Year 14, Day 337 - 12/3/22 - Movie #4,292
BEFORE: OK, I got my glasses fixed today - well, sort of. I broke the left side-piece a few days before Thanksgiving, in the exact same spot where I'd broken them before, so I knew I was going to encounter trouble with my optician. The last time this happened they had to order a whole new set of frames, despite the fact that in my mind it should be an easy fix. Just order the side-piece, there's a little screw that connects the side piece to the main part of the frame (the one that holds the lenses) and in my mind, it should be an easy fix, maybe $50 tops. But by ordering the whole frames and switching the lenses over, it costs them more money, and they pass that cost along to me, which pisses me off. If I drove my car to a garage with a flat tire, they wouldn't make me buy a whole new car, right?
But the glasses shop claimed they couldn't just buy a side-piece, they had to buy the whole set of frames from the manufacturer. And they couldn't just solder the broken side-piece back together, because nobody does that any more. I checked in at another glasses shop just to see if somebody else wanted to make a quick $50 by doing a repair, but they wouldn't do it either - which makes me wonder what we've lost as a society, when people aren't serving the customer's needs or trying to save money and time, but instead they adhere to a company policy which nets them a bigger profit on each repair job. Look, I held my glasses together for the last two weeks with a piece of duct tape, and while that wasn't perfect, it did the job. I maintain that when you've got a piece of broken equipment, the main job of fixing it in the simplest way possible should be the main goal, and there's no need to get a whole new pair of glasses when just ONE piece is broken, and anybody with a small enough screwdriver should be able to get the job done.
But I held my tongue - no I didn't, I complained quite loudly about how this store's policy sucked and would cost me four or five times what a simple repair job might cost. But they wouldn't listen to logic and reason, they only knew ONE way to fix the glasses, by replacing the entire frame. So I dealt with taped-up specs for two weeks and finally got over to the shop today, where they switched the lenses pretty quickly, and I paid them for the new set of frames. Then I asked to keep the old, broken frames, and I was really expecting a fight here. My secret agenda was that if these new glasses should break on the other side, in the same spot, I'd have the old frame that I could salvage for the part. I was ready to point out that I paid for the new frames, so they're mine, and I paid for the old frames too, so those are also mine. Since the old frames weren't under warranty any more, they didn't have to return them to the manufacturer, so I walked out of there with the old, broken set. That's the best I could do, but I know that if the other side ever breaks, it's a cheaper fix, I just need to find someone with a tiny screwdriver.
I was ready to raise a fuss, however, if they didn't let me keep the old frames - I was ready to call them out on deceptive repair practices and threaten to call the Better Business Bureau, but it didn't come to that, so I managed to keep my cool. So there's that.
Andy Garcia carries over from "Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar".
THE PLOT: After a publisher mislabels a writer's debut novel about a deadly assassin as non-fiction, the author finds himself thrust into the world of his lead character and must take on the role of his character for his own survival.
AFTER: I'm finally going through some tracks, there's still a chance that I could put together a Christmas mix CD this year, before it gets too late. So I'm previewing tracks tonight - thankfully I keep notes from last year's process, also the year before and the year before that. So there are always songs that DON'T make the mix for space reasons, but if I was considering them before, those songs may all have some merit. Some years I just look at the tracks I haven't used yet, and slam a mix together from that. One track that's funny comes from Richard Cheese, the famous lounge singer who appeared in yesterday's movie playing the hotel lounge singer. His cover of the song "Last Christmas" is only about 20 seconds long, since after the intro to the song he stops the band and says, "We were going to play our version of "Last Christmas", but that song sucks..." and then it's on to the next song.
That's about what I was expecting from tonight's movie, I figured that after a few minutes of what looks like a horribly unfunny comedy, I'd have an overwhelming desire to stop the film and just call a mulligan today. OK, so it's bad, but it's not THAT bad - I did manage to make it all the way through, and the saving grace here is that I'll never, ever have to watch it again. What a time-saver! It's somewhat reminiscent of "The Lost City", in the sense that it's also about an author who's an expert on many things, but mostly in theory. Writers write, after all, and they do that from the comfort of their desk, and these days even research is done mostly online, so writers, for the most part, aren't DOERS. Both this film and "The Lost City" follow the same premise, where the writer is abducted (for reasons) and then is forced to live out a scenario that very much resembles one of their books. For some reason, I want to imagine what would happen if Stephen King suddenly had to deal with a demon or a ghost or something supernatural - sure, he's probably KNOW what to do, even though he'd made all that other stuff up. But it would be weird.
Sam Larson is an author who's got a friend that tells him stories about the spy game, and after a question about jumping from a helicopter, off-hand mentions some legendary agent called "The Ghost" who supposedly did that and survived somehow. But this friend (who's obviously a former CIA agent himself, I don't know why it took Sam so long to realize this) says this stuff shouldn't go into Sam's book, so of course he writes about it all, after just changing a few minor details. So when his online publisher adds the word "True" to his title, and makes it available for download as "non-fiction", someone out there puts two and two together, and figures out that Sam must be the legendary agent "The Ghost", and he's abducted to help plan a military coup in Venezuela.
(Sam almost has a James Frey-like confession in an interview with Katie Couric, but he bolts and runs away from the interview, which keeps the mystery alive, story-wise. But it's a huge narrative cop-out, because in this sneaky scenario the events in the book are both true and untrue, and the author who made everything up and the publisher who mislabeled the book never have to atone for their sins. In real life the author would be exposed as a fraud and the book sales would suffer as a result, conveniently here that doesn't happen, because the storyline needs to be advanced due to the resulting confusion.)
If I'm being honest, there's a lot about this film that seems very lazy - the fact that pudgy actor Kevin James is cast in an action role, for example. Obviously this is not a guy who works out, and he (the actor AND the character) is thrust into a combat role, and there's a disconnect there that nobody seems willing to point out. Look, I'm a stocky guy myself, I hate exercising and I enjoy being out of shape just a bit too much, but I don't pretend that I'm somebody I'm not and go out and run marathons. Asking me to accept a reality where a guy of this size fights soldiers and makes his way through the jungle without sweating up a storm is a bit too much, all across the board. I'd love to hear the story, was this written for another actor who might be more believable in the part, and then that actor dropped out?
Plus, it's yet ANOTHER example of a screenplay written about a writer, who's having difficulty writing something. I'm going to try to remember to add all of these up at the end of the year, I feel like I've watched at least a dozen films like that in 2022. Again, it's lazy, lazy, lazy, that a screenwriter thought that the most interesting thing he could offer was about a writer trying to write something - which usually isn't very cinematic AT ALL. But they cheat again here, because as the writer is writing his book, we see those scenes play out as if they're a movie - admittedly it's more interesting than looking at words on paper, but it's a changeable story-within-the-story that can be rewound, fixed, edited, etc. Cheating on a grand scale, but even this degree of cinematic short-cutting couldn't produce something very interesting in the end.
The writer-turned-action hero finds himself in the middle of a triangle of Venezuelan honchos, the gangster, the guerrilla leader and El Presidente. After numerous abductions and having to "prove" his identity as The Ghost over and over, the writer offers to kill the President for the guerrilla leader, then offers to kill the gangster for the President, and then I think he's also hired by the gangster to kill the guerrilla leader - this is extremely confusing, to say the least. Geez, why these characters don't just kill each other is beyond me, it sure would save everybody a lot of time and effort, myself included. (There's another HUGE shortcut used to determine one of these three characters, but I won't mention it here, no spoilers.)
There's also a rogue DEA agent, who's also a beautiful woman and ends up doing most of the hand-to-hand fighting (since it would be too unbelievable to leave this to Kevin James' character) and you just know she's going to end up falling for the writer in the end, and this also fails to come across as credible. Who knows, maybe she's a broken person who digs overweight writers, I don't know.
I hate to hit a low point so late in the year - this film makes me want to think that with only 9 slots left in Movie Year 14, I should be making better choices. Big picture time, though, it's worth burning this one off tonight if it gets me closer to ending the year the way I want to end it. It hurts, but I'm taking one for the team so I can get closer to Christmas movies. Wait, this movie came out in 2016? It's been on Netflix for SIX years? How long has it been on my freaking list? Now I'm glad I watched it tonight, it's been hanging around for WAY too long - at least it served a purpose by acting as a connector...
Also starring Kevin James (last seen in "Hubie Halloween"), Zulay Henao, Maurice Compte (last seen in "End of Watch"), Kelen Coleman, Andrew Howard (last seen in "Tenet"), Ron Rifkin (last seen in "Just a Kiss"), Rob Riggle (last seen in "Opening Night"), Leonard Earl Howze (last seen in "The Lone Ranger"), Yul Vazquez (last seen in "The Phenom"), Kim Coates (last seen in "Fantasy Island"), P.J. Byrne (last seen in "Walk of Shame"), Emilie Ullerup, Lauren Shaw, Jeff Chase (last seen in "Escape Plan: The Extractors"), Katie Couric (last seen in "Listening to Kenny G"), Gabriel Rodriguez, Al Hamacher (last seen in "The Best of Enemies"), Daniel Zacapa (last seen in "Masterminds").
RATING: 4 out of 10 80's songs sung in Spanish
