BEFORE: I realize that by sticking to my linking process, I've created an imperfect system - not that any system could be "perfect", but I suppose under a "more perfect" system I would become aware of a movie, watch it and be done with it. Instead there's a feeling that I'm chasing after something here that I'm never going to accomplish - I can't, for example, watch every movie ever made, not in one lifetime, anyway. I can't restrict myself to "good" movies over "bad", because I don't know which ones are good or bad without watching them. I haven't even gotten to every movie on a list of films that played on the Academy's web-site for Oscar qualification LAST year, because of my slow linking process. I have reduced that list from 65 films to 46, with plans to watch two more in the next month. But the progress is so slow that I'm afraid to check the Academy's site for THIS year, because it will only give me another 60 or 70 films to try to get to. Instead I think I'll stick to adding films based on the e-mail I get once a month from IMDB, which tells me what's new on all of the streaming platforms - it's certainly more efficient than doom-scrolling through Netflix or Hulu trying to find something decent to add to my lists.
Instead, I have to take comfort in what I call a "perfect year", that's a chain from January 1 to Christmas of 300 films that are all linked together by shared actors, with no breaks. I've managed to create those chains for the last four years now, and I'm currently working on a fifth one - at the end of the year, by brain then has a feeling of accomplishment, I get a mental "lift" from that, I'm momentarily happy, even if not every film during that year satisfied me. But there's a danger involved with this, what happens when there are no more movies to link, what happens when there's a break in the chain, which may be inevitable at some point? Will I feel bad or let down? Probably - it's easier to focus on the "bad" thing in the moment than to look back on the "good" things that were accomplished in the previous five years.
This is where I find myself in my career, also - if I should lose my job or determine that I can't do it any more, then I will probably feel bad, like I failed. But looking back on 30 years of work that got done, 30 years of running animation studios and keeping them afloat, getting things done, that's nothing to sneeze at and it's what I should focus on if the inevitable failure should happen. When I talk about my mental health, I'm really talking about how my career has really messed with my head - I have stress dreams at night that are centered around filmmaking, and it's like I'm working old jobs when I should be relaxing. Last night I had a dream that I was working on a film with a crew on an island somewhere, and the two camera crews needed to be hired, and I had to walk them both through this process of explaining how many scenes they each needed to shoot, and how to divide that number by the number of shoot days, so they knew how many scenes they had to shoot per day. Then there was some problem with the plane not returning to the island every day, because the cinematographer thought that the plane would take the exposed film to the labs every day, and without that happening, how was the film going to get back to the mainland on a regular basis? (I haven't brought film to a lab in almost 30 years, but my brain still thinks this is a problem that needs to be solved...)
If I'm not solving filmmaking problems in the real world, and I'm not solving filmmaking problems in my dreams, then I'm writing blog posts that are pointing out the problems with a film's plot, or I'm looking up where a film was shot, how a film was shot, or musing about how a screenwriter decided to write about a subject that he or she didn't fully understand. So by extension I'm trying to fix the problems that I see in films that were already made - when obviously it's too late to do anything to correct these mistakes. I have to regard this now as a form of sickness, it's something in my brain that I can't switch off. My complaining about the plot points in "Alone Together" is not helpful at this point, they're not going to change the film because I pointed out that Katie Holmes' character said "wine opener" instead of "corkscrew", that's ridiculous. So why the hell do I do this? It's 30 years of programming, and I may need to just stop, because it's really stressing me out. But then, what would I do with my time? Let's face it, I'm in too deep.
Becky Ann Baker carries over from "Alone Together". And I still haven't gotten to the films "Together" and "Together Together". I wish I were kidding.
THE PLOT: When smart but cash-strapped teen Ellie Chu agrees to write a love letter for a jock, she doesn't expect to become his friend - or fall for his crush.
AFTER: I want to hurry and get my review up today, because it's a big day for television - the Puppy Bowl XIX starts airing at 2 pm, and the pre-game show starts an hour before that. I'm kidding (actually I'm not...) because we all know it's Super Bowl Sunday, and I still watch the game even if I'm not rooting for either team, because I want to see the ads. I had a job for over 15 years where I tracked commercials with animation, and I still have that conditioning left over, that I NEED to watch this game and eat a lot of snacks while I do that. It's my JOB, even though it hasn't been my job for about 10 years now. It's another case where things are never going to be what they were before, but just try telling that to my brain. I may need some form of therapy.
Anyway, let's get to the latest film that I'm probably going to try to "fix" even though that's impossible. This is a spin on the classic story of "Cyrano de Bergerac", where a smart, literate person tries to help a not-so-smart person win over the person they love, only to fall in love with that person themselves. What's different is that the film is set in high school, and the smarter person is a teen girl, and if we follow the logic and the plot of the classic story, we can easily predict that Ellie, the smart girl, is going to fall in love with Amber, the girl Paul loves, even though Amber is dating Trig, the most popular boy in school. Wow, this is super trendy, it's a class struggle and an immigration story and it's a coming-out story, and it's kind of like this all needed to happen to breathe some life into an old tale. I support this.
BUT (and you knew I was going to have a BUT, right?) there are still some very clunky bits to the plot here. Ellie, who's in the "Cyrano" role, is in the habit of writing for others, she writes essay papers for other students in her school, and she does this to raise money not just for herself, but for her father, who has a dead-end job running a railroad station in their small town, but he should have been some kind of mechanical engineer, it's his immigrant status and poor English skills that are holding him back. So he just sits around watching old movies, which were meant to help him speak English better, but it's not working out well. We're supposed to root for Ellie, but helping other kids cheat on their homework is still wrong.
There's a teacher who KNOWS her student is writing essays for other people, but doesn't turn her in. Does this make sense? Supposedly the teacher is impressed by Ellie's skills, writing several essays on the same topic without repeating herself, but it's still wrong. The teacher just doesn't want to be bored by reading the terrible essays that the kids would write themselves, but instead is entertained by the different essays that Ellie writes for other students? Yeah, this doesn't make sense, or this is a horrible teacher, and the students aren't being prepared for the adult world if the teacher keeps allowing them to cheat. Huge NITPICK POINT here.
The preface includes this old Greek story from Aristophanes about how humans once had four arms, four legs and two heads, but the Gods split them in half so that they'd spend their whole lives feeling incomplete, and wander around the Earth looking for their other half - I don't think this is meant to be taken seriously, this was a COMEDIC thought that Aristophanes once proposed, certainly we're all not meant to take this as an explanation for love, right? It's a bunch of B.S. somebody thought of thousands of years ago that's still screwing us all up. You, with the two arms and two legs and one head, you can be complete, you don't NEED to find your other half. It's great if you do find a partner, and by all means be happy together, but if you think of yourself as "incomplete" because you're not in a relationship, you're setting yourself up for trouble. Today's "Love Tip", therefore, is to not think of yourself as incomplete if you're not currently in a relationship - stop making yourself feel this way.
The classic films that Ellie's father watched were chosen carefully - they all have love triangles in them. A love triangle is the easiest way to create conflict in a romance film - and obviously the "Cyrano" story uses the same device, but it's a very specific love triangle, one where an identity is concealed, and the smart person uses the dumber one to express their love secretly. I've got another spin on "Cyrano" coming up in a couple days - but ironically, not the 2021 film "Cyrano" with Peter Dinklage, which unfortunately I couldn't link to, so it will have to be watched at a later time. Maybe next February? I support "The Half of It" because it's like "Cyrano de Bergerac" with a fair amount of "Napoleon Dynamite" thrown in, along with bits of "Heathers", "Mean Girls" and let's say "Paper Heart" mixed in.
This film is set in the town of Squahamish, which really sounds like it should be in Washington or Oregon, but it was filmed in upstate New York. Yeah, I looked it up, I can't help it, I need to know this sort of thing. It's all part of the sickness. OK, that's it, grab yourself a "taco sausage" and go watch the Super Bowl or the Puppy Bowl, whichever.
Also starring Leah Lewis, Daniel Diemer, Alexxis Lemire, Wolfgang Novogratz, Collin Chou (last seen in "The Matrix Revolutions"), Enrique Murciano (last seen in "Rough Night"), MacIntyre Dixon (last seen in "Reds"), Catherine Curtin (last seen in "Bad Education"), Patrick T. Johnson, Gabi Samels, Haley Murphy (last seen in "The Kindergarten Teacher"), Patrick Noonan, Dean Tierney, Cronin Cullen, Kathryn Ainsley Grant, Billy Thomas Myott, with archive footage of Humphrey Bogart (last seen in "An Accidental Studio"), Charlie Chaplin (last seen in "Jerry Lewis: The Man Behind the Clown"), Cary Grant (last seen in "Mel Brooks: Unwrapped"), Katharine Hepburn (last seen in "Lucy and Desi") and Rosalind Russell.
RATING: 7 out of 10 bottles of Yakult
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