Gloria Bell

Year 15, Day 53 - 2/22/23 - Movie #4,354

BEFORE: It's Ash Wednesday, but who the hell cares?  To me that just means that it's only 46 movies until Easter - and I rest easy knowing I've got my Easter film all picked out, I just have to get there.  Two years ago I watched "Mary Magdalene" on Easter Sunday, last year I tried to link to "Paul, Apostle of Christ" but I couldn't find a way to get there, so I watched "Three Christs" instead.  This year I'm going to try for that movie about St. Paul again, I think I have the path to get there, but it's going to put me in a weird place, where I'll have to get back to fiction movies through documentaries.  (The only valid link out of "Paul, Apostle of Christ" takes me to a documentary about Val Kilmer. Whatever.)

Brad Garrett carries over from "My Best Friend's Girl", where he had a vocal cameo as an unsatisfied customer calling a company's complaint line. Which reminds me that I have a talent for identifying actors from their voices, which also reminds me that "The Masked Singer" is back on the air, 2nd episode of the season tonight, so I know where I'll be at 8 pm. 

THE PLOT: A free-spirited woman in her 50s seeks out love at L.A. dance clubs. 

AFTER: I'm not sure about the WHY of this film - maybe I've just watched too many rom-coms already this February, and that's very damaging for the brain, after several weeks of things working out for the best and people finding their soulmates after some minor confusions, you sort of come to expect that, and that's...well, it's not healthy.  I know many people find their soulmates in real life, or at least they believe that they do, but just as many people don't - or they let them get away or there are troubles they can't overcome, or who knows.  Everybody's story is different, few of them are linear, and so we should never come to "expect" such success in real life, but instead learn to live with what happens and try to enjoy the journey along the way. 

This is not a rom-com because it's not a comedy, there's very little that's funny about it, unless you find certain things ironically funny.  A lot of sad and borderline pathetic things happen here, so that makes it what?  A rom-dram?  That works if you pronounce the "dram" in "drama" a certain way, if you say "drama" like it rhymes with "gramma" it's just not going to catch on. But you never here anyone talking about rom-drams, I wonder why that is?  Surely they must exist, but I guess maybe people want to feel good, not bad, whenever possible, so they don't seek them out?  Look, Shakespeare had the right idea, something's either a comedy or a tragedy - if nobody dies and they fall in love instead, it's a comedy.  When the bodies start piling up, like in "Hamlet" or "MacBeth", it's for sure a tragedy.  Things were simpler then, it was a different time. 

Gloria is a middle-aged divorced woman with two adult children - a daughter who's a yoga instructor and a son who's married and takes care of his baby son, but has no idea where his wife is. (You can go ahead and put a pin in that one, but the movie just refuses to do a deep dive and explain this part.). Gloria spends her nights going to dance clubs that play disco music - who knew these were still around?  I thought they defiantly blew up all the disco records in Comiskey Park in 1979.  Club-owners in L.A. didn't get the memo, I guess. 

Gloria meets Arnold at the clubs one night and they start a relationship - but it's filled with problems, like the fact that he won't tell his ex-wife that he's dating someone new, and in fact he's still supporting his wife and daughters, who can't get jobs for some weird reason. Gloria, on the other hand, brings Arnold to her son's birthday party, and introduces him as her "friend", but she has such a good time reminiscing with her children and ex-husband that Arnold feels left out, and he disappears from the event. 

Gloria's daughter is pregnant, and intends to move to Sweden to be with the baby's father, who's a Swedish surfer (who knew?).  Meanwhile Gloria's best friend/co-worker gets fired and Gloria also finds out she's got a degenerative eye problem, so her eyesight's just going to get worse and worse.  Thankfully her psycho upstairs neighbor accidentally (?) left his weed on her doorstep, so she tries some.  They give marijuana to glaucoma patients, don't they?  

Arnold keeps calling her to apologize, and finally she calls him back, and they go on a trip to Las Vegas. But shortly after checking in, Arnold gets a call from his daughters that his wife has had an accident, and he refuses, at first, to travel back to check on her condition.  But despite having a nice dinner with Gloria (for some reason, NOT at a Vegas buffet, WTF?) he excuses himself and disappears, probably back to L.A. to see his ex-wife.  Gloria has a wild night in Vegas by herself, drinking and sex and probably some kind of hallucinogen, because she wakes up on a pool chair, and has to call her mother to take her back to L.A. 

I can't really tell if this film goes anywhere, if all the pieces add up to something bigger, to make some kind of point, or if it's all just random occurrences.  I mean, sure, it fits into my theme fine, because it's about how complicated relationships can get, and it calls into question why we bother with them in the first place, because life would be so much simpler if we could learn to be happy by ourselves and all that.  But as the story of two people who never can quite seem to get on the same page, it's also kind of sad in some respects.  You can find somebody who loves you and wants to take you to dinner and read poetry to you, but can you ever REALLY be sure that you can trust that person to be there when it counts?  I don't have an answer here, I'm asking for all the divorced people who live in constant fear that it's going to happen again.  If not today, then someday. 

A record is a great metaphor for a relationship, because it's easy to feel like you're going around in circles and not making much progress - but still, the needle is inevitably moving closer to the end of the groove.  At some point the song is going to be over, and it's bound to be at a point when you just wanted to keep on dancing.  Well, the good news is that you can just play a different record, just like you can start up a new relationship.  Or you can flip the record over and play the other side, or play that record again, it's up to you. You can even keep listening to disco music, even though it's WAY out of vogue. That metaphor is today's "Love Tip", sorry if it's a bit of a confusing one.

Also starring Julianne Moore (last seen in "Being Flynn"), John Turturro (last seen in "Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me"), Caren Pistorius (last seen in "Slow West"), Michael Cera (last seen in "Person to Person"), Holland Taylor (last seen in "Legally Blonde"), Jeanne Tripplehorn (last seen in "Steal This Movie"), Rita Wilson (last seen in "Everything Is Copy"), Chris Mulkey (last seen in "The Purge"), Cassi Thompson, Tyson Ritter (last seen in "Peppermint"), Barbara Sukowa (last seen in "Romance & Cigarettes"), Alanna Ubach (last seen in "Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde"), Sean Astin (last seen in "The Do-Over"), Jesse Erwin (last seen in "Walk of Shame"), Chopper Bernet, Gerard Sanders (last seen in "Iron Man"), Roberta Hanlen, Francisco Rodriguez, Sarah Lowe, Jeff Leibow, Derrick Redford, Aileen Burdock (last heard in "The Guilty"), Ari Schneider, Heather Messal, Jennie Fahn, Barbara Scolaro (last seen in "The Hero").

RATING: 5 out of 10 paintball guns