, isn't that weird?  Like, I know it's the name of her production company, too, and she's probably not a fan of Harpo Marx.  What's weird is that a little research shows that's Oprah's birth name isn't really Oprah, it's ORPAH, for real.  The story on her Wiki page says that most people in her life misread it as OPRAH instead of ORPAH, so she just changed it.  This story sounds very suspicious, I'm not sure I believe it.  Then again, I'm not sure WHY I don't believe it, but it all seems like too big of a coincidence.)

This brings me to Shug Avery, a character played by Margaret Avery, another odd coincidence.  This woman is a singer who is Mister's mistress, and when she takes ill he brings her home to stay with him, which is a bold move, to move his girlfriend into the same house as his wife, but men ruled the roost back then, I guess.  Shug's a very open-minded woman who then has a sexual relationship with Celie, so things started looking up for her for a while, I guess.  Why these three just couldn't get past their hang-ups and have a happy, committed three-way relationship is beyond me, but I guess they were so repressed back then that things like this just weren't talked about in polite company, so there was Shug and Mister going on, then there was Shug and Celie, and those two things had to be kept separate.  For some reason, this film doesn't get much attention for being its ground-breaking lesbian sub-plot, back in 1985 this would have been very forward and radical for a Hollywood movie, right?  Yet I barely knew this was an important part of the plot, and mostly any impact that it has sort of gets shrugged off, like it's no big deal.  

Just when I thought that the film had forgotten about Celie's sister, Nettie - to be fair, there's like a full hour and a half where this character isn't even mentioned - Shug intercepts a letter from Nettie, and Celie learns that her sister is alive, living in Africa, and Mister has been keeping letters from her as part of her ongoing torture marriage.  And man, if I thought this movie was slow-moving before this point, it really started to drag once the plot focused on Celie just reading all those old letters for about 20 minutes.  They tried in vain to dress this up with a few fantasy-like sequences, but it's still watching someone READ LETTERS for a long spell, and that's just an interesting place for a movie to dwell.  I just don't agree with this as a narrative choice.

I get the logic here, the longer that the movie shows us Celie being put down, the greater it's going to feel when she finally gets the strength to fight back, to leave Mister, to tell him off and strike out on her own.  But Jesus, this movie's running time is nearly as long as "Beloved", it's almost two 1/2 hours overall.  How about a little bit of editing to speed things up a bit?  We all know it's going to happen, why can't we get there a little sooner, Steven?  Then a series of unlikely coincidences befall Celie, and not only did they collectively feel way too sudden, it felt like the director realized that the end of the movie was coming up fast and he had to make sure she got everything she deserved.

This one part near the ending was very strange, this musical number that focused on Shug, and she's not the main character of the movie, so why take focus away from the main storyline?  She was all the way over by the juke joint and started singing along with the music from the church, which was miles away, instead of with the music from the band that was right next to her.  Then she started making her way over to the church, and instead of everyone thinking she was crazy, they just followed her until they became a huge progression that burst into the church, with the jazz musicians joining the church choir.  I guess it was meant to be symbolic, about somebody finding their way back to the church, but it just wasn't clear to me, what was Shug's relationship to the Reverend, was that her father, her ex-lover?  And who was the girl singing in the choir, was that Shug's daughter or a symbolic representation of the girl she used to be?  I just didn't get it. 

Anyway, this film definitely had its place in the 1980's pantheon, and it was Oprah Winfrey's first movie, and essentially Whoopi Goldberg's first, too, so there's that.  And it's on that list of the 1,001 Movies That I'm Supposed to See Before I Die, so I've now seen 439 of the 1,001 - I'm still working off the 2019 list, but there might be a new version of the list this year, I'll have to remember to check. 

Also starring Whoopi Goldberg (last seen in "The Accidental President"), Margaret Avery (last seen in "Magnum Force"), Akosua Busia, Desreta Jackson (last seen in "Sister Act"), Adolph Caesar (last seen in "Club Paradise"), Willard E. Pugh, Rae Dawn Chong, Laurence Fishburne (last seen in "Where'd You Go, Bernadette"), Carl Anderson, Grand Bush, Dana Ivey (last seen in "The Leisure Seeker"), Bennet Guillory, James Tillis, Leonard Jackson, Susan Beaubian, Phillip Strong, Peto Kinsaka, Lelo Masamba, Margaret Freeman, Howard Starr, Daphaine Oliver, Jadili Johnson, Lillian Njoki Distefano, Leon Rippy (last seen in "The Life of David Gale"), John Ratch Hart, with a cameo from Gayle King (also last seen in "The Accidental President").

RATING: 5 out of 10 homemade biscuits

Beloved

Year 13, Day 119 - 4/29/21 - Movie #3,823

BEFORE: Oprah Winfrey carries over from "Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond", and I'd keep an eye on Oprah this year - if she keeps turning up in documentary footage and I keep using her as a link, she could easily win the year with the most appearances, or at least tie with Barack Obama.  I think she's also going to be my outro link from the next documentary chain, too, if I do another one in July.  Which means that both documentary chains COULD have been connected into one longer one, if not for the need to acknowledge Mother's Day and July 4.  I'm putting together the June schedule now, just looking for the link between two last random films, and then if I can find that I've got a chain from here to about July 24, which is something.  I've got a rough plan for October now, too, so then I'll just have to close that gap and that should bring me close to the end of the year - it's not even May but yeah, I'm thinking about how to get within spittin' distance of Christmas. What's important right now is that I've got one possible way to start the horror chain in October, but THREE ways to end it - right now it looks like New York Comic Con is a go for early October, so that means maybe I can't do a full month, so I need a chain with a variable length and a few potential starting points for November.

July's tricky, perhaps, because will "Black Widow" finally get released?  I can get to it by late July, but to do that I need to use a few films I had deemed as useful links for October, then that would cut my options for a horror chain down from three to two.  Which is fine, two is still much better than zero.  

But first I've got to finish out April - here's tomorrow's line-up for TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming: 

6:00 am "Two Girls and a Sailor" (1944)

8:15 am "2001" (1968) - SEEN IT

11:00 am "2010" (1984) - SEEN IT

1:00 pm "Two Women" (1960)

3:00 pm "Umberto D" (1952)

4:30 pm "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" (1964)

6:45 pm "Under Western Stars" (1938)

8:00 pm "The Uninvited" (1944)

10:00 pm "Union Pacific" (1939)

12:30 am "Vertigo" (1958) - SEEN IT

2:45 am "Victor/Victoria" (1982) - SEEN IT

5:15 am "Wait Until Dark" (1967) - SEEN IT

5 out of 12, I'm bringing it on home, up to 140 out of 349 and that's still over 40%.  Just barely. I should finish on May 1 right where I predicted, I think. 

THE PLOT: A former slave is visited by the spirit of a mysterious woman. 

AFTER: The July schedule is vexing me right now, because I really want to see "Black Widow", so I've definitely got a path to it, but what if it doesn't get released - AGAIN?  What if it's not the BEST path?  Should I have saved "Beloved" to go after the next documentary chain, which will be the big Summer Concert Series?  That would give me more linking options, I see how that could connect with "The Best of Enemies", as a back-up in case "Black Widow" doesn't happen again.  Screw it, I've got "multiple outs", as they say in magic tricks, so my path to late July is clear, it hits all the major holidays between now and then, and I've got to learn to be satisfied with that.  I'll deal with late July and August and closing the gap to October 1 later. You never know, my whole line-up could be different by then, I'll have added dozens of new films, and there could be many more options that I'm just not aware of right now. 

I'm back on Black History, sort of, anyway - this film is about a former slave living in Ohio in the years after the Civil War, and it's based on a book by Toni Morrison, but MAN, this is a strange movie.  Like, I know right now on movie screens somewhere Godzilla is battling King Kong, and that's probably super ridiculous in many ways, but I think maybe somehow this one's even weirder than that, if such a thing is possible.  Look, I know that terrible, terrible things were done to slaves in the American South, there's no getting around that, but even starting from that point, there's some weird, weird stuff here.  This film was a box office bomb, and I have to wonder if it was a smart idea to go THERE and make audiences very uncomfortable.  I'm not going to second-guess Toni Morrison when it comes to history and racial inequality, but still, there may be questionable plot content here.  

When ex-slave Sethe flashes back to her experiences at "Sweet Home", of course they're going to be terrible.  She barely got out with her life, and her back is so scarred from whippings that there are permanent marks in the shape of a tree, and she'll just never recover, physically or emotionally.  Her husband Halle never made it off the plantation, and eventually we'll find out that his sacrifice enable the release of not only Sethe, but also the matriarch Baby Suggs.  That's all well and good, but for some reason the audience is forced to watch in graphic detail as white men violate Sethe, even drinking the milk from her body while she was pregnant.  I'm just not sure that anybody ever DID that in the South, like if white slave-owners were so racist, would they drink the milk from a black woman?  It seems like the sort of thing they'd be against, but again, I'm not an expert, and another negative is that I have to watch a scene where Oprah, America's talk-show queen, gets milked.  OK, I know it's probably a stand-in, but even so...

Then there's itinerant wanderer and former slave Paul D., who's been roaming the country ever since the war ended, and somehow ends up on Sethe's doorstep.  That can't be random, he must have had that destination in mind, but it's all so unclear.  He says he came back for Sethe, but then if that's true, what took him so damn long?  Or was she like tenth on his list of possible hook-ups?  Sethe invites him in to her home and there's an evil red light, so he knows right away the house is haunted - then WHY does he stay, if he knows this?  Any person either believes in ghosts or they don't, and if he does, then the sensible thing would be to turn around and find another ex-slave to shack up with, but he believes there's a ghost, and he stays anyway.  That makes no sense, and also gets no explanation.  

The initial scene of the film shows Sethe with three children, and a poltergeist making trouble in the home.  Two of Sethe's children run away, because they can't deal with the ghost any more, but her daughter, Denver stays.  This is where things started to get confusing for me, because the plot on Wikipedia says that Sethe has FOUR children, not three.  The two boys run away, one daughter stays, where's the fourth one?  Anyway, when Paul D. shows up, a loose family is formed, with Sethe and Paul living as a couple with a young adult daughter.  

Then into this situation comes Beloved, who seems to grow out of a tree in their yard, and is covered with ants or bees or something.  The family takes in Beloved, who doesn't seem able to speak or know how to eat, basically communcating in growls and other noises.  Part of the puzzle here seems to be figuring out who or what Beloved is, and Denver figures it out before the others.  No spoilers here, but it's obviously got something to do with Sethe's past, which is slowly revealed as the film doesn't really care for linear storytelling.  Sethe's escape from Kentucky is revealed via a lengthy flashback, and I'm still not feeling like the story adds up right, why is that?  It's clear that the characters only get certain pieces of information when the audience is ready to hear them, and that's part of the problem.  If the story had just started at the beginning and had the middle in the middle and so on, there wouldn't be this need to dole out little factoids here and there, some of which turn out to be very important. 

This is essentially a ghost story told via the framework of the racist Reconstruction Period, with Ohio representing the progressive North and Kentucky the regressive South - if a slave makes it across the river then maybe it's a whole new world, but then there are always the memories and the "ghosts" from the past that can still drag them down. It's a big challenge for an actor to play a resurrected spirit trying to live in a human body, essentially a feral girl, unfortunately it's too easy to let that performance slip into parody or just a bunch of nonsense, which I think is what happened here. Plus I've still got some difficulty understanding the methodology here, like was Beloved a real person, or a spirit, or just someone's imagination?  It's all so very unclear, perhaps open to interpretation, but come on, they've got to give me something to hang my hat on here.  Right now the only thing I'm certain of is that I'll never get back the nearly three hours I spent watching this. 

I agree that the horrific things that were done to slaves in America need to be addressed, discussed and even analyzed, but I'm not sure that they make for an appropriate framework for a ghost story, that all sort of cheapens things somehow, I guess?  Like maybe there were better ways to get there than this way?  I just don't know, I'm scratching my head.  Since this doesn't link up with any of the other horror films on my list, so I think maybe I'm glad I slotted it in here, but, generally speaking, I think I would have preferred to have not programmed it anywhere at all.

Also starring Danny Glover (last seen in "Jumanji: The Next Level"), Thandie Newton (last seen in "RocknRolla"), Kimberly Elise (last seen in "Death Wish"), Hill Harper (last seen in "Concussion"), Beah Richards (last seen in "Drugstore Cowboy"), Lisa Gay Hamilton (last seen in "Beautiful Boy"), Albert Hall (last seen in "The Great White Hype"), Anthony Chisholm (last seen in "Going in Style"), Jason Robards (last seen in "Melvin and Howard"), Harry Northup (last seen in "Fathers' Day"), Tracey Walter (last seen in "Wakefield"), Jude Ciccolella (last seen in "Sin City: A Dame to Kill For"), Wes Bentley (last seen in "Welcome to Me"), Irma P. Hall (last seen in "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil"), Dorothy Love Coates, Kessia Embry, Dashiell Eaves. Brian Hooks (last seen in "Fool's Gold"), Vertamae Grosvenor, Angie Utt, Frederick Strother, Paul Lazar (last seen in "Snowpiercer"), Robert W. Castle, Jane White (last seen in "Klute"), with cameos from Charles Napier (last seen in "The Grifters"), Thelma Houston. 

RATING: 3 out of 10 slaughtered hogs

Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond

Year 13, Day 118 - 4/28/21 - Movie #3,822

BEFORE: I've reached the last documentary in my chain, for now.  Considering who my outro link is, I could easily have extended the chain - but then I'd miss Mother's Day.  I'm going to use that prominent person who is both a talk-show host AND an actor to transition back to fiction films tomorrow so I can get to a mother-themed film by May 9.  I'll have more to say about the May line-up in just a couple days, obvi. 

There are just three more days left in TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" line-up, now that the 2021 Oscars are in the rear-view.  Here are the films airing tomorrow, April 29:

7:30 am "The Three Musketeers" (1948)

9:45 am "To Be or Not to Be" (1942) - SEEN IT

11:45 am "Tom Jones" (1963) - SEEN IT

2:00 pm "Tom Thumb" (1958)

4:00 pm "Top Hat" (1935) - SEEN IT

6:00 pm "Travels with My Aunt" (1972)

8:00 pm "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" (1948) - SEEN IT

10:15 pm "The Truman Show" (1998) - SEEN IT

12:15 am "Tunes of Glory" (1960)

2:15 am "12 Angry Men" (1957) - SEEN IT

4:00 am "Twice in a Lifetime" (1985)

With 6 seen out of 11, this is probably the last day where I've seen the majority of the films.  Now I'm up to 135 seen out of 337, almost exactly 40% seen. And TCM and I are both on a Jim Carrey theme, I've got this doc today that uses some clips from "The Truman Show", and they're showing that same film tomorrow.  Pretty sweet. 

Dick Van Dyke carries over from "Walt: The Man Behind the Myth". 

THE PLOT: A behind-the-scenes look at how Jim Carrey adopted the persona of idiosyncratic comedian Andy Kaufman on the set of "Man in the Moon". 

AFTER: Wait, is that Jim Carrey or Andy Kaufman on the poster. (Yes, it is.) I just watched a magic trick on "Penn & Teller: Fool Us" about a week ago that used upside-down photographs of famous people in a trick, and the magician talked about the cognizance factor when a photo is upside-down, how your brain can be tricked when processing an image.  So I think this poster is a photo of Carrey as Andy, but I'm not completely sure. But that's what this whole film is really about, the blurring of the two men that occurred when Jim Carrey portrayed Kaufman in the 1999 film "Man on the Moon". 

If you somehow haven't seen "Man on the Moon", by all means, go and do that.  It's a very metaphysical piece about a very meta comedian - some people didn't really "get" Andy Kaufman, many were confused about whether he really WAS the foreign character he played on the sitcom "Taxi", or if he was just doing a bit (Andy's "Foreign Man" character was kind of the pre-Borat, if you think about it).  Then Kaufman would go on SNL and lip-sync along with a record of the "Mighty Mouse" theme and the humor was so out there that when he was doing a bit, then people got confused about whether it was real.  Sometimes he aimed so low with his comedy that it went right over people's heads, if that makes any sense.  There was nothing to really "get", so, naturally, some people didn't get it - you were better off if you just switched your brain off and went along for the ride.  

Then Andy got into wrestling, which even at its best has that same questionable nature to it - is it real?  Is it all staged?  Is it somewhere in-between?  Andy seemed to prefer wrestling with women, and to do that he had to act like a sexist heel and put down all women, but was that how he really felt, or was that just part of the act?  Then he had a long-running rivalry with wrestler Jerry Lawler, but in the true spirit of wrestling, it's possible that every bit of that was also just part of an act. Every staged wrestling fight is meant to LOOK really dangerous and painful, without being so. 

I watched "Taxi" as a kid, so I knew who Kaufman was, but then his other appearances on SNL and Dave Letterman's show just left me scratching my head, like it seemed like a lot of work just to figure out what his deal was.  I got more insight when "Man in the Moon" came out in 1999, but now here comes this documentary to tell me that what was going on behind the scenes, making that movie, was even weirder than what made it into the film.  In order to play Andy Kaufman, Jim Carrey really had to get into his mind, and that meant living AS ANDY while he was on the set, and the cameras weren't rolling.  Or who he imagined Andy to be, acting the way that he believed Andy would act, never turning it off, until he got off the set, I think - and even then, there was some question.  Some people would say he was "channeling" Andy's spirit, other people found it either endearing, noteworthy or probably quite annoying.  

Somebody was shooting documentary footage the whole time - and that somebody was Lynne Margulies, Andy's girlfriend/partner.  Meanwhile Courtney Love was there, playing Lynne Margulies as a character, so things maybe felt a little weird.  But there was a lot of that going around - Paul Giamatti was playing Bob Zmuda, Andy's writing partner, but Bob Zmuda was also constantly on set, and he played a different character in "Man on the Moon", not himself.  Danny Devito played George Shapiro, Andy's manager, but George Shapiro was also on the set, and played a different character in the film.  Meanwhile, Danny Devito was a co-star of Andy's on "Taxi", so I think he played himself in the same film, too, or maybe they used archive footage of a younger him for scenes where he played Louie DiPalma, I forget.  But you can see how this could get confusing very quickly, with everybody pretending to be somebody else, who was also there.  And then Carrey's a "method actor" who decided to live in his character for several weeks...

(Meanwhile, Richard Belzer, David Letterman and Jerry Lawler played themselves in "Man on the Moon", which seems a lot simpler - but in another way, when juxtaposed, ended up being more complicated than you might think...)

On top of that, then you have the Tony Clifton character, who was a creation of Kaufman and Zmuda, a crude lounge-singer who tended to act out and yell at people on set, and from what I understand, sometimes Kaufman was Tony Clifton, and sometimes it was Zmuda in the outfit.  And then Kaufman insisted that this alter ego of his be offered a guest role on "Taxi", but he had to be hired separately, as if he were a real person.  Again, it was probably just Kaufman doing a bit to be funny, but it also made him appear to be a difficult pain-in-the-ass to work with.  

Behind the scenes on "Man in the Moon", Jim Carrey also adopted this practice, and switched from day to day between the Andy Kaufman and Tony Clifton personas - as Kaufman, knowing he'd be coming to the set the next day as Clifton, he then spoke of Tony in the third person, and acted like he had the next day off.  But under that, somewhere was the knowledge that he was still Jim Carrey, just wearing a different outfit and acting differently the next day - still reality was clearly blurring and maybe Jim's persona was getting a little bit lost under the other two characters. 

There are framing sequences here, where Jim Carrey (now) talks about Kaufman, and what it meant to go deep into that role, to speak to Andy's father and Andy's daughter AS ANDY so they could finally have some sense of closure.  Then he had to take some time off from being Andy, after the shoot, just to figure out again who Jim was, and who Jim wanted to be.  Even when this doc was filmed, almost 20 years later, Jim has a very different perspective on life, and what it means to be who you are, and his thoughts on life, death, being and non-being and what it all means in the end, perhaps nothing.  We all want different things, but then again we're all heading toward the same place, which is a state of non-being, and some people will get there sooner than others, and some will feel fulfilled when they get there, others not so much.  Deep thoughts.

But in a weird reflection of the "Man in the Moon" footage, as weird as it is when an actor takes on a role, walks a mile in another man's shoes, essentially "becomes" him for a few weeks, whatever that means, in the framing interview footage, Jim Carrey is forced to speak as himself, and though that also seems like it SHOULD be a lot simpler, in another way, when juxtaposed, ended up being more complicated than you might think. 

I've got a friend who directed another documentary about Andy Kaufman, called "Kaufmania", which is not streaming anywhere just yet - that's a shame, because it shares about 10 or 12 actors with this doc.  But even if I could watch that tomorrow, it would throw me off, because then I might not make it to Mother's Day on time.  Maybe later this year if I can work it in, though.  

Also starring Jim Carrey (last seen in "I Love You Phillip Morris"), Danny DeVito (last heard in "The One and Only Ivan"), Paul Giamatti (last seen in "Fyre Fraud"), Milos Forman (last seen in "Heartburn"), Courtney Love (last seen in "Kurt & Courtney"), Bob Zmuda (last seen in "The Number 23"), Jerry Lawler (last seen in "Fighting with my Family"), Elton John (last seen in "Rocketman"), Lynne Margulies, Judd Hirsch (last seen in "This Must Be the Place"), Carol Kane (last seen in "The Dead Don't Die"), Peter Bonerz (last seen in "Catch-22"), Ron Meyer, George Shapiro, Stacey Sher, Angela Jones, Gerry Becker (last seen in "A Perfect Murder"), Michael Stipe, David Letterman (last seen in "Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump"), Hugh Hefner (last seen in "Class Action Park", Jon Lovitz (last seen in "Killing Hasselhoff"), Andy Dick (last seen in "Zoolander 2"), Stanley Kaufman, Eric Gold, 

with archive footage of Andy Kaufman, Peter Buck, Johnny Carson (last seen in "ZZ Top: That Little Ol' Band from Texas"), Jeff Conaway, Jeff Daniels (last seen in "The Lookout"), Tony Danza (last seen in "Don Jon"), Cameron Diaz (last seen in "Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her"), Sammy Davis Jr. (last seen in "Selma"), Jamie Foxx (last seen in "John Lewis: Good Trouble), Merv Griffin (last seen in "Whitney"), Arsenio Hall (last seen in "Coming 2 America"), Philip Baker Hall (last seen in "In Good Company"), Marvin Hamlisch (last seen in "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days"), Ed Harris (last seen in "Swing Shift"), Marilu Henner (last seen in "Noises Off..."), Bob Hope (last seen in "The Last Laugh"), Maurice LaMarche (last heard in "Ralph Breaks the Internet"), Matt Lauer (last seen in "The Accidental President"), Oprah Winfrey (ditto), Mike Mills, Nick Nolte (last seen in "Warrior"), Gwyneth Paltrow (last seen in "Higher Learning"), Dinah Shore, Kate Winslet (last seen in "A Little Chaos"), Renée Zellweger (last seen in "One True Thing").

RATING: 6 out of 10 talk-show appearances

Walt: The Man Behind the Myth

Year 13, Day 117 - 4/27/21 - Movie #3,821

BEFORE: Walt Disney carries over from "Walt & El Grupo", makes sense, right?  This is Walt's third appearance in my documentary chain, but he's still lagging behind Adolf Hitler and several others (filmmakers LOVE using Hitler footage...).  But I've got a new leader for number of appearances for the year, Toni Collette is no longer the front-runner.  After all the political films, Donald Trump rose to 7 appearances, but he's only in the second spot, Barack Obama's now in the lead with 8 appearances. (filmmakers also LOVE using Obama footage...)

We're also getting very close to the end of April and TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, so here's the line-up for tomorrow, Wednesday, April 28:

7:30 am "The Sunshine Boys" (1975) - SEEN IT

9:30 am "Sweet Bird of Youth" (1962)

11:45 am "Swing Time" (1936) - SEEN IT

1:30 pm "A Tale of Two Cities" (1935)

3:45 pm "Test Pilot" (1938)

5:45 pm "That Hamilton Woman" (1941)

8:00 pm "Them!" (1954) - SEEN IT

9:45 pm "Theodora Goes Wild" (1936)

11:30 pm "The Thin Man" (1934) - SEEN IT

1:15 am "The Third Man" (1949) - SEEN IT

3:15 am "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" (1944)

5:45 am "This Land Is Mine" (1943)

Sort of getting my last chance here, with 5 seen out of 12, I've seen 129 out of 326 overall, which is 39.5%, just a bit shy of respectable.  The work continues. 

THE PLOT: This documentary offers a fascinating look at the man behind such classics as Mickey Mouse, Snow White, Mary Poppins and Bambi, as well as the creation of Disneyland and many of the other things Walt Disney imagined into reality, featuring more than 50 interviews with original artists, imagineers, friends, family and collaborators. 

AFTER: This documentary starts with footage of the premiere of "Mary Poppins" and suggests that film was Walt Disney's crowning achievement in cinema (Dick Van Dyke narrates the doc, so either they had to write that, or maybe he slipped it in...).  That footage was from 1964, and then two years later, Walt Disney was dead - so the moral seems to be, never accomplish anything great, because then there's nowhere else to go, how are you going to top it?  Karma then takes its toll, apparently, so maybe it's better to never achieve much.  (JK, he died from lung cancer, after a lifetime of heavy smoking.)

Disney's really the great American success story, who else could take a few drawings of a mouse, assemble them into a series of short films, and then parlay that into a multi-billion dollar empire.  Oh, well, multi-million within his lifetime, the billions part came later.  When his fledgling studio was in trouble, Walt turned to TV and signed a deal with ABC to air second-run Disney movies and cartoons, called "The Wonderful World of Disney", with films introduced by the man himself, and then he'd take the TV network's money and invest it in making more movies, plus buying up land in California and Florida for theme parks.  Decades later, DisneyCorp would own ABC outright, plus ESPN, Fox, Marvel, Lucasfilm and I think Hulu.  Then of course there are the Disney Parks, Disney stores, Disney Cruise lines, and if you've got kids who watch the Disney Channel or Disney Plus, it's probably close to a religion in your house...

But there were apparently down times for Walt Disney, both financially, creatively and personally.  As I mentioned yesterday, his brother Roy was the business guy, and probably freaked out every time Walt went over budget on a movie, or had some crazy notion about building the city of tomorrow (later called EPCOT) or wasn't able to handle a labor dispute.  The famous 1941 labor strike and Walt's trip to South America from yesterday's film are seen here, but only briefly, as if it were just a small bump in the road.  The problems that caused it seem to stem from the fact that the three features after "Snow White" (Pinocchio, Fantasia and Dumbo) just didn't perform as well as expected, and the studio fell deeper and deeper into debt. (Again, by millions, which was a lot of money back in those days...)

On the personal level, Walt's wife had a few miscarriages before their daughter was born, and to console themselves they would go on long cruise vacations (must be nice to be the boss...I assume that the animators working at the studio didn't have such luxuries) and when Walt and his brother bought their parents a new house in California, a malfunctioning gas heater led to the death of their mother. (See, there's that pesky karma again....)  Walt and his wife Lillian had two daughters, one of them adopted, and you just KNOW the guy really wanted a son, because this was back in the 1950's, a very sexist time.  Walt celebrated the biggest when he finally got a grandson, he was probably ten times happier for this than any daughter or granddaughter, those male-heir notions persisted.  

Of course, it was a different time - yesterday's film touched on cultural appropriation just a tad, and looking back on old Disney films through a modern lens brings up some very obvious problems, particularly with "Song of the South".  The Disney Parks only recently altered the "Splash Mountain" ride to remove the Br'er Rabbit and Br'er Fox characters from that movie (one might ask, what took so long?) and they've redecorated the ride with characters from "The Princess and the Frog", another Disney film with African-American characters, but one that society hasn't been deemed racist. Yet. 

But it's all just grist for the mill, isn't it?  Everything's designed to funnel foot traffic to Anaheim and Orlando, to put asses in the seats of the latest Disney-themed or Star Wars-themed ride.  I admit I'm part of the problem, we had plane tickets to go to Disney World in May 2020, and up until the pandemic hit, there was a good chance that I would visit the "Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge" exhibit on May 4 (Star Wars day).  But the universe had other plans, and we got flight credits that we just turned in a few days ago so we can fly to Chicago in June and visit my brother-in-law. Sorry, Disney Parks, maybe next year.  (It is the 50th Anniversary of Disney World, but I'm betting attendance is slow to rebound - then again, it is Florida, so who knows?)  

It's interesting to note that Disney was ahead of his time on the technical front for the theme parks, when he learned that using real jungle animals was a bad idea for the "Jungle Cruise" ride, that's when they developed animatronic animals.  Eventually this same concept was applied to the Hall of Presidents, creating animatronic Abe Lincoln and George Washington after he learned that the real Presidents were even more unreliable than jungle animals. Disney practically invented the concept of recycling by creating exhibits for the 1964 New York World's Fair - "Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln", "Carousel of Progress" and "It's a Small World" and after the fair was over, the exhibits were shipped down to Florida to become part of the Hall of Presidents, the Carousel of Progress at Tomorrowland, and the ride that is everybody's worst nightmare. 

This film has a lot of interviews with the Disney animators and staff (some of whom have also passed on since) and Disney actors (some, like Buddy Ebsen, have also passed) and friends of Disney like Ray Bradbury (yup, him too).  The animators all had nothing but praise for Disney as a man, yet I noticed they also made it a point to mention that Walt didn't praise or compliment his workers very often, in fact he would often pair them up with people they didn't like to challenge them, or pit them in gladiatorial combat to see which would survive. (Again, JK)  This all sort of reminded me of Anthony Scaramucci in "Unfit" talking about Donald Trump, where his argument was basically, "No, Trump's not a racist, because he hates everybody.  He's just an asshole, but he was MY asshole, because he gave me a job."

This movie is NOT on the major streaming services, and honestly, I'm not even sure it counts as a movie because IMDB lists it as an episode of "The Wonderful World of Disney".  Should that disqualify it?  It's definitely feature-length.  And why hasn't it been made available for streaming on Disney Plus? I found a copy posted on YouTube but it kept skipping, every two or three minutes there would be five or ten seconds missing and the screen got very pixellated, so was this just a bad upload or what?  I tracked down a copy posted on archive.org but it had the same skipping problem, so maybe there was some kind of accident and there's no error-free copy of this film available any more.  I must have missed some key points about Disney's life due to this bad video copy, but it was too late to drop in a substitute or change course, so I persisted.  (I realized too late that another documentary, "The Boys", was also about Disney's filmmaking and would also have connected to tomorrow's film.)

Also starring  Harriet Burns, John Canemaker, J.B. Kaufman, Diane Disney Miller, Frank Thomas, (all carrying over from "Walt & El Grupo"), Paul Anderson, Ken Annakin, Sharon Baird, Buddy Baker, Ray Bradbury, Michael Broggie, Bobby Burgess, Mickey Clark, Kevin Corcoran, Bill Cotter, Alice Davis, Marc Davis, Virginia Davis, Roy E. Disney, Buddy Ebsen (last seen in "Breakfast at Tiffany's"), Peter Ellenshaw, Richard Fleischer, Bruce Gordon, Joe Grant, Ollie Johnston, Chuck Jones, Ward Kimball, John Lasseter, Art Linkletter, Bill Littlejohn, Leonard Maltin (last seen in "Drew: The Man Behind the Poster"), Bill Melendez, Ron Miller, Floyd Norman, Don Peri, Mel Shaw, Richard Sherman, Robert Sherman, Brian Sibley, Dave Smith, Charles Solomon, Jack Speirs, Robert Stack (last seen in "Joe Versus the Volcano"), Bob Thomas, Dick Van Dyke (last seen in "Gilbert")

with archive footage of Julie Andrews (last heard in "Aquaman"), Gary Cooper (last seen in "David Crosby: Remember My Name"), Angie Dickinson (last seen in "Sam Whiskey"), Lillian Disney (also carrying over from "Walt & El Grupo"), Adolf Hitler (ditto), Sharon Disney, Karen Dotrice, Mary Tyler Moore, Richard Nixon (last seen in "Da 5 Bloods"), Ronald Reagan (last seen in "Class Action Park"), Shirley Temple (last seen in "The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer"), Spencer Tracy (last seen in "The Old Man and the Sea"). 

RATING: 5 out of 10 Laugh-o-grams shorts

Walt & El Grupo

Year 13, Day 116 - 4/26/21 - Movie #3,820

BEFORE: Walt Disney carries over from "Class Action Park", and I watched the Oscars in-between. Walt Disney still owns the record for the most Oscars, 22 wins and 59 nominations. I wasn't even thinking about that when this film ended up here, another accident, but of course there are no accidents, just me taking advantage of coincidences. 

If my viewing of nominated films counts as any kind of endorsement, or to whatever degree I was "rooting" for the films I'd seen, I did pretty poorly, I'd only seen the winners in 5 categories, and really, that was just three films.  "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" won for Best Costume Design and Best Makeup and Hairstyling, "Soul" won for Best Animated Feature and Best Original Score, and I'd watched "Two Distant Strangers", which won for Best Live-Action Short. That's all I'd seen, out of the 23 winners in the big categories - so now I've got some catching up to do, I put all the nominated features on my lists, and I'm planning to get to three of them in May - "One Night in Miami", "A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon" and "Tenet".  That's the best I can do for now, because I still have Oscar-nominated films from previous years to get to, like "Judy" from 2019 and "Bohemian Rhapsody" from the year before that. It's a process. 

TCM is still working through the nominated films that start with the letter "S", and here's their line-up for tomorrow, April 27, Day 27 of "31 Days of Oscar". Almost done:

6:30 am "The Story of G.I. Joe" (1945)

8:30 am "The Story of Louis Pasteur" (1936)

10:15 am "The Story of Three Loves" (1953)

12:30 pm "The Strange Love of Martha Ivers" (1946)

2:30 pm "The Stranger" (1946)

4:15 pm "Strangers on a Train" (1951) - SEEN IT

6:00 pm "The Stratton Story" (1949)

8:00 pm "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1951) - SEEN IT

10:15 pm "Strike Up the Band" (1940)
12:30 am "Summer of '42" (1971)

2:30 am "The Sundowners" (1960)

5:00 am "Sunrise at Campobello" (1960)

Damn, my stats tomorrow are nearly as bad as the ones from yesterday's awards ceremony.  Hitting for just 2 out of 12, overall that means 124 out of 314, or 39.4%.  In both cases, it's just not my year, and I've got a lot of work still to do.

THE PLOT: The story of the 1941 Goodwill Tour to South America, made by Walt Disney and his staff. 

AFTER: There's a story here, and then there's sort of a story-behind-the-story too, which I think I'd find a bit more interesting.  A few months before Pearl Harbor, when several European countries were already at war with Germany and Italy, the U.S. government tasked Walt Disney to go on a sort of "goodwill tour" to South America, because people were still unsure how far the war would extend, and which side countries like Argentina, Brazil and Chile might ally with.  Since Disney didn't think of himself as any kind of politician or ambassador, the story goes that he initially refused - but when it got re-pitched to him as a chance to learn about South American culture, meet some potential new characters and maybe develop some films about that, he was totally on board.  

Beyond Disney's love of strip-mining other cultures for inspiration, something he was very good at from stealing stories from European fairy tales, there was a financial reason as well - the U.S. government agreed to back the films that he made, so even if they didn't make money at the box office, the studio still wouldn't lose money, thanks to federal backing.  Well, then, how could he say no?  Meanwhile, there was a call among the employees of the Disney Animation studio to unionize, and Walt took this rather personally, hadn't he paid them for their time?  Now they wanted benefits and raises in addition to the prestige they got for being DisneyCo. employees?  You see, Walt, prestige is great but it doesn't pay your mortgage, fix your crooked teeth or send your kids to college.  

What's suggested here is that the government helped fix the union disputes while Walt was away on tour, but I heard it was really Walt's brother, Roy, who was the businessman of the family, who negotiated with the budding union while Walt was out of town.  This makes sense, and once everything got worked out and the studio still needed to do a round of layoffs, it was decided that an equal number of union and non-union employees would lose their jobs.  Umm, that's the solution?  Being equitable is great, but losing your job is shitty from the employee's standpoint, no matter what.  Still, this union dispute sounds to me like a much more interesting story than watching Walt and a bunch of animators, artists and designers travel around South America not learning the language and expecting all the natives to speak English.

There were a couple of themed shorts that resulted from the trip, "Saludos Amigos" and "The Three Caballeros", but I haven't seen those.  I've seen clips of Donald Duck interacting with a green macaw bird character (José Carioca?) and then other clips of Goofy learning the difference between American cowboys and the gauchos of Argentina, but I'm still not really sure to what extent Walt Disney really understood the culture down there.  Honestly it feels like he was spoon-feeding bits of it to ignorant Americans who probably didn't care. Roosevelt's "Good Neighbor" programs also introduced Brazilian singer Carmen Miranda to America, and I don't think many Americans understood what she was singing about or why she wore a hat made out of fruit. (I've researched it before, and I still don't get it...)

The problems come in when someone tries to take elements of another culture and then represent them in American movies - back in the 1940's and 1950's there was little of the "politically correct" mentality we have now, and that explains why Mickey Rooney was allowed to play a very stereotypical Asian character in "Breakfast at Tiffany's", why most Americans thought all Asian women dressed like geisha girls, and so it's unclear what exactly resulted from dragging South American stereotypes into American culture through a camera lens.  Americans probably thought that Brazilians just drink, dance and party all night, and this may have happened because the Disney artists and animators were encouraged to drink, dance and party all night. 

I'm drawing the conclusion that there was no footage recorded on the trip, which seems like a shame.  Obviously there were no cameraphones back then, and it was still in the days before video cameras, but couldn't someone have brought a Bolex or something and shot a few roles of film?  Instead the director of "Walt & El Grupo" had to digitally manipulate some still images from the trip, and that just looks terribly cheesy.  This film also kept falling back on having family members read letters written by the artists on the trip to their wives or kids back home.  It's sweet in a way, but also an artistic cop-out.  Walt got to bring his wife on the trip, but not his daughters, I'm not quite sure what to make of that.  Some of the artists were married to each other, or maybe fell in love on the trip, I'm not sure, but then a few had to spend months away from home just for the sake of artistic research, communicating with family only by mail, what a drag. 

Also starring Flavio Barroso, Lydia Bodrero, Harriet Burns, John Canemaker, Josefina Molina Chazarreta, Diane Disney, Blaine Gibson, Juan Carlos Gonzalez, J.B. Kaufman, Janet Lansburgh, Leticia Pinheiro, Andres Chazarreta Ruiz, Cindy Sears, Jeannette Thomas, with archive footage of Lee Blair, Mary Blair, James Bodrero, William Cottrell, Jack Cutting, Lillian Disney, Norman Ferguson, Larry Lansburgh, John Parr Miller, Herbert Ryman, Ted Sears, Webb Smith, Frank Thomas, Charles Wolcott, Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler (last seen in "Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump". 

RATING: 4 out of 10 terrible hats

Class Action Park

Year 13, Day 115 - 4/25/21 - Movie #3,819

BEFORE: Donald Trump carries over from "Unfit", and he's my link out of political documentaries to...well, other documentaries.  I'll get back to fiction soon, I promise.  My wife watched this documentary a couple months ago and recommended it to me (it's available on HBO Max), and while I don't focus on films suggested most of the time, once in a while I'll make an exception.  

It's Oscar time, yet somehow this 2020 documentary didn't get a nomination, it must have fallen through the cracks somehow.  This was the year that even streaming films were allowed to qualify, for the first time, so airing on HBO Max wouldn't have made this one ineligible.  Maybe there was a problem with the paperwork or something - nope, this one didn't even make the shortlist, which is the list of films from which the Academy voters pick the five nominees.  Well, you know what, it's a tough category, there were 238 documentaries that qualified, but only 15 made the shortlist, including "All In: The Fight for Democracy", but even that didn't get a nomination. But somehow "My Octopus Teacher" did...

Today, of course, you can watch "Singin' in the Rain" on TCM at 6:00 pm and that should finish with enough time for you to switch over to the ceremony - unless you like all that red carpet stuff and watching stars get out of their limos.  Here's tomorrow's line-up from TCM's "31 Days of Oscar", which seems to have some more appropriate films about acting in it:

8:00 am "Splendor in the Grass" (1961) - SEEN IT

10:15 am "Stage Door" (1937) - SEEN IT

12:00 pm "Stage Door Canteen" (1943)

2:15 pm "Stagecoach" (1939) - SEEN IT

4:00 pm "Stand By For Action" (1942)

6:00 pm "A Star Is Born" (1937)

8:00 pm "A Star Is Born" (1954) - SEEN IT

11:15 pm "A Star Is Born" (1976) - SEEN IT

1:45 am "Star Witness" (1931)

3:00 am "Step Lively" (1944)

4:30 am "A Stolen Life" (1946)

Wow, if you can make it through "Stage Door" and all three versions of "A Star Is Born", more power to you. That's one way to wind down from the Oscars, I suppose.  Hitting for another 5 out of 11 brings me to 122 seen out of 302 films, still hovering just above my cut-off at 40.3% with five days remaining. 

THE PLOT: A documentary that focuses on a legendary dangerous water park and its slew of injuries and crimes along with child safety concerns. 

AFTER: Action Park was a real place, if you grew up in the New York City area during the late 80's or early 90's, you probably either wanted to go there or went there and regretted it, and if you grew up in North Jersey you may have worked there, despite having no marketable skills or basic lifeguard training.  A former Wall Street trader named Eugene Mulvihill bought two ski resorts after being barred from trading stocks, and wanted to develop something to make money during the non-winter months, and he came up with a three-park system that combined a water park, a concrete "alpine slide" and Motorworld (home of go-karts, car racing, and battle tanks).

Problems in design and operation plagued the park for years - it seems appropriate that my lead-in link is Donald Trump and my lead-out will be Walt Disney, because Mulvihill embodied sort of a combination of these two men, he had the aspiration and ambition of Disney, combined with the ineptitude, lack of follow-through and pure greed of Trump.  (Trump considered investing in Action Park at one point, but after visiting the site he decided it was too risky, low class and hands-off for even him.)  You could say that Action Park is a great metaphor for the Trump presidency - Trump put an oilman in charge of the EPA, and a certified idiot in charge of the Department of Education, while Mulvihill hired unreliable teens to supervise the rides and act as lifeguards - in both cases, it was if the inmates were running the asylum, while management was nowhere to be seen. Mulvihill had money-laundering schemes, as did Trump, I'm sure, and as with Action Park, those of us who survived walked away from that administration wondering how we did it. 

Normal amusement parks spend years developing rides, they'll bring in a team of experts to figure out how to get the maximum G-force out of a roller coaster drop, then have another team of experts build a ride according to the specs, then a third team would be responsible for daily inspections and maintaining safety standards.  Action Park had none of that, and they passed the savings on to you.  They designed whatever rides, swings and jumps seemed cool with zero research, then Gene would tinker with the designs to make them faster, cooler and even less safe, and then safety inspections?  You can probably infer that the standards were at a minimum.  The instructions from the average lifeguard on how to stay safe on the water slides were probably, "OK, you're next. Don't die."  

A lot of problems should have been obvious at that planning stage - the alpine slide was RIGHT under the ski lift that people needed to ride to get to the top of the slide, along with their heavy plastic sled that could easily fall or be dropped off the chairlift, to land on the people riding down the slide, or land on the slide and create an obstacle for the next rider down the chute.  Eventually it became a challenge, people would ride up with an extra sled just to see if they could drop that sled RIGHT on a rider on the track.  It turns out that everything IS legal in New Jersey, as the song goes. 

When the management built a beer hall to celebrate OktoberFest, St. Patrick's Day and, umm, Wednesday, they placed it RIGHT next to the race car track. No, that couldn't possibly become an issue in the future, that checks out OK. Teens getting loaded at the beer hall and then racing cars, what could possibly go wrong?  Or combining binge drinking with speedboat racing and bungee-jumping, that sure sounds like a great idea.  The park was also constructed on BOTH sides of a New Jersey highway, what genius signed off on THAT?

Cliff diving was a popular activity in some parts of the world, why not bring that practice to New Jersey and encourage a lot of untrained teens to do it?  Who wasn't ready for a 20-foot drop into a pool full of people who were too slow to swim out of the way to avoid having another person cliff-dive right on top of them?  Even the wave pool (or as the employees called it, the "grave pool") was known for creating such an undertow that people standing in the pool would get dragged to the bottom, often grabbing on to two friends to bring them down too, because misery loves company.  Then even on the Colorado River Ride, where teams of people would travel on a course similar to rapids on inflatable circular rafts, it was left up to the patrons to somehow get their crafts to the end of the ride, bumping into other rafts on a too-crowded course, and this led to many fist-fights in the giant pool at the end.  

The classic had to be the Cannonball Loop, a too-high water slide with a loop at the end, which was designed with no knowledge of physics or safety, just "Wouldn't it be cool if there was a loop at the end?"  Test dummies that were sent down the loop ended up in pieces in the pool, so that's when management knew they had a hit.  Riders that were too small couldn't build up enough momentum to clear the loop, and riders that were too big got stuck at the top - yet there was no "You must be THIS tall and also THIS short" sign at the top of the course, they just sent everyone down the chute and hoped for the best.  

It's all fun and games until someone gets hurt - then, of course, it's hilarious.  But then not so much when somebody dies, which did happen. Often.  Someone got electrocuted on the Kayak Experience after one of the fans used to propel the water short-circuited, and another person had a heart attack after using the Tarzan swing, which propelled people into VERY cold water.  The whole park was connected by asphalt, which, you know, got very hot during the summer, and that would only be bad if people were walking around barefoot after swimming.  Action Park also had the first skydiving simulator in the U.S., where riders were held up by the power of giant fans, which would cut out at the end of the ride - yeah, that probably never ended well. 

To make matters worse, accidents were constantly under-reported, the park's insurance company was, umm, non-existent, and safety concerns were ignored because the park brought in so much economic traffic from the NYC area, and teens came back to school in September with noticeable injuries like "ride rash", and some teens never came back from Action Park at all. I don't remember where it happened, but I went on an Alpine Slide once - my sister wanted to go to a water-park, and I couldn't swim, so they handed me a plastic sled and put me on the chair-lift.  There was no protection, nobody around for miles, anything could have happened, and I felt the course was much too dangerous, so I took the ride at a snail's pace, barely moving down the mountain, afraid to really open that thing up and cut loose. This film confirms that my instincts as a pre-teen were solid, the first fatality at Action Park was on the Alpine Slide, when a teen's sled jumped the track and his head struck a rock. 

Usually I would agree that kids today are overly protected by their "helicopter parents", that concerns over their well-being are exaggerated, producing a generation of weak and ineffectual kids coming up, but sometimes the parents have good reason to be concerned.  There are, or at least WERE, very unsafe places to go and very unsafe things to do there.  And kids do get injured riding bikes and skateboarding and swimming in pools, so maybe I've got this all wrong. 

One bad decision, like "OK, you can go to Action Park", and that's all she wrote. 

Also starring Chris Gethard (last seen in "Don't Think Twice"), Faith Anderson, Alison Becker, Bill Benneyan, Matthew Callan, Jim DeSaye, Daron Fitch, Joe Hession, Mark Johnson, Bob Krahulik, Brian Larsson, Esther Larsson, Mark Malkoff, Andrew Mulvihill, Jessi Paladini, Mary Pilon, Seth Porges, Jason Scott, Tom Shaw, Ed Youmans, with narration by John Hodgman (last seen in "Movie 43")

with archive footage of Tony Bennett (last seen in "Quincy"), Robert Brennan, Jerry Cantrell, Walt Disney, Leonardo DiCaprio (last seen in "Blood Diamond"), Michael Douglas (last seen in "Unlocked"), Corey Feldman (last seen in "The 'Burbs"), Hugh Hefner (last seen in "Love, Gilda"), Jimmy Kimmel (last seen in "Fyre Fraud"), Johnny Knoxville (last seen in "The Last Stand"), Eugene Mulvihill, Wayne Newton, River Phoenix (last seen in "My Own Private Idaho"), Riki Rachtman, Ronald Reagan (also carrying over from "Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump"), Ivana Trump (ditto), Layne Staley

RATING: 7 out of 10 dislocated shoulders