BEFORE: OK, last day in February, time to check the format stats, and tomorrow I'll post the links that will get me through March. This is NOT the end of the romance chain, as expected I'm going into overtime, halfway into March as per usual. Gonna cross off 13 more romance-based films before switching topics.
My February:
12 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Licorice Pizza, Person to Person, Hello I Must Be Going, Welcome to the Rileys, Yes God Yes, Prelude to a Kiss, Gloria Bell, The Night We Never Met, Sweet November, Touched With Fire, Another Kind of Wedding, Maggie's Plan
4 Movies watched on cable (not saved): Last Night, Swimfan, For Love or Money, My Best Friend's Girl
6 watched on Netflix: Ibiza: Love Drunk, Colette, Love Wedding Repeat, The Half of It, The Last Summer, Sierra Burgess Is a Loser
2 watched on Amazon Prime: Life Partners, The Year of Spectacular Men
3 watched on Hulu: Spencer, Alone Together, Unplugging
3 watched on Hulu: Spencer, Alone Together, Unplugging
1 watched on a random site: The Object of My Affection
There you go, a perfect 28 - here's hoping I can keep the chain alive until December once again, that would make five in a row, which would get me - well, nothing but a sense of well-being.
Wallace Shawn carries over from "Another Kind of Wedding".
THE PLOT: Maggie wants to have a baby, raising it on her own, but when she gets romantically involved with John, a married man, things get complicated and the balance of her plans may collapse.
AFTER: Because I roll over my unwatched romances to the next season, it turns out that most of my February films were still pre-pandemic ones, with the exceptions being "Licorice Pizza", "Spencer", "Alone Together" and "Unplugging", I guess that's all just par for the course, though. If I'm going to prioritize clearing off some of the older films, like "Prelude to a Kiss", "For Love or Money" and "The Night We Never Met", it's bound to happen. Today's film comes from the pre-pandemic year of 2015, which meant that people were still all working in person, traveling to important conferences, and shopping for pickles at the Union Square farmer's market. Just an observation over the way things used to be, and could be again someday, but for some reason we're just not all fully back to normal yet. I was reminded of this by those anti-vaccine protestors the other night, who were chanting things about the tracking microchip in the COVID vaccine. Wasn't this completely disproved, like two years ago? Even FOX News isn't keeping silly theories like this alive any more - anyway, the government is already tracking you through your PHONE, so why would they need to implant a microchip in your arm? JK. Maybe.
Maggie has all kinds of plans to "fix" people, it's just her way of helping out. She also has a plan to have a child, but she doesn't want to put the child through all the pains of having divorced parents, so the solution is simple - have a baby via sperm donor, and relieve that fellow of all obligations of raising that child. There's maybe a flaw or two in the plan, because how is she going to raise her baby AND keep her job at the New School - say what you will about two-parent households, but it's probably easier to split the parenting duties between two people. Sure, the relationship could still fail, any relationship can, but it might at least hold for the first few years of childhood, which might be the toughest. Anyway, she's selected her college friend as the donor, he majored in mathematics but he works crafting artisanal pickles - maybe it's not a bad gig, all you can do with a math major, I think, is teach math.
But the plan gets ruined when she finds out that John - a fellow teacher she met when their paychecks got mixed up because they have similar last names - expresses his love for her, after they've spent a few months getting to know each other, and she gave him notes on his probably autobiographical novel. John's married with two kids, but has fallen out of love with his European, very dominating wife. She's got tenure at Columbia, so that's provided for their family while he teaches a few classes and works on his book.
Right after John and Maggie get together, the film flashes forward a couple years, Maggie had the baby and she and John are now married, and they've fallen back into their regular patterns, John is letting his new wife support the family while he works on another novel (or is it the SAME novel?) and Maggie's still trying to fix other people, while second-guessing her choices. Yep, you guessed it, now THEY'VE fallen out of love, at least to some degree, and so Maggie comes up with a scheme to get John back together with his first wife. It's sneaky, noble and self-defeating all at the same time, so really, that tells you all you need to know about Maggie, I think.
Also, Maggie and John are co-parenting not just their own baby, but his two children with his ex, Georgette. So now instead of raising ONE daughter by herself, which was the original plan, Maggie's got a hand in taking care of THREE children, so naturally there's no time for herself. (The two older children do live with Georgette, however she's often traveling, so during those times they stay with Maggie and John.).
And so there is valid motivation for Maggie to team up with her rival, Georgette, who has somewhat changed her ways after the divorce from John. The two women make a new plan, to get John invited to speak at a conference Georgette is also attending, and pretend that it's some kind of schedule mix-up or lack of communication. Those happen all the time between divorced co-parents, right? A snow-storm and a power outage then happen, which strands the former couple and they end up having more time to re-connect. Everything looks like it's going great, they'll be fine as long as John doesn't learn that his trip was a set-up...
No major complaints today, the characters are well-developed here and the story feels like it could be possible, assuming that "ficto-critical anthropology" is a real thing - I wouldn't know. But the point, and today's "Love Tip" is that life is often not linear, and love is not always neat and tidy, as Maggie's friend Tony says, "Love is messy. It's illogical, it's wasteful, and it's messy."
I had this film on my list because it was on at least one of the streaming services at some point - but I missed it, it scrolled off. When I saw that it could serve as a valuable link in my chain this time around, I kept an eye out for it, and it ran about a month ago on PBS, of all places. The NYC PBS station, WNET channel 13, often runs movies on Saturday nights, and I've gotten in the habit of checking out their programming each week. They run a classic film, a short film and an "indie" film most Saturdays in a line-up they call "Reel 13", and this turned out to be very helpful, and FREE. I don't know if the "Reel 13" line-up gets played on other PBS stations or if it's just a NYC thing - but if you can, check it out because they do make some great programming choices. My only complaint is that the films are introduced by a Columbia professor who teaches film studies, and he's got a bad habit of saying a bit TOO much when he introduces the film. Dude, please save the spoilers for AFTER the movie.
Also starring Greta Gerwig (last seen in "20th Century Women"), Ethan Hawke (last seen in "Glass Onion"), Julianne Moore (last seen in "Gloria Bell"), Bill Hader (last heard in "The Addams Family 2"), Maya Rudolph (last seen in "Licorice Pizza"), Travis Fimmel (last seen in "Finding Steve McQueen"), Ida Rohatyn, Alex Morf (last seen in "The Many Saints of Newark"), Jackson Frazer (last seen in "Foxcatcher"), Mina Sundwall, Fredi Walker-Browne, Monte Greene, Brendan Titley, Stephen Lin, Angela Trento, Sue Jean Kim.
RATING: 6 out of 10 "eurhythmics" classes
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