Filth

Year 13, Day 275 - 10/2/21 - Movie #3,946

BEFORE: It's only day 2 of October, and already, here's a film that is NOT a horror film, not in the traditional sense, anyway - so what gives?  Ah, I have to explain that in order to keep the chain alive, I've had to make a couple of concessions.  Last October, I was forced to include films like "Birds of Prey" and "Jumanji: The Next Level", which are fantasy films, but not horror. And the year before that, I had to include "Alpha" and "Loving Vincent" - after years of watching horror films, I haven't really started to run out of them, but connection-wise, it's getting harder to program a month-long chain of them without causing a break.

When programming October 2021, I found I had two clear chains, but no horror film that could connect them - so I'll be watching a documentary mid-month to fuse the two chains together - I'll explain that choice when I get there.  "Filth" is being used here to connect "Salem's Lot" to the rest of the horror chain, but how did "Filth" get associated with the horror list in the first place?  I have to look back two years to "X-Men: Dark Phoenix", which found its way into the horror chain, and last year, James McAvoy was also in "It: Chapter Two", so I kept this one handy in case I needed to make a connection - but I found another outro film, "Goosebumps 2", so I didn't need "Filth" any more.  BUT, I was still waiting to hear when "The New Mutants" would be released, and it wasn't in time for Halloween 2020, so I saved it for 2021.

I guess I thought there was a chance that James McAvoy would show up in "The New Mutants", since having Charles Xavier in that film would make sense, only to the best of my knowledge, he doesn't appear in it.  But by that time, "Filth" was kept on the horror list because the plot summary talked about "demons", only it turns out it's one characters inner demons, not the Satanic kind.  

BUT, as a film that got bumped two years in a row, "Filth" had some staying power, it turns out, because it connected to other horror films like "Overlord" and "Devil" - but instead, I was able to re-purpose it to connect "Salem's Lot" to the main Shocktober chain via David Soul.  What?  A guy who's most famous for two things, playing Hutch in the 1970's cop show "Starsky & Hutch" and also having the smash 1970's pop single "Don't Give Up On Us", what's he doing in a 2013 film about a corrupt police officer?  Ah, there's a story there, and it will be related below in the form of "Fun Facts about David Soul".  

Just be aware that a David Soul link out of Salem's Lot is the equivalent of throwing a life preserver to a drowning man - it's just the thing I needed to save me. See you after the jump.  

THE PLOT: A corrupt, junkie cop with bipolar disorder attempts to manipulate his way through a promotion in order to win back his wife and daughter, while also fighting his own inner demons. 

AFTER: OK, I've consulted with the imaginary judges inside my brain, and I've determined that because this film has a number of scary elements, such as hallucinations, violent gang killings, a corrupt and possibly insane police officer, and a number of Christmas songs covered by British acts like Shakin' Stevens, the ruling is that this film WILL be allowed to remain as part of Shocktober.  (Look, I know just about every channel's pulling out the horror films right now, I'm just going with the flow, I'm not out to buck trends here.  Sure, I moved Black History month to late April/early May, but that was just because February gets booked up by romances.  What should I do, watch horror films in Janu-EERIE or Febru-SCARY?)

So there are no witches, goblins, ghosts or vampires tonight - an out-of-control cop is still pretty scary, right?  Or at least shocking - like everything else in our country right now, the issue of police being corrupt or wielding too much power is a polarizing issue.  Either Black Lives Matter or Blue Lives Matter, you can't stand up for both of them at the same time.  They're the only thing keeping this world from descending into chaos, or they're part of the chaos themselves with their outdated procedures and attitudes toward minorities and the poor and people with mental issues.  (Could it be, maybe, sometimes the truth lies somewhere...in-between?). 

Anyway, this film is based on a novel by Irvine Welsh, the author of "Trainspotting", and the focus on a corrupt cop losing touch with reality led many to call the novel "unfilmable" over the years.  And that may in fact have been the case, but somebody went ahead and made a movie out of it anyway.  So, umm, who are we supposed to root for, Bruce Robertson, the Scottish police detective with the mental condition who takes drugs, steals from his friends, discredits his fellow officers to try to get a promotion, and has a number of kinky sexual encounters with those officers' wives?  I've heard of anti-heroes, but this takes the concept just a bit too far.  Plus, he's starting to have these weird hallucinations...  Speaking of here's

DAVID SOUL FUN FACT #1: David Soul appears here in one of those hallucinations, like a fantasy sequence where he picks a woman (Robertson's wife) up in a car, and drives around with her, singing along with his 1977 hit "Silver Lady".  This song was a #1 hit in the U.K., but only reached #52 on the Billboard charts in the U.S.  Despite (or perhaps because of) the implication that Soul was picking up a prostitute in this fantasy sequence, the song came BACK on the U.K. charts in 2014, and was also used in a U.K. commercial for bus company National Express, and Soul appeared in that ad, playing a bus driver. 

Bruce, the Scottish cop, is assigned to solve the murder of an Asian student by an Edinburgh gang - Robertson's wife was seen early in the film, appearing on the scene to chase off the attackers, but too late.  (These coincidences make sense later in the film - or do they?). But if Bruce and his rookie partner Lennox can crack the case and solve the murder, then Bruce just might get that promotion.  And he feels strongly that if he can get the promotion, then he'll also get his wife and daughter back, even if there's no direct correlation.  Gradually, we learn that Bruce's always explaining that his wife is "out of town" is his way of dealing with the fact that she's left him, perhaps for good.

DAVID SOUL FUN FACT #2: David Soul has been married FIVE times, and has five sons and a daughter.  While this is not anything close to a record for celebrities - I think Liz Taylor was married what, 8 times? - it's notable, or at least interesting.  We like to think that celebrities are just like us, only perhaps more so, but are they?  They certainly get divorced a lot - Drew Barrymore was just talking on TV the other day about being divorced three times, and I just don't know if that still carries the same stigma that it used to, maybe they're all easily explained away, or maybe they all just lead to more questions.  Soul married an actress in 1964, but the marriage only lasted a year, married another actress in 1968 but divorced again in 1977.  Third marriage lasted 1980 to 1986, he was married to another actress, Julia Nickson from 1987 to 1993, and married his fifth wife, Helen Snell, in 2010.  

Bruce, the Scottish cop, is also the member of a Masonic lodge, which several of the other officers also belong to.  But he takes his friend from the lodge, Bladesey, on a secret trip to Hamburg, Germany, so they can both visit prostitutes, and this way Bladesey's wife won't find out about it.  Bruce has also been making obscene phone calls to Bladesey's wife, Bunty, and when the police captain finds out about the calls, he puts Bruce in charge of finding out who the obscene phone caller is.  And since Bruce doesn't want to turn HIMSELF in, he instead frames Bladesey as the caller by secretly recording him quoting lines from the Frank Sidebottom show.  (This character was seen by me in the movie "Frank" a few years ago, but I don't really get the connection.  Is this a real British TV show?  More research is required here.). 

DAVID SOUL FUN FACT #3: David Soul met his fifth wife while working in a British stage production of "Deathtrap" - it seems that Soul obtained British citizenship in 2004, due to all the theater work he's done across the pond.  He moved to England in the mid-1990's, in shows like "Blood Brothers", "Comic Potential" and something called "Jerry Springer - the Opera" (I swear, I'm not making any of this up.). And in 2012, he did a one-week run with Jerry Hall (Mick Jagger's ex) at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin, in the Pulitzer Prize nominated play "Love Letters". 

Back to Bruce the cop, who starts having weirder and weirder hallucinations, and one represents a session with his psychiatrist, which reveals the knowledge that Bruce's younger brother died when they were children, and Bruce might have been accidentally responsible, through a game of "King of the Castle" (we call it "King of the Mountain" in the U.S.) that took place on top of an unstable pile of coal.  OK, Bruce may have some lingering issues - but why is he seeing animal heads on the bodies of the people he encounters?  Is this related to the guilt over his brother's death, or just a bad reaction to the medication he's on, or the drugs he takes recreationally?  With Irvine Welsh, you just never can be sure.  

DAVID SOUL FUN FACT #4: Soul agreed to appear in this movie to lip-sync to his song "Silver Lady" after a drinking session with director Jon S. Baird.  This explains a lot - for that director, David Soul's hits are something like his karaoke stand-bys, and apparently Irvine Welsh is also a big fan of David Soul's music.  David's daughter, China Soul, also appears in the film as one of the singers in the back seat of his car.  Originally in the screenplay, the song featured in this scene was Foreigner's "I Wanna Know What Love Is", but I guess if you can get David Soul, then you get David Soul.  

As weird and messed-up as this film is, and it is VERY messed-up (I'm holding back A LOT here, because NO SPOILERS), it could have been even weirder - the book this is based on is partly narrated by a tape worm that's growing inside Bruce.  Still, there's a lot here that I just didn't grok, partially because I'm not Scottish.  For example, "Stoat the baw" is a Scottish term meaning a child molester, and I'm clueless.  I guess you don't HAVE to be Scottish to enjoy this film, but I'm guessing it would probably help.  This may be a contender for Weirdest Movie Seen in 2021.

DAVID SOUL FUN FACT #5: David Soul was born David Solberg. Sounds about right. 

Also starring James McAvoy (last seen in "Becoming Jane"), Jamie Bell (last seen in "The Chumscrubber"), Eddie Marsan (last seen in "The Gentlemen"), Imogen Poots (last seen in "She's Funny That Way"), Brian McCardie, Emun Elliott (last seen in "Exodus: Gods and Kings"), Gary Lewis (last seen in "Billy Elliot"), John Sessions (last heard in "Loving Vincent"), Shauna Macdonald, Jim Broadbent (last seen in "Dolittlle"), Joanne Froggatt (last seen in "Mary Shelley"), Kate Dickie (last seen in "Star Wars: The Last Jedi"), Martin Compston (last seen in "Mary Queen of Scots"), Iain De Caestecker, Shirley Henderson (last seen in "Okja"), Joy McAvoy, Jordan Young, Pollyanna McIntosh, Bobby Rainsbury, Zack Niizato, Therese Bradley, Robin Laing (last seen in "Outlaw King"), Franziska Altmeyer, Ron Donachie (last seen in "Made of Honor"), Tracy-Ann Oberman, Mitchell Mullen, Jake Wilson, Luke MacDonald, Natasha O'Keeffe, Chidi Chickwe, Sanjeev Kohli (last seen in "Stan & Ollie'), Neil D'Souza, Trudie Styler (last seen in "The Next Three Days'), Megan Finn.

RATING: 4 out of 10 head butts

Salem's Lot (1979)

Year 13, Day 274 - 10/1/21 - Movie #3,945

BEFORE: I'm right where I wanted to be, I stretched out my September films so there wouldn't be two weeks of downtime right before the horror chain started, and I think it was the right move.  I planned carefully to reach something with Fred Willard, because he's my link to "Salem's Lot", which ran as a miniseries on TV way back in 1979.  I was 11 years old then, and I didn't care for horror movies, not one bit.  They gave me nightmares - some still do - and as a very fragile child I didn't need anything keeping me awake at night.  A few years later I went to see "Poltergeist" in the movie theater, when I was 15 or so, and I didn't sleep well for a week - perhaps this is because I hadn't built up a resistance to horror films, so diving right in to a scary one without easing into it, like you would with a cold swimming pool, was too much of a shock to the system.  

But screw it, it's October now, the calendar page flips over and I'm forcing myself to convert over to a horror-based economy for the next 22 - or maybe 23 - films.  I'm still one over for the year, so I either have to cut the last horror film from my chain (it's a case where the chain will neatly close up around the gap) or else cut a different film from the November line-up.  We'll see, I'm torn on this issue, I may have to block out NEXT year's horror chain to see if that film might play a key linking role, in which case, I should probably save it for 2022.  Either way, I'm determined to finish 2021 with another solid unbroken chain from New Year's Day to Christmas.  

At this point, there are VERY few Stephen King-based movies left unwatched, I'm going to get to one more this October, and then that will, I think, just leave "Graveyard Shift", "Children of the Corn" and the remakes of "Carrie" and "Pet Sematary".  Last year I crossed off "It Chapter Two", "Doctor Sleep" and "The Dark Tower", and the year before that, it was "1922" and "Gerald's Game".  It's been a process.  But I really should get to "Salem's Lot" now, because a remake is due in 2022, according to the IMDB.  But wait, I hear you say, this was a 2-night miniseries in 1979, and I thought you said you avoid TV movies and mini-series from your countdown.  Right, you caught me - I figured I couldn't sneak this one by you.  Mini-series are exempt from the Movie Year, unless I decide to apply for an exemption, and Stephen King warrants an exemption, I believe.  Hey, I made allowances for the original mini-series version of "It" way back in 2010, so I think I can also kind of grandfather "Salem's Lot" in.  Anyway, I'm only counting this as one movie, not two, so it's extra work on my part.  I put in a lot of effort to figure out how to get here - and to somewhere else FROM here, so now there's nothing to it but to do it.  

Wait, I almost forgot my format stats for September, and my links for October:

SEPTEMBER - 

9 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Animal Kingdom, Equals, Bloodshot, Brightburn, Puzzle, Nanny McPhee, Nanny McPhee Returns, Time Freak, Robert Klein Still Can't Stop His Leg

3 Movies watched on cable (not saved): Genius, Yesterday, Cats

3 watched on Netflix: Quigley Down Under, The Prom, The Last Blockbuster

1 watched on iTunes: The Space Between Us
1 watched on Amazon Prime: An Hour Behind
1 watched on Hulu: Trolls World Tour

1 watched on HBO Max: The Suicide Squad
1 watched on a random site: My Future Boyfriend
20 TOTAL

And my October links will be: David Soul, Kate Dickie, Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlie Heaton, Mia Goth, Jason Isaacs, Frank Welker, Sarah Michelle Gellar & Freddie Prinze Jr., Muse Watson, Robert Raiford, Amy Irving, Drew Barrymore, David Arquette, Hilary Swank, Emma Roberts, Eiza Gonzalez and maybe Brian Tyree Henry.  There, that should do it, but I've probably also said too much. If you're playing along at home with the IMDB you probably just figured out my whole Shock-Tober chain. 

THE PLOT: A novelist and a young horror fan attempt to save a small New England town which has been invaded by vampires. 

AFTER: I'm kicking things off with vampires, but as I said, I'm easing into the whole horror thing.  I started watching this on "Throwback Thursday", and today's movie is from a simpler time, one that not only evokes 1979 but some of the very early vamp films, like "Nosferatu".  This was back when we liked our vampires to look all disgusting and full of teeth, not like Brad Pitt wearing a couple fake fangs.  Back when problems could be solved with a good ol' stake to the heart, back when if your dead best friend came and knocked on your window on a foggy night, it was best not to let him in - especially if your bedroom was on the third floor.

This is also VERY early Stephen King, I know "Carrie" was the first of his books to be turned into a movie, but this was the second, three years later.  And it's based on a short story, no less, called "Jerusalem's Lot" - so they shortened the title for the TV movie, but it turns out the town of Salem, MA is also a shortened version of "Jerusalem", I just never made the connection before.  They re-made "Salem's Lot" as another mini-series in 2004 - IFC promoted it as "The One With Rob Lowe", they ran it concurrently with this one back in, well, from the commercials I'm going to guess it was October 2016.  So this has been sitting on my list for maybe FIVE Octobers, that's how hard it was to link to it.  That same short story also got turned into "Chapelwaite", a cable series that's running now on Epix, though they moved the story to the 1850's.  

As with most Stephen King stories, this one's set in Maine, and like several other notable ones, the lead character is a writer.  I sort of cracked the code on King last year with "It: Chapter Two", after learning that Louisa May Alcott based one of the characters in "Little Women" on herself, I realized that King's basically done the same, with so many stories with authors as the central character.  Bill Denbrough in "It" was the obvious stand-in for Stephen, but writers also take center stage in "Misery", "The Dark Half", "Secret Window" and quite notably "The Shining".  There are others, but those are the ones I've seen - one theory online is that these author characters are the ones who end up changing or shaping reality by battling demons (literal and figurative) but I think it's much more simple than that.  "Write what you know," they often say, and King knows a lot about being an author.  (He also got hit by a van back in 1999, and used that incident as a plot point in the last novel from the "Dark Tower" series.)

But as you might imagine, a short story doesn't really seem like it needs to be turned in to a two-night TV miniseries, with a total running time of 3 hours and 20 minutes.  SHORT story, that means it's SHORT, so how did they come up with enough material to fill a 2-episode series?  The quick answer is, they didn't - this films drags like...well, a big thing that drags along very slowly.  Some characters have to say things two or three times, just to fill up some space.  This should have been over in an hour - man comes to town, gets a room at the boarding house, contacts his old high-school teacher, starts dating a woman he saw reading one of his books, figure out there are vampires in town and people are dying, track them back to the most suspicious house in town, grab a few stakes and have at it.  It should have been that simple and short, but it just wasn't.  

Even though the look hearkens back to Nosferatu, and there's a very Renfield-like character who's working for "the Master", the modern sensibility here comes from stretching out that story over two two-hour blocks, no doubt on consecutive nights, thus maximizing the ad revenue and cashing in on that money, honey.  Why should we wrap this up in one hour when we've got enough sponsors to run ads for four?  

Oddly, Part 1 begins with the ending, two characters chasing down vampires in Guatemala, of all places.  (This made me think of "Bat-Manuel" from "The Tick")  It's an obvious use of the "splash-page" effect, then snapping back to depict the story that would get us there, but it also had the negative result of removing a great deal of suspense from the story.  We know from the start that those two characters are going to survive whatever comes their way in Salem's Lot, because they end up in Central America together after.  For work, not a romantic vacation, it's not that kind of film.  

This film is so old that it predates all the really psycho-scary films, like "Nightmare on Elm Street", also all the gory slasher-type films like "Friday the 13th" or "Texas Chainsaw Massacre", it's more like the old Dracula films where you barely even saw blood.  There are only like two jump-scares in the whole three-hour miniseries, how did everybody stay awake when this aired in 1979?  I'm guessing network standards were very strict at the time, like you couldn't even show a vampire biting somebody in the neck?  This film always seems to cut away just before that happens, or else it happens JUST off-screen.  Lame.  

It also takes WAY too long for Mears & Co. to figure out what's going wrong in town.  Mears wants to write a book about the old Marsten house, where it's rumored that several people have disappeared over the years, and Mears claims to have seen a ghostly figure inside the house once.  Umm, hello, people in town keep dying from "pernicious anemia", will you people please put two and two together here?  And writing a book about the house really isn't going to solve the problem in a timely manner.

I approve re-making this into a feature film, preferably only 105 to 110 minutes in length, because the story development needs to happen a lot quicker than in this 1979 version.  Come on, pick up the pace, teens today don't have very long attention spans?  But you know that if Netflix or Amazon had their way, they'd license this story and turn it into a 12-part miniseries instead, then end it on a cliffhanger and announce that Season 2 is in development...

Also starring David Soul (last seen in "Starsky & Hutch"), James Mason (last seen in "The Boys from Brazil"), Lance Kerwin (last seen in "Outbreak"), Bonnie Bedelia (last seen in "The Big Fix"), Lew Ayres (last seen in "Holiday"), Ed Flanders (last seen in "The Pursuit of D.B. Cooper"), Julie Cobb, Elisha Cook Jr. (last seen in "Sergeant York"), George Dzundza (last heard in "Superman: Brainiac Attacks"), Clarissa Kaye-Mason, Geoffrey Lewis (last seen in "The New Guy"), Barney McFadden, Kenneth McMillan (last seen in "Eyewitness"), Marie Windsor (last seen in "Song of the Thin Man"), Barbara Babcock (last seen in "Far and Away"), Bonnie Bartlett (last seen in "Frances"), Joshua Bryant, James Gallery, Robert Lussier, Brad Savage, Ronnie Scribner, Ned Wilson (last seen in "Being There"), Reggie Nalder, Ernest Phillips.

RATING: 4 out of 10 spooky deer heads

Robert Klein Still Can't Stop His Leg

Year 13, Day 272 - 9/29/21 - Movie #3,944

BEFORE: Full disclosure, I started watching this late one night in April, just as something to have on in the background while I scanned the DVR's guide for new available movies on the premium channels.  I assumed this was just another Robert Klein comedy special, God knows there have been many, many of those over the years - I think he might have made more HBO stand-up specials than even George Carlin, which is quite an accomplishment.  If you live long enough and you're good at what you do, you just end up breaking records, it's as simple as that.  

But really, it's a 2016 documentary about Klein's whole career, which is extensive, and sure, there are clips from his stand-up specials here, but it's a look at where he is now (umm, four years ago), living in upstate New York and still working on new material, and at one point he goes to visit Fred Willard, his improv comedy partner years ago, when they came up through the ranks together at Second City.

So I've already sort of been through this one, and added a bunch of people to the IMDB credits, which is what I do, and any chance to get Fred Willard and Chris Messina another appearance in 2021, I'm going to take.  But I'm going to re-watch this one again today, the whole thing through, because I could really use a laugh.  I'm stressed out at work, struggling to get more shifts at the new part-time gig, and my parents are moving in to assisted living today.  My sister's up in Massachusetts coordinating the move, and I begged out of the process because I've got too much going on here in NYC.  It's definitely the right time for my parents to make this move, which is before they HAVE to, and my mother needs better access to medical care and physical therapy, and my father needs to be less stressed out about making sure she takes her medications right, but it's hard to be happy about something like this, even if it's better for them in the long run.  The future's uncertain, maybe they'll just ride out the winter without worrying about shoveling snow, maybe one or both of them will return to the house someday, it's tough to say.  At some point I'll need to drive up there and get whatever I have stored in that house out of there, and at some other point my sister and I will need to make a decision about what to do with that house, but these are questions for another day.  

THE PLOT: Combining decades of archival material, interviews with some of comedy's biggest stars, and new footage, this is a hilarious and poignant look at the life and career of Robert Klein.

AFTER: The name of this film comes from a routine that Robert Klein's done, over (and over) the years, performing as a blues harmonica player who can't seem to stop his leg from moving to the music, and that's always what's he's singing about, too, the fact that he can't stop his leg.  It's funny maybe the first few times, but now it's the technical definition of a bit that's just gone on way too long.  I kind of wish they'd left off the last two words of the title, because "Robert Klein Still Can't Stop" is a better title, it's much more positive and a great summation of his attitude right now.  So many of the people interviewed here, or seen in archive footage, have passed away that it almost depicts a darker side to comedy.  We laugh, and try to make others laugh, because life is too short and ultimately has no meaning other than what we project on to it, so we might as well enjoy the ride.  Seriously, since this movie was released in 2016, we've lost interview subjects Don Rickles, Fred Willard, George Segal, and then there are prominent mentions of Rodney Dangerfield, George Carlin, Jonathan Winters, Richard Pryor, Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin and Ed McMahon, all of whom have aged out of this program called life since the turn of the millennium.  Then when you factor in the comics who died before that, like Milton Berle, Henny Youngman, Steve Allen and the Three Stooges, it starts to feel like there are more dead comedians than living ones.  And I re-watched this to try to cheer myself up.

Both Pryor and Carlin get name-checked here in a segment that's lifted directly from an episode of "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee" (I should know, I binge-watched that whole series during the lockdown last year) and then that same format continues in other parts of the documentary that were shot live, as Robert Klein goes grocery shopping, gets a haircut and attends a comedy-writing class at SUNY-Binghamton to critique the stand-up performances of college students. Some of those up-and-comers are fine, but he hated the one who used music, partially because mixing comedy and music is Klein's thing, and of course he's much better at it than some 20 year old kid.  

But is he, though?  Klein has a background in musical theater, even got a Tony nomination in 1979 for Best Actor in a Musical for "They're Playing Our Song" (written by Neil Simon, and with music by Marvin Hamlisch). Plus he was married to an opera singer for a time.  But every HBO special he ever made included a song, and they're not all gems - like his odes to colonoscopies and medical marijuana.  Then there's that "I Can't Stop My Leg" song, which based on the montage has appeared in every single special in one form or another, so come on, really, how "special" can that be, then?  

Beyond the TV specials, he's been in movies ranging from "The Owl and the Pussycat" to "Mixed Nuts" to "Reign Over Me", and even carved out a spot for himself in the romantic comedy genre, in films like "Two Weeks Notice" and "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days".  He even played the mayor of NYC in TWO "Sharknado" films, but the movie that I remember him best from is "Next Stop Wonderland", which I saw at the Sundance Film Festival way back in 1998, when he played a corrupt Boston businessman who wanted to take possession of the land where the New England Aquarium was.  

But according to this film, the lasting influence of Robert Klein comes mainly from his comedy albums, which were owned and listened to, over and over, by the comedians of today when they were younger.  Klein was among the first comedians to perform really smart topical humor, like social commentary - Carlin got to the same sort of material later on in life, after he went through his hippie goofball phase.  But Klein got there first, and then sort of headed the other direction, when Klein got older that's when the goofy songs about pot and sexual abstinence came along. But as for those early albums, they influenced Jay Leno, Bill Maher, Billy Crystal, Jon Stewart, Richard Lewis and many others.  

After tooling around the Hudson Valley for a while, doing errands, we get to see Klein working with Don Rickles, filming a promo for a series of celebrity roasts, now (then) available on DVD.  And then there's a long story about going sailing on a very stormy day with Rodney Dangerfield - only there's no real payoff for the bit.  Klein worked with Dangerfield for about 11 years, on and off, so I have no doubt he's got many great stories about the man, but he could probably do much better than "that time Rodney almost drowned".  Hell, Chevy Chase told a better story about Rodney's off-screen habits and vices during an episode of "Norm MacDonald Has a Show" (the latest Netflix show I binge-watched, right after Norm passed away).  

I'm glad Robert Klein is still semi-active, at a time when most comedians his age have packed it in.  But it's possible that he used up all his good material (and best songs) already - he hasn't had a new comedy special since 2010, and a documentary that uses so many clips from the older specials isn't really a substitute for a new stand-up special.  Still, we all need laughs in this crazy world, probably now more than ever, and we need to celebrate those comedians that are still with us, because God knows we've lost too many already.  

Also starring Robert Klein (last seen in "Definitely, Maybe"), Lucie Arnaz (last seen in "The Jazz Singer"), Mike Binder (last seen in "The Private Lives of Pippa Lee"), Eric Bogosian (last seen in "Uncut Gems"), James Burrows, Harry Cohen, Rhoda Cohen, Billy Crystal (last seen in "Everything Is Copy"), Budd Friedman, Melanie Roy Friedman, Michael Fuchs, Myrna Jacobson, Allie Klein, Jay Leno (last seen in "Between Two Ferns: The Movie", Sheila Levine, Richard Lewis (last seen in "She's Funny That Way"), Bill Maher (last seen in "The Accidental President"), Bob Mankoff, Larry Miller (last seen in "Isn't It Romantic"), Rick Overton (last seen in "A Futile and Stupid Gesture"), Don Rickles (last heard in "Toy Story 4"), Ray Romano (last seen in "Bad Education"), Jerry Seinfeld (also last seen in "Between Two Ferns: The Movie"), Bob Stein, David Steinberg (last seen in "Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic"), Jon Stewart (last seen in "Too Big To Fail")

with archive footage of Roger Ailes, Steve Allen (last seen in "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan"), John Belushi (last seen in "The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart"), Tom Bergeron (last seen in "Quiet Riot: Well Now You're Here, There's No Way Back"), Milton Berle, Yogi Berra, Lenny Bruce (last seen in "The Last Laugh" (2016)), Curly Howard (ditto), George Carlin (last seen in "Bill & Ted Face the Music"), Johnny Carson (last seen in "Tina"), David Letterman (ditto), Barbra Streisand (ditto), Gary Collins, Rodney Dangerfield (last seen in "The Onion Movie"), Larry Fine (last seen in "Zeroville"), Moe Howard (ditto), Chris Messina (ditto), Henry Fonda (last seen in "Jane Fonda in Five Acts"), Adam Goldberg (last seen in "Once Upon a Time in Venice"), Merv Griffin (last seen in "MLK/FBI"), Charlton Heston (last seen in "They'll Love Me When I'm Dead"), Craig Kilborn, Thomas Lennon (last seen in "The 15:17 to Paris"), Mickey Mantle, Matthew McConaughey (last seen in "The Dark Tower"), Ed McMahon (last seen in "Echo in the Canyon"), Jack Paar, Richard Pryor (last seen in "Hitsville: The Making of Motown"), Ed Sullivan, (ditto), Phil Rizzuto, Diane Sawyer (last seen in "All In: The Fight for Democracy"), George Segal (last seen in Stick"), Gene Shalit, Jonathan Winters (last seen in "Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind"), Henny Youngman. 

RATING: 6 out of 10 appearances on "Hollywood Squares"

My Future Boyfriend

Year 13, Day 271 - 9/28/21 - Movie #3,943

BEFORE: The Emmy Awards aired a little over a week ago, and I couldn't help but notice that there's a distinct category for TV movies, which used to be something of an oxymoron - once upon a time, something had to be either TV or a movie, it couldn't be both.  But now the category is called "Limited series or movie", and in that instance "movie" really means "movie made for TV" or "movie that couldn't get released in theaters", because that line is getting really blurry these days, thanks to Netflix and other streaming services.  Years ago we also knew the difference, a "made for TV" movie was just never going to be as good as a movie made for theaters. Even if you made a movie and it did zero box office in theaters, better to let it die that way than to be bought by a (ugh) network and air for free, at least that way the movie could die a quite, dignified way.  

Then something happened after the cable explosion, once networks like Lifetime, Hallmark, and AMC started producing original content (because, you know, it turns out there are 24 hours in a day, and 7 days in a week), the made-for-TV movie became slightly more respectable.  But only slightly.  Tonight's film was made for ABC Family, which I think is now called Freeform or something.  And it's streaming for free on ABC.com and also Freeform's site - so there's just no way this can be any good, because it's being given away like a cheap floozy of a movie.  You get what you pay for these days, and this one's just being handed out like a take-out menu on the street, not a good sign at all.  

BUT, it is part of my workable solution to the question, "How the hell can I get from "The Suicide Squad" to the start of my October chain in ten steps or under?" which at one point seemed very impossible, only it wasn't.  It only took a few pages of charts with arrows between movies that could lead me to Fred Willard, who's serving this year as my (recently departed) harbinger of Halloween - if Fred's here, then spooky movies are RIGHT around the corner.   Barry Watson carries over from "An Hour Behind". 

THE PLOT: An archaeologist from 1,000 years in the future uncovers a romance novel written in our time. Curious, he journeys back to find out about this thing called "love" from the novel's author. 

AFTER: If you don't recall Sara Rue, she was the "it" girl of network sitcoms in the early 2000's on a show called "Less Than Perfect", and this came after a few small roles in movies like "Pearl Harbor" and "The Ring".  She's sort of been bouncing around the network dial for years, with short runs on shows like "Mom", "Bones" and "The Rookie", and most recently on a CBS show called "B Positive".  It must have been tough for her when Zooey Deschanel came along with "New Girl" and was deemed way more a-dorkable.  

If you don't recall Barry Watson, he was on a show called "7th Heaven" for a full decade, and during that time had roles in movie comedies like "Sorority Boys" and "Teaching Mrs. Tingle".  After aging out of the family drama racket, he did a similar bounce around the networks in shows like "Samantha Who?", "Gossip Girl" and "Hart of Dixie", but based on what I've seen this week, he also found a home in these made-for-TV romantic comedy movies - hey, I get it, if you don't get three screen credits in as many years, I think they take away your SAG card or something. 

Here Barry plays P-A-X-497/341, a guy from the 32nd century, who discovered an old romance novel in a metal case, inside an old sunken ship, which was accessible after the oceans dried up.  Yes, climate change is real, this tracks, we get it. Good to know that humanity is still alive in 3127, even though there's no oceans - I guess the ice caps melted, but the Earth also got so hot that the water all boiled away?  I'm not sure how they're surviving, it must be like 200 degrees outside on a good day.  Pax (for short) functions here as the classic "fish out of water", who doesn't understand what society was like in 2011, so he came back to see for himself.  The concept he doesn't really understand, of course, is "Love".  Umm, and sex - neither one apparently exists in the future.  Reproduction takes place in a lab, of course, and marriage is still a thing, but only for companionship, and it's mandated by the government.  I'm not sure if this means the conservatives came out on top in the future, or the liberals - it's tough to say.  

(It's weird, to see a future where "love" was labelled a toxic, subversive concept, so nobody even talks about it, but is that even realistic?  They still speak and read English, so there's no great literature from the 1700's or 1800's that made it to 3127?  No Jane Austen, no Bronte novels, no Jackie Collins?  Something doesn't really track there.  The future people have overcome and outlawed violence and hatred, but how can you eliminate one thing and not be at least aware of its opposite?  If society eliminated war, they'd still understand peace, right?  They'd be soaking in it.)

Why is there a need to "dumb down" future people?  We'd like to think that society as a whole gets smarter as time goes on, not dumber, right?  But then sometimes when we see a story set in the future, people seem very clueless - like in "Equals", which I watched last month, people in the future had rid themselves of emotions, and then when they inevitably bubbled to the surface, people didn't know what to do with them, and people displaying emotions got sent to asylums for reprogramming or worse.  Silly future people!  Plus the government is involved with falsifying all the "historical records" and we all know that can't happen, the U.S. government always, always tells us the truth about everything, right? RIGHT? 

What we get then are these cinematic time-travelers who spend most of their time trying to figure out every little element of human society.  What is this strange music called "the blues"?  What is this strange food called "jambalaya"?  What is this thing called "sex"?  Hang on tight, Paxie, we're about to rock your world.  A human from 1,000 years in the future is like an alien, this is the "Mork from Ork" syndrome, where he needs everything explained to him so that we the audience can see our own world in a different light.  

Elizabeth, the author of that romance novel that Pax found, works at a newspaper called "Strange Times", which is a spin on the old Weekly World News publication that used to feature totally real stories about Bigfoot, Batboy and Hillary Clinton dating Hitler.  It was "fake news" before fake news was cool - the difference was that everybody KNEW it was fake, and read it anyway, just for fun.  If you believed those stories about alien invasions, Elvis Presley sightings and demonic faces in the World Trade Center, then you were easily pegged as somebody to watch out for - but later QAnon picked up that ball and ran with it, and look where we are now.  The Weekly World News defiantly refused to fact-check anything, and they sprinkled in a few real but also ridiculous stories from the A.P. so the entire publication would appear legitimate. I haven't read their content in years, because who needs the fictional columnist Ed Anger when we've got Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones fulfilling the exact same function in the real world?

They just couldn't find a way to end this one without tipping their hat to the old time-travel paradox, could they?  Pax solves the problem of how to be with Elizabeth not by returning to 2011, but by making another jump, "Quantum Leap"-style, to 2010 and making sure that she never gets together with Richard in the first place.  Umm, yeah, that may solve the problem but it creates a number of other ones - with everything he knows about Elizabeth, he's got an unfair advantage here, she of course doesn't remember him at all because at this earlier point, she hasn't met him yet.  And now Pax will have to explain the whole "man from the future" thing all over again, which is a lot of work, why go through all that twice if you don't have to?  

This also reminds me of "Time Freak", when Stillman kept re-doing relationship moments until he got the outcome he wanted - this brings up issues of free will and consent, like if you remove all the timelines that you don't like, and leave only the ones where the girl falls in love with you, then she's not really with you by choice, is she?  I'm not saying this is temporal rape, but it's stacking the deck in one's favor, and that's not cool.  It's a slippery slope once you start manipulating the timeline just to get hooked up with a non-time traveler.  Seriously, aren't there more important things that Pax should be doing to change the timeline?  How about that whole "the oceans dried up in the 25th century" thing.  Maybe warn somebody about the comet that's going to hit in 2875, and kill millions?  Just a thought, maybe with enough advance notice, we could build a planetary shield or a space laser to destroy the comet, or get a crew to land on the thing a blow it up?  But no, you go ahead and figure out what love is, because that's way more important.  

Yesterday, after tweeting about "An Hour Behind", my BFF responded that it sounded like one of those fake TV movies mentioned on "30 Rock" as a cutaway, and of course he nailed it.  This one's cut from the same cloth, though I assure you this film is completely real and totally terrible.  Once again, I'm watching this so that you don't have to.  You're welcome.  If you do watch this, I can guarantee you'll be counting down the minutes to the next commercial break.

Also starring Sara Rue (last seen in "Can't Hardly Wait"), Fred Willard (last seen in "Mascots"), Jordan Wall, Justin Smith (last seen in "The Highwaymen"), Valerie Harper, Adam Boyer (last seen in "Just Mercy"), Enisha Brewster, Mike Pniewski (last seen in "Richard Jewell"), Cara Mantella (last seen in "I, Tonya"), A. Ali Flores (last seen in "The Beach Bum"), Jody Thompson (last seen in "Instant Family"), Ritchie Montgomery (last seen in "Cleaner"), Kevin Stillwell, TJ Hassan, Jay Gates, Larry Schmidt, Rivka Levin, Steve Warren and the voice of Ryan Felton.

RATING: 3 out of 10 overpriced Hurricanes on Bourbon St. 

An Hour Behind

Year 13, Day 269 - 9/26/21 - Movie #3,942

BEFORE: Well, this is a bit strange - within the last week, while I've been busy trying to get a short film qualified for an Oscar, while I've been trying to unlock the mysteries of Google calendar at my new part-time gig, while I've been running around town trying to get my hearing aid fixed and deal with a city-wide Mountain Dew shortage, the hit count of my blog has increased significantly.  I mean, like by a factor of 20, and I'm not sure why.  Sometimes my BFF will mention my blog or my unique process of organizing movies on his podcast, and I'll see a bump - but nothing like this.  And in one case I got 800 hits before I even Tweeted out a link - so something's up.  I can't just be successful, I can't just sit back and enjoy it, this means I've been taken over by Slovenian hackers or something who have set up a ghost site with my content and are just using a link to the site for convenience's sake.  Or maybe a group of skater teens out in Colorado are sharing links and saying, "Check this out, I can't believe what a freak this guy is, he's got nothing better to do than watch movies in a row starring the same actor, what a LOSER."  Or Asa Butterfield's legal team is all reviewing my content to see if they can legally shut me down... I can't just enjoy this, something's wrong, and I was perfectly content putting out reviews to entertain tens of people per day, but my brain won't rest until I discover the reason for this bump.  We're very close to horror films now, and my content choices are bound to become more embarrassing over the next few weeks, this is my pledge to you, new readers.  

Aubrey Reynolds carries over from "Time Freak".  Let's hope her character at least gets a name in this film, after all, she is our nation's fourth most popular person named Aubrey.  (And I'm not even counting Drake, born Aubrey Graham...)

THE PLOT: The time change and a case of mistaken identity result in a wonderful blind date for Trish and Parker, but is it enough to keep them together? 

AFTER: Well, the good news is that this is the kind of film that should break my sudden popularity streak, so let's nip this in the bud, shall we?  This film doesn't even have a Wikipedia page, so does it even exist then?  Technically I watched this through AmazonPrime, but not in the main section, it's running in the IMDB.TV part, and on Tubi, which means it's FREE as long as you're willing to watch a few ads in-between.  But it's FREE, so that should tell you something right there about the quality of this film, anything good these days you have to pay for, one way or another, either through a rental or some monthly subscription.  

I do allow TV movies into my chain in cases of emergency, and preserving the chain is always some form of emergency.  I can't tell, though, if this was made for the Lifetime channel, or maybe Hallmark, those are two platforms that feature exactly this sort of cheesy romance movie, or so I've heard.  Maybe this was made to pitch to those channels, and the pitches were unsuccessful - either way, I'm intrigued, I'd love to know more, only there's not much information out there about "An Hour Behind", I wonder why?  (It's terrible, that's why.).  Still, I have to break it down, so please bear with me, new readers from Slovenia - just be aware that if you're in Slovenia, you're reading pirated content, and you should be ashamed of yourself.  

Anyway, here's what my programming has in common with Hallmark's and Lifetime's - in addition to regular programming, there are THREE very important times of the year for specialty films: February/Valentine's Day, October/Halloween and December/Christmas.  Everything else is "common time", plus I go a step further and usually designate documentary month and Black History month, though they've tended to be floating and not affixed to any particular calendar page. By all rights, this film belongs in February, however, clearly I've screwed up.  I mistakenly thought for some reason, perhaps the title, that this was a movie about time-travel - and it's just not.  The main plot point is Daylight Savings Time, which sets it in the spring.  And possibly makes it relevant for fall, too, but we won't set the clocks back until November, which means I'm off-base, no matter how you slice it.  

But I've railed in this space before with my thoughts on Daylight Savings - I'm against it.  It's silly, stupid, costly, and it doesn't save energy and it doesn't protect kids walking home from school and it just doesn't do any of the things it claims to do except cost every city in America money and waste everybody's time changing their clocks.  And it disrupts cable service, somehow it makes movies playing at 2 am look either an hour longer or shorter in the on-screen guide.  We've had this useless process for decades, and it's accomplished nothing but given American mothers an excuse to call their adult kids and remind them to adjust their clocks forward or back twice a year.  Jesus, is there NOTHING else for us to talk about?  Look, I know there are a lot of problems in the world right now, this is really minor stuff compared to a pandemic and wars and climate change and immigration reform and civil rights and voting rights and reproductive rights and ending sexual harassment and curing cancer and what dress that celebrity wore to the Met Gala, all of that stuff is important too, but if we can get all that other stuff straightened out, can we then PLEASE consider ending the stupid custom of Daylight Savings Time?  

Time is arbitrary, we divided up the world into 24 time zones just to make things easier for ourselves, but the truth is that all time is local, and there are really thousands of time zones, "noon" is whatever moment the sun is directly above your particular spot on the planet, so really, your 12 pm is different from 12 pm just a few hundred miles to the east or west, and everything from sundials to watches to cell phone clocks have been invented to make things EASIER, not more difficult, and Daylight Savings is the opposite, it just causes more problems than it solves (remember, it solves NONE) and it's inconvenient, makes you late for work, and STEALS an hour from your spring that you don't get back, not ever.  I know, you THINK you get that hour back in the fall, but that's not the same, who wants an extra hour in November, that's a piss-poor replacement for a lovely spring hour.  If you look back in my old posts and tweets, I've said I would support any political candidate willing to work toward eliminating this costly process of fooling ourselves for eight months every year - thank God Trump didn't take a stand against DST, I would have been really conflicted then.  But think of it this way, we spend more time with the WRONG time on our clocks each year than we do with the RIGHT time on them - WTF?  All for some imagined benefit that never really comes.  It's time to end this - screw the farmers, screw the parents, if you want to get up an hour earlier, then you just go ahead and do that in your own house, leave me out of it and let me sleep.  

But that's the jumping-off point for this really bland romance film - cupcake baker Trish agrees to go on a blind date arranged by her sister, which is a breakfast date that happens to fall on the spring day when we change the clocks.  Clearly this film was written by committee, because they couldn't go "all in" on making Trish a screw-up, she also has to be seen as a Strong Powerful Woman who is also a Competent Business-Owner, therefore she can't just "forget" to adjust her clocks forward.  That would be a fault in her character, so they had to load the deck by having a glass of water spill onto both her watch AND her alarm clock (what are the odds?) so that she'll oversleep and miss the breakfast date.  Seriously?  Did the director suddenly realize that he can't depict somebody "forgetting" to do something, so he had to cover his bets and throw this electrical short in as a plot point?  This is really rookie, student-film type stuff - when in doubt, just double down.  Suddenly that great idea for a plot is weakened by last-minute overthinking.  

Trish shows up almost an hour late for the date, and Adam has already bailed - but Parker, unknowingly also wearing a green shirt, which was how she was going to be able to recognize Adam, is sitting at his usual table, when Trish sits down and goes right into the "blind date" conversation.  Adam's not sure what to do, at first he just takes it at face value, that a beautiful woman has joined him for breakfast and just gone right into it.  Even when she starts calling him "Adam", he doesn't take the time to correct her, because why would he?  Plus, he can't seem to get a word in edgewise, and then before long, he's too far in to make the correction.  You can see this one coming down Fifth Avenue, as they say.  These crazy kids are going to hit it off, over their shared love of breakfast foods, and then they'll have a funny story to tell their grandchildren one day.  

It's not that simple, there's 90 minutes of network time to fill, after all - when Adam finally comes clean and admits that he's Parker, and a paramedic instead of a lawyer, then despite the wonderful day they spent together, riding a pedal-craft on the lake and talking about cupcakes, she can't get over the fact that he deceived her, he took too long to reveal that he wasn't her intended date.  This, despite the fact that SHE was late, SHE sat down with him, SHE made an assumption, and SHE never gave him the chance to say three words in a row.  Nope, it's all on him, and let's set back the clock about chatty, irrational women a few decades while we're at it.  This is a great guy, he's a life-saving public servant, he's really into the flavor combination of chocolate and peanut butter, but Trish can't help but wonder if Adam would be the better fit.  Yeah, the bird in the hand can just go screw himself, right?  Something better's always just around the corner or out of reach...

Parker keeps trying to get her attention, but Trish's clueless sister keeps saying that Adam's a "great guy" - only he's not, he's a self-obsessed lawyer who doesn't know a cupcake from a brownie.  And he's always got to run because there's a "new development in the case", which is probably B.S., and if this were anything but a Halltime or Lifemark movie then we'd see him doing coke in the bathroom every five minutes to really drive the point home.  Why the hell does it take Trish so long to see this?  Oh, right, 90 minute movie and all that.  Parker does the right thing, he bides his time in the Friend Zone until he can make some kind of grand gesture or there's a better opportunity to plead his case.  There are more ups and downs in their rocky road to a relationship, but they're barely worth spoiling.  

You can kind of tell an "A"-movie from a "B"-movie on production values alone sometimes - and believability, or the suspension of disbelief, is a big part of that.  When I watch a top TV drama, like "Law & Order: SVU", it all feels real, like I'm not aware that every interior shot was filmed on a set, the squadroom is a real place, because the production spent a lot of money to make it feel that way.  Maybe Dick Wolf Productions bought a building somewhere in NYC and there's a whole fake squadroom somewhere, I don't know.  But then if I watch a soap opera, I'm keenly aware that every living room, every coffee shop, every boardroom is just a set.  Is this the difference between 1-camera and 3-camera TV?  I don't know.  But that differential applies to "An Hour Behind" for sure.  The bakery is CLEARLY a set, the cafe is CLEARLY a set, the law office, forget about it, OF COURSE that's a set.  Which makes it all feel like some overblown student film, and very unbelievable in the end.  

And obvious, obvious, obvious, there's no subtlety here, we KNOW that Trish is going to be able to open up her second cupcake shop, we KNOW that the real Adam will be revealed as a giant douchebag eventually, and we KNOW these crazy kids Trish and Parker are meant to be together.  It doesn't even matter how they got together, whether it's because of DST or a shorted-out alarm clock, life's all about taking the ingredients that you're given and making something beautiful and delicious out of it, and God, just typing that makes me want to throw up.  Maybe this romance doesn't even belong in February, it's just not good or subtle enough, and it's better to burn it off here, because at least this way it serves a purpose, it gets me one tiny step closer to starting the Shock-ToberFest chain.  

The film's not satisfied with just getting these two together, though, it's got to twist the knife at the end - Trish and Parker encounter each other again on the occasion of another time change - though it's a bit unclear whether this is the fall time change or the one the following spring (DETAILS! I need DETAILS!).  Trish screws up again and forgets (?) to change the clocks AGAIN, actually her cell phone dies this time because it got wet, leading her to be an hour early (?) for another breakfast meeting with her sister, and that puts her in position again to encounter Parker.  Wait, if she missed the time change in fall, then she wouldn't fall BACK, so she'd think it was 9 am when the rest of the world had set their clocks back to 8 am.  Umm, yeah, that tracks I think, but didn't she pass any public clocks on the way to the restaurant?  Like on a bank or something?  It's all very clunky, but I've said that a lot this week, about several movies. It doesn't seem like Trish and Parker have been on-again and off-again for a year, so I guess the last few scenes take place in fall?  The Salt Lake City weather sure seems very nice for November, though...

If you are interested in watching this film, and I'm honestly struggling to think of a reason why you would be, you could do it ON the day in November when we set the clocks back.  If you time it right you can then watch this film right before you change the clock, then, just maybe, you can console yourself with the imaginary feeling that you at least gained back an hour and didn't waste as much of your time as you COULD have. Just a suggestion.  

Also starring Emily Rose, Barry Watson (last seen in "Ocean's Eleven"), Alesandra Durham, Casey Elliott, Scott Christopher (last seen in "Vice" (2018)), Brooklyn Brough, Shona Kay, K. Danor Gerald, Michael Birkeland, Sarah Kent, Rick Macy, Chad Wright, Channon Voyce, Nanci Wudel. 

RATING: 3 out of 10 tiny peanut butter cookies with a dark chocolate drizzle.