BEFORE: Well, two things are filling up, my schedule and my DVR. The DVR for TV shows, not the one for movies, the movie one I'm actually making progress on. I'm behind on half of my TV shows, like "The Amazing Race" and "CSI: Vegas" and "Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives", and about two years behind on "Chopped", still. And I don't have any free nights to make progress on TV shows, because most of my co-workers at the theatre are unavailable this month, on vacation or working other jobs, so a lot of shifts have come my way. Which is great, I can't wait to collect more hours over the next few pay periods, and since I think the whole place will slow down around the holidays, I need to work the hours now, because I can't work them then. So, I'll say YES to any shift that comes my way, and my movie-watching schedule for November is drastically reduced anyway, just 15 films to watch in 24 days.
The plan is to drive up two weeks from today and visit my parents for Thanksgiving, but drive back on Saturday before the big traffic rush on Sunday, so I should have some time that last week of the month to really focus on TV shows, because I won't be watching movies then. I just have to cram in ENOUGH TV each week to keep the DVR from filling up, because then I will miss shows. And then I guess I'll sleep when I'm dead, so until then I'll just continue burning the candle at both ends and the middle.
Evan Rachel Wood carries over from "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story".
THE PLOT: A woman's life is turned upside down when her criminal parents invite an outsider to join them on a major heist they're planning.
AFTER: Wow, what a difference a day makes - just yesterday (OK, two days ago) I was watching "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story" and thinking I was watching a contender for Best Film of the Year. For me, obviously, all things regarding "best" and "good" are subjective, and one man's trash is another man's treasure, and all that. But now my next film wasn't to my tastes at all, and I can't even figure out where exactly it's coming from or what it's trying to say, and so it may be a contender for "Weirdest Film of the Year", and there have been some WEIRD films watched this year. "Boss Level" and "Cosmic Sin" were weird films, "Dune" was a weird film. But I mean the films that are just, like oddly weird - I don't want to say BAD, but they come at you from an odd angle, like "Romance & Cigarettes" or "House of Gucci". Not like "Willy's Wonderland", more like "Prisoners of the Ghostland", know what I mean? You just have to scratch your head and think, "Huh, this must have meant something to somebody at some time, but I'm just not picking up on what they're laying down here.
I've watched indie films, don't get me wrong - I've been to Sundance three times and mostly enjoyed myself, even though I watched some head-scratchers there. I haven't seen any other films by Miranda July, though, and now I don't think I'll be seeking any others out, because this was just so beyond odd that I couldn't even understand it. There's this family of con artists, father, mother and teen daughter, and the teen's really the brains of the outfit, she keeps coming up with these schemes to raise large sums of money, when her parents are happy just winning small prizes in local raffles and flipping them to other people for cash. The family lives in a converted office building or something, they don't sleep in decent beds but sort of crash in cubicles on the floor, and they're constantly avoiding the landlord so they don't have to pay their rent. And then every day at certain times pink suds seep through the walls from the soap factory next door, and they have to gather the suds in buckets and wipe down the walls. Good god, why, WHY to any and all of this?
Nobody really lives this way, do they? What purpose does all this serve, what can we as the audience learn from their situation? Nothing, as far as I can tell. The relationship between parents and daughter is strained because they're all incapable of expressing complex emotions like love, or they've made a conscious decision to NOT feel those things, because reasons? Are they too afraid how much it will hurt if the family breaks up? That's a terrible reason to not express love for your family members.
The family flies to New York, using tickets they won in a contest, just so they can run a scam at the airport where the daughter pretends to lose her luggage, but the parents have already walked out of the airport with her bags, and she then files a claim to collect the insurance policy she had on the luggage. Look, I've noticed that people at the airport used to give a shit and check the tickets of people claiming bags of the conveyor belt, but they stopped doing this at some point, and I haven't seen security at bag check in years. You can land at an airport and claim your bag AND someone else's, which is weird because security is so tight when you BOARD the plane, and then it's completely lax when you get your luggage. But you didn't hear it from me.
Anyway, the daughter, whose name is Old Dolio for some other reason that makes no sense. at all, then earns over $1,500 from the airline for them "losing" her luggage. (If an airline exec watches this film, then you'd better believe they'll have officers stationed at baggage claim in the future...). This money was supposed to pay the family's back rent, but somewhere on the flight back the parents meet a young woman who they enjoy speaking with, and they convince her to help them find a new scam, since she works for an optician that makes deliveries to elderly patients, and somehow this leads to them all stealing stuff from the apartments of those senior citizens. First, though, there's an awkward attempt at a threesome between the parents and the new girl, and this is another terrible idea, so the less said about that, the better.
The new girl, Melanie, notices the emotional rift between the parents and their daughter and sort of inserts herself into the middle of it, I couldn't really tell what was going on here, either, except that Old Dolio is in some kind of arrested state, she's not properly emotionally developed because of the way her parents raised her, so she's vulnerable to the first person who comes along to cater to those emotional needs, I guess? And then I can't tell if this was another manipulation, or some twisted form of love, or just another business transaction in the end. Old Dolio's parents vow to change their ways, and shower their daughter with all the birthday presents they never gave her, in an attempt to win her back, but knowing them, this is probably all just part of a bigger scam to get that airline money back.
Does anybody really live like this? Do people fly from Los Angeles to New York City to do a little dumpster diving and then fly back home? Are there people who look at a dying elderly person and try to accelerate the timetable on their inevitable demise just because they've got a lot of stuff they can steal and sell to Goodwill? Am I supposed to hate this family, or feel sorry for them, or see myself in them? I just can't figure it out. And even if Old Dolio finally gets engages in some emotional growth or learning and determines that she needs to get away from her toxic parents, find an adult relationship and grow the hell up, so freakin' what? What does it all mean in the end? Nothing?
Look, I had my life upended by the pandemic, as many people did. I was forced to change careers, and ultimately it was sort of a wake-up call that I couldn't keep living the life I had, and I had to start something new. Among other things, I became more keenly aware of the conversion of my time into salaried hours, and since I'm in my fifties, I'm worried about that, because there may be more days behind me now than ahead. I kind of maybe agree that we're all just slaves working for the almighty dollar, and there's no way off the hamster wheel that feels right, so we just keep going around it, hoping that the scenery will change one day. But even those depressing notions seem more positive than the vibe of this film, which really harshed my mellow, man. I mean, thanks for being a link in my chain and all, but I can't move away from this whole story quickly enough.
Also starring Richard Jenkins (last seen in "A.C.O.D."), Debra Winger (last seen in "Shadowlands"), Gina Rodriguez (last heard in "Scoob!"), Patricia Belcher (last seen in "Eye for an Eye"), Kim Estes, Da'Vine Joy Randolph (last seen in "The Lost City"), Rachel Redleaf (last seen in "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood"), Randy Ryan (last seen in "20th Century Women"), Mark Ivanir (last heard in "The Adventures of Tintin"), Diana-Maria Riva (last seen in "What Women Want"), Betsy Baker (last seen in "Oz the Great and Powerful"), Michelle Gillette, Susan Berger, Adam Bartley (last seen in "Vice" (2018)), Michael Twaine, Andrew Hawkes, David Ury (last seen in "Birds of Prey"), Matthew Downs (last seen in "Straight Outta Compton"), Samantha Cardona, Zachary Barton, Jeffrey Nicholas Brown, Ben Konigsberg (last seen in "Lady Bird").
RATING: 3 out of 10 small earthquakes (were these meant to be symbolic of something, or just a typical L.A. occurence? Another baffling question with no answer...)
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