Friendsgiving

Year 14, Day 326 - 11/22/22 - Movie #4,290

BEFORE: Ryan Hansen carries over from "The Turkey Bowl", naturally when I saw that one actor appeared in TWO of the Thanksgiving movies on my list, I just had to program them. That's a done deal, an easy link, like it was meant to be or something. 

This is going to wrap up November, just 15 films watched this month but that's so I can save 10 slots for December, otherwise I'll be going stir crazy at home with nothing to watch.  After this just 10 films to go, and here are the links that will get me to Christmas: Fortune Feimster, Andy Garcia, Rob Riggle, Jane Seymour, Bob Hoskins, Richard E. Grant, Helen Mirren and Amit Shah.  Since Fortune Feimster's also in the next movie in my chain, after this film I'm going to watch her new comedy special on Netflix, because that will right into the chain, but will not count.

THE PLOT: Molly and Abby, along with their crew of close friends and acquaintances, host a dysfunctional, comical and chaotic Thanksgiving. 

AFTER: If you watch TV this month, you're going to see a lot of holiday commercials, and I'm not talking about the ones for Reese's Tree-Shaped Peanut Butter Cups or the Hess toy truck or the ones where Santa Clause drives a Mercedes instead of a sleigh.  I mean your basic retail store ads, for Best Buy or Wal-Mart or Amazon - I pay attention because I spent 15 years watching ads as part of my job, specifically looking for accounts that used animation, but really, tracking almost everything.  The two biggest trends I see in the make-up of the pretend families seen in those ads are the inter-racial families, and the token gay couples.  It's hard to find a spot these days that DOESN'T feature one or both of these.  On one level, it's great, it's an acknowledgement that those families and couples are there, they exist, and they also enjoy holidays and buying material things.  On the other hand, it also feels like pandering, like, "Hey, liberals, we see you, we targeted our ads at you, so please buy our stuff?"  Naturally I'm split on the issue - and I should just fast forward and not think about it, but I can't. 

This film "Friendsgiving" sort of feels the same way - the writers gathered together this extremely varied group of people in L.A., with a wide range of ages, ethnic groups and sexual orientations, which is similarly great, because those groups are being represented, those couples and families exist, they all enjoy Thanksgiving, too.  But also similarly, it feels like pandering of the highest order at the same time. "Hey, lesbians, we see you, we put several lesbian characters in our movie, so please watch it?"  Well, come on, who doesn't like lesbians?  Sure, I'll watch. 

I suppose ultimately it's a step forward because 10 or 20 years ago, if you had a lesbian character in a movie, then THAT'S ALL that the film would be about. Like "Go Fish" or "Blue Is the Warmest Color" or "Bound" or "The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love" - the very fact that those movies had lesbians in them, that was enough, that was the selling point.  How many guys (and gals) rented "Wild Things" just to see THAT scene?  Now fast forward to the 2020's, and the lesbian character is just one messed-up person who's having a hard time finding romance, in a whole house full of people who are JUST as messed-up and having JUST as hard a time finding romance. You don't suppose...there's a whole city full of those people, isn't there?  And it's called Los Angeles?

So I want to say it's "old hat" now, as a society we're so past the shock of it all, and we're ready to just move on and treat gay and lesbian people as, you know, people.  But we're not, are we?  Not when some groups are targeting drag shows for violence and shooting up gay clubs out West.  Not when there are Arabic countries that paid billions to host a soccer tournament and they think they have the right to tell attendees to not act gay in public.  Not when China can ban an entire movie just becase of a same-sex kiss between two characters.  Maybe that last one's not such a big deal, because if people in China don't get to watch "The Eternals", that only affects Disney's bottom line, but in those other instances, people are still in danger because of who they are and who they love.  There are the people who want big government to stay out of everyone's lives, except when it comes to policing things they don't personally approve of.

I'm getting off the track, because I'm here to talk about Thanksgiving, and Friendsgiving, which has become a celebration over the past few years for people who either can't go home for the holidays, or just don't want to.  Perhaps there's a political or moral divide involved in some of those cases, but for others, it's just distance, and the fact that everyone ELSE is also trying to travel somewhere on the same day, so it's just a nightmare.  You know, there's no rule that says you HAVE to celebrate Thanksgiving on the same day as everyone else - you could get together with your family the week before, or the week after, and in doing that, you've made the holiday about 50% easier for everyone involved, with regards to travel, getting the feast together, or making restaurant reservations. My wife and I haven't been out to a restaurant ON Valentine's Day in years, for that same reason, everyone else is trying to do the same thing at the same time.

Anyway, Molly's an actress who's newly divorced, or about to be.  She's getting over her ex by seeing a new man, who ticks all the boxes, helps her with her baby son, seems very into her, only he doesn't seem to have a job, other than "philanthropy", which means he's got five bogus charities that probably all filter money into his pockets.  Molly's set to spend Thanksgiving with her best friend Abby, who's that lesbian who broke up with her partner a year ago, and can't seem to start dating again, after learning her ex just got engaged. Abby's upset at first that she can't just spend the holiday with Molly, because Jeff is there, too.  She eventually comes around on this point, but then wait, there are more friends coming over...

Molly's mother arrives from Sweden, unexpectedly.  Her mother invites Gunnar, Molly's ex-boyfriend (she didn't know about Jeff, apparently).  Then there's Rick, Molly's agent (?) and his new wife, Brianne, who's had so much Botox that she can't talk. Then there's mutual friend Lauren, who brings her husband Dan and their two children.  And Lauren invites three more lesbians for good measure, in case one of them could be a match for Abby.  Then there's Claire the sha-woman, and Gus, the token gay guy with the missing brother, and by then the small anti-family Friendsgiving celebration is up to at least fifteen people.  Well, at least most everyone brought a side dish and/or a bottle of premium alcohol. 

The party (and the movie) starts to go downhill fast once the 'shrooms come out - Abby fantasizes a visit from her three Fairy Gay Mothers, but it's very unclear how this dream sequence helps her in any way.  She already knows her preference/orientation so what advice does she even need at this point?  Molly's revelation, that her current boyfriend is nothing more than a rebound guy, seems a bit more significant.  Perhaps she needs someone who can keep his shirt on at a party and can pick up a restaurant check once in a while.  But in addition to trying much too hard to appeal to all the target groups watching, the film also tried much too hard to be wacky.  I'm sure L.A. is a crazy place full of crazy people, but I don't necessarily need to see all of them being crazy in one movie.  

You know what, instead of Friendsgiving just stay at home and eat a frozen turkey dinner.  That's OK too.  I'm off to Massachusetts tomorrow, we have to pick up a turkey dinner box that I ordered from a grocery store and get ready to visit my parents on Thursday and deliver it. The holiday is kind of a meals-on-wheels mission for us now.  Sure, I COULD get the whole fresh turkey and cook it with all the sides, but this will be much easier.  I'll be back with another post on December 1 to start the countdown to Christmas.

Also starring Malin Akerman (last seen in "I'll See You in My Dreams"), Kat Dennings (last seen in "Thor; Love and Thunder"), Jane Seymour (last seen in "The Female Brain"), Aisha Tyler (last seen in "Bedtime Stories"), Chelsea Peretti (last heard in "Sing 2"), Christine Taylor (last seen in "Zoolander 2"), Deon Cole (last seen in "The Harder They Fall"), Wanda Sykes (last seen in "The One and Only Dick Gregory"), Margaret Cho (last seen in "Conan O'Brien Can't Stop"), Fortune Feimster (last heard in "Soul"), Jack Donnelly, River Butcher, Andrew Santino (last seen in "Dean"), Dana DeLorenzo (last seen in "A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas"), Rose Abdoo (last seen in "Other People"), Carla Jimenez (last seen in "The Purge: Anarchy"), Scout Durwood, Brianna Baker, Joe Lando, Serenity Reign Brown, Mike Rose, Karen Y. McClain, Nadya Ginsburg, Johnny Williams (last seen in "Green Book"), Kenneth Sims, Vladimir Perez, Melissa Graver. 

RATING: 3 out of 10 props for the photo booth

The Turkey Bowl

Year 14, Day 325 - 11/21/22 - Movie #4,289

BEFORE: Headed into Thanksgiving Week, and this is right where I wanted to be - I've got just enough time to watch both Thanksgiving-themed movies before we have to get in the car on Wednesday morning and drive to Massachusetts.  But before that, let's get into some Monday Night Football, OK?

Ryan Hansen carries over from "Hit and Run". And if you're saying "Who the heck is Ryan Hansen?", well you're not really wrong.  According to my records I've seen him in seven movies now and I just can't remember him in any of them.  OK, I kind of remember him from "Bad Santa 2", but there's something just very forgettable about him - is it just me?  You may know him from "Fantasy Island" or "Like a Boss" or "CHIPS" or any of a dozen TV shows, or maybe you don't.  His character's name in "Hit and Run" changed halfway through the movie and NOBODY NOTICED - or they did and they just didn't care.  He was kind of just along for the ride last night.  More on this in a bit. 

THE PLOT: A 30-something urbanite is pulled back to his rural hometown by his high school buddies on Thanksgiving to finish the Turkey Bowl, an epic football game against their crosstown rivals that was snowed out 15 years before. 

AFTER: I'm trying to be nice here, and respect actors and the work they do - but you maybe will recognize Matt Jones here, who's in the "second banana" role, more than you would Ryan Hansen.  Jones has been in a bunch of CBS sitcoms, like "Mom" and "Bob Hearts Abishola", and while he may not have as many movie roles as Ryan Hansen, he's at least got a distinctive look.  Hansen is just kind of THERE, he's like vanilla ice cream or wood paneling, you may not even notice him, which is bad when he's cast in the lead role in a film.  I wanted to like his character, but there's nothing about him that stands out.  His character was once a high-school quarterback, and those are like the top dogs in high school, they're power players, typically handsome, super athletic, all the girls want to date them (maybe even some of the guys, too, you know what I'm saying) and I'm just not getting that vibe from Hansen.  Maybe it's all the moping around he does in this film, he's never sure of himself, never takes the reins and tries to command the situations he's in, instead he just sort of ducks out of everything and avoids everyone whenever possible, and it's like he's not really living his own life, like his character in "Hit and Run", he's just along for the ride.  

This film needed somebody like Vince Vaughn in "Dodgeball", remember that movie?  He was the leader of the team, but not in an overpowering way, since it was an ensemble comedy Vaughn let the other actors have their moments and he didn't dominate, but still you knew at every moment that he had top billing in the film.  Just like a football team, a film's cast needs a leader that the other players can support.  I'm just saying I didn't get that from Hansen, not even at the end during the big game.  Hell, the villain character was more dynamic than him, but maybe that's because I recognized the actor as the guy who plays Hawk on "Titans". 

But the story required that Patrick Hodges, the guy climbing the corporate ladder, the guy about to get engaged to his girlfriend, the guy whose future father-in-law is about to run for President, somehow has to find his way back to his Oklahoma hometown, when he's been avoiding doing that for the last 10 years or so.  Without a quarterback there's no game, and the town's high school's going to forever feel like they've been cursed, because they haven't won a Turkey Bowl since 1992 EXCEPT there's that game from 1999 (?) that was never finished because of a freak snowstorm - and so the players and pretty much everyone in town's been in some kind of cursed limbo, always wondering if that would have been the year that they got revenge on the Noble Knights, who went on to win the State Championship or something.  Look, I wasn't into high school sports back in the day, and I'm still not really a football guy - but how can the Badgers and the Knights be "crosstown rivals", were the schools in the same town, or different towns, or what?  This is pretty unclear - is there a rich side of Putnam with a private high school and a poorer side with a public one?  My hometown had a situation like that, but then why would the Knights walk around saying "We hate Putnam" when they're all Putnam residents?  They should clarify that and say "We hate Putnam High", right?  

One thing's for sure, the Noble Knights are heavily favored, even if Hodges can come back and be the QB once again.  The Badgers are all out of shape, out of practice, and out of their minds - they're a ragtag bunch of has-beens and never-weres, but if you think that they can't put aside their differences, come together, buckle down and maybe pull out a few trick plays to have a chance of winning the game, then you just haven't seen a lot of movies.  Films favor the underdogs to an unbelievable degree, after all - we love "Rocky" and "The Bad News Bears" and "The Mighty Ducks" and "Major League" and probably a dozen other sports movies where the statistics favor one opponent, but the screenwriters have other plans.  

Hodges has to be tricked into coming back to Oklahoma, instead of spending Thanksgiving with his girlfriend's family in Vail - and then once he's there, his former teammate who's now the town sheriff has to arrest him (and only him) after the big fight outside the bar, so the judge can offer him a reduced sentence of "community service" - namely, playing in the Turkey Bowl. And then he has to keep lying to his girlfriend about needing to stay in town a few more days - meanwhile he's got at least two ex-girlfriends coming on to him, but wouldn't you know it, one's the sister of the rival quarterback, and the other one is DATING the rival quarterback.  So this is a complicated situation, beyond all credulity, but hey, at least he gets to re-connect with his parents, who don't seem to understand his new vegetarian lifestyle.  

Look, it's a formula, OK?  You just KNOW what's going to happen, even though it's going to take a whole two hours to play out.  Returning to his hometown is going to make Hodges realize that he's not really the person he's been pretending to be, he's a small-town guy who's got nothing in common with his big-city girlfriend, and maybe he belongs back home, dating a local girl, and being a big fish in a small pond.  There's nothing wrong with that, except admitting that you couldn't hack it in the big city.  But there are thousands of small towns out there, maybe the secret to happiness is finding the one you belong in, getting off that hamster wheel and just living your life and loving somebody with no pretense.  Who can say?  

FINALLY, after a whole three days (?) of practice and parades and fist-pumping, it's time for the Big Game.  OK, the little game, but it means something to somebody, at least.  Again, this is something of a foregone conclusion, because we didn't show up and put up with all this back-and-forth just to see the team we like lose to the team we hate.  What if we watched the whole "Karate Kid" movie only to see Daniel-san get his ass kicked?  That would be a bummer, right?  Or if "Rocky" didn't go the distance?  (That's right, kids, Rocky Balboa did NOT beat his opponent in his first movie...he won by losing, or something like that...).  Even if the Badgers were to lose here, hey, at least they tried, they came together and they did a thing.  We all get so caught up in wins and losses in sports that it's sometimes easy to forget that everybody's trying really hard, and at least they're still getting paid, right?  

So it's not the best movie, or even the best football movie - somebody still made this movie, and that's an accomplishment.  It got released and it aired on cable despite not having any well-known name actors in it. (Will Ferrell, Mark Wahlberg and Adam Sandler were all attached to it at one point, and all dropped out.) Take it from me, someone who's been working on independent films for almost 30 years - that's still a WIN for somebody.  And it's a win for me because this is a film all about going back to your hometown during Thanksgiving week, seeing your old friends, catching up with your parents and using all that to figure out who you want to be going forward.  

The music, however, is just horrible - most of it is period appropriate, songs from the late 1990's like "All Star" by Smash Mouth and "Semi-Charmed Life" by Third Eye Blind - OK maybe "No Rain" by Blind Melon is a good song, but it's all so passé now.  And don't we all hate Smash Mouth now?  Were they playing this song ironically or just trying to piss everybody off?

Also starring Matt Jones (last seen in "Brightburn"), Alan Ritchson (last seen in "The Hunger Games: Catching Fire") Kristen Hager (last seen in "Life" (2015)), Da'Vone McDonald (last seen in "Walk of Shame"), Tanner Anderson, Travis Nicholson (last seen in "Straight Outta Compton"), Chris Reed, Barry Switzer (last seen in "Any Given Sunday"), Brett Cullen (last seen in "Reminiscence"), John Beasley (last seen in "The Purge: Anarchy"), Leah McKendrick, Blair Bomar, Kevin M. Brennan (last seen in "The To Do List"), Ashley Fink (last seen in "You Again"), Renee Gauthier, Sean McGraw (last seen in "Born of the Fourth of July"), Michelle Little, Burns Burns, Laurie Cummings (last seen in "Wildlife"), with a cameo from Harland Williams (last seen in "Employee of the Month"). 

RATING: 5 out of 10 yearbook photos

Hit and Run

Year 14, Day 323 - 11/19/22 - Movie #4,288

BEFORE: Getting really close to the end of the current Movie Year now, just 12 films to go after today.  But there are 42 days left in the year, so I'm looking at about a month of down time, during which I'll feel like I'm making no progress.  The holidays take some of the sting out of that, plus I'll have a lot of time to review my lists, search the streaming sites for films I haven't seen yet, update my cast lists, and start planning a chain for next February so that I can then reverse-engineer something for January.  It's a process.

If I stick to my 300 films per year, once you factor in about 40 or 50 slots for romance, maybe another 30 or 40 for documentaries, and then 20 or 30 for horror films in October, that only leaves me about 180 to 210 "open" slots, ones that aren't bound by format.  Call them the "freestyle" months if you want, but when I look at it that way, it's easy to see why films of the other genres seem to keep slipping through the cracks.  Even after watching movies all year long, there's still a list about a mile-long of films that I just can't get to this year.  Like "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever" is off the table at this point, so is "Ghostbusters: Afterlife", and "Project Almanac" has been put on hold yet again.  What about the recent movies like "Elvis", "Moonfall", "The Last Duel", and "Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore"?  Or "Nobody", "Licorice Pizza", "Nightmare Alley", and "The Green Knight"?  "See How they Run", "Blood Father", "Dragged Across Concrete" and "Ambulance"?  "Nope", "Blonde", "The Gray Man", "Bullet Train" and "The Protege". You see the problem, right?  Hollywood keeps cranking movies out faster than I, or anyone, can possibly watch them.  But it's a process. 

Beau Bridges carries over from "The Good German". Anyway, soon the counter's going to reset and I can try to work in some of those films listed above.  Just going to clear a few older films off the list and then think about the best way to move forward. That's a process too. 

THE PLOT: A former getaway driver jeopardizes his Witness Protection Plan identity in order to help his girlfriend get to Los Angeles. The feds and his former gang chase them on the road. 

AFTER: One last action movie before we start talking about the holidays.  Damn, but this one was a lot of fun.  What a difference a day makes, because I kept falling asleep during the last film, "The Good German", because there just wasn't enough happening to keep my attention.  This one had me riveted, I wasn't even tempted to play games on my phone because there was always something going on - and I'm not even a car guy!  If you ARE a car person, you'll probably like this one even more than I did.  The star here is a 1967 Lincoln Continental, which the main character has modded with a 700 horsepower engine, and damn, that thing moves.  This movie sort of makes me rethink my ban on the "Fast & Furious" movies, but I think I'll keep it in place, because at the end of the day, those films aren't comedies.  Not intentional ones, anyway, and I think if I dived into that franchise I'd never stop making fun of it. 

(Another character drives a Pontiac Solstice, or so I'm told, and the villain drives a BMW sports wagon, if you can believe that.  And then late in the film, there's a Tatum, which is a really cool off-road racer, the kind that goes on those desert rally races, I think.  Again, not a car guy, but now I kind of wish that I was.)

Yul lives in the middle of nowhere, under the assumed name Charles Bronson. Yep. But his girlfriend Annie teaches at a local college and her boss wants her to take a position at a better university in Los Angeles, which puts her in a difficult position.  Take the dream job and move away from her boyfriend, or pass on the opportunity and then live with regrets.  Yul can't leave the town he's hiding in, but then he decides he has to, to get her to the job interview in time by pulling his really fast car out of storage.  What could POSSIBLY go wrong?  

Annie's ex still hasn't gotten over her, and he's convinced Yul is a criminal, so he contacts the leader of Yul's old gang and blows his cover.  Before long Yul and Annie are being chased by violent criminals and the Marshall that oversees him in the Witness Protection program, and also Annie's ex-boyfriend. An intimate knowledge of the California highway system may also be required here to really understand what's going on. This was filmed in towns like Tustin, Fillmore, Cornell and Santa Clarita in California, though Yul lives in Milton, which is 343 miles from L.A.  That's a 5 or 6 hour drive, so I'm not sure why they have to leave the day before, especially with such a fast car.  Maybe they're accounting for L.A. traffic, I don't know. 

But I get it, California is really really big, yet somehow the people in these four cars still manage to keep finding each other, which maybe shouldn't be so easy.  Yet the story demands it, so we have to accept it.  But again tonight I'm reminded of the film "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World", where four or five carloads of people are racing through California to get to a buried treasure.  If you mixed that film with a Steve McQueen movie you might get something like "Hit and Run", or maybe not, this is kind of its own thing and shouldn't really be compared to other films.  Maybe "Smokey and the Bandit" is a better comparison anyway.  

Dax Shepard and Kristen Bell seem like a really together couple - hey, if you can live together and work together and make movies together and those movies are as fun as this one is, then more power to them. Maybe it's too late, but I would love to see a sequel to this film.  Or a prequel - "Hit and Run 2" could go back and show us the story of those 13 bank heists, and Yul could be engaged to Neve and she could plan the heists with Alex and we could see what went wrong on that last one.  Or it could detail what happened to Yul to initiate the change of conscience, what turned him around and put him on the path of self-awareness or redemption.  What do you say, Hollywood?  

Also starring Dax Shepard (last seen in "Let's Go to Prison"), Kristen Bell (last seen in "You Again"), Tom Arnold (last seen in "Happy Endings"), Kristin Chenoweth (last heard in "The Witches"), Michael Rosenbaum (last heard in "Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker"), Bradley Cooper (last heard in "Thor: Love and Thunder"), Jess Rowland (last seen in "CHIPS"), Ryan Hansen (ditto), Carly Hatter (ditto), John Duff (ditto), Joy Bryant (last seen in "Bobby"), David Koechner (last seen in "Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny"), Steve Agee (last seen in "Brightburn"), Kal Bennett, Nate Tuck, with cameos from Jason Bateman (last seen in "Thunder Force"), Sean Hayes (last seen in "Jerry Lewis: The Man Behind the Clown"). 

RATING: 7 out of 10 seniors at the lemon party