BEFORE: Just time for a quick post, I'm off to work at the SAG Awards tonight - OK, it's a simulcast of the SAG Awards, being held in a Manhattan theater, but it's a chance for the SAG actors on the East Coast to gather together and watch the broadcast together. So there's a chance of spotting some celebs in person today, could be a fun event to work. March should be a busier month for me, I've got some 12-hour or longer shifts coming up when film festival season starts, so there's a chance to make some extra money, but then I also heard rumors that the theater will be closed again this summer to finish the roof work they started last summer. So one way or another, I've got to start looking for another job this summer, if only to keep me busy and out of trouble for a couple of months.
Bruce Altman carries over from "The Object of My Affection".
THE PLOT: Two bipolar patients meet in a psychiatric hospital and begin a romance that brings out all of the beauty and horror of their condition.
AFTER: Hindsight is always 20/20 - I'm looking back on the schedule now and thinking, Katie Holmes was in "Alone Together", why didn't I put this film next to THAT one? And Griffin Dunne was also in "Last Night", why didn't I connect to that? For that matter, Michael Cera was in "Gloria Bell" and "Person to Person" - but I remember trying out a chain with those two films adjacent, and it just didn't work. I can't follow every connection, because I'm limited to one per night, and there really are more connections than there are slots, at least some of the time. And some connections just can't happen because then there would be some films I want to get to that would be stranded, not connected to anything, so I kind of have to focus on some of the lesser connections just to get those films watched.
I tried a few dozen paths through my romance films, and I have to tell myself that I probably landed on the best one, or at least the one that's going to clear a lot of the lingering films away, also one that's focused on clearing my DVR, although maybe it will never be clear, I can still work toward that as a goal - and the chain that ends in a good place and will help me link to something for St. Patrick's Day. That's all important, more important than putting the two Katie Holmes films together, I think. Once I start second-guessing my progress, that way madness lies.
I don't mean madness in a clinical way, which happens to be the topic of the film today. This depicts two people with bipolar disorder who meet in a hospital therapy group, and they're also poets, one a published poet and the other a performing "improvisational" poet (aka a white rapper). Ideally there would be some kind of point made here about the dual nature of artists, or something that all artists might emotionally share in common, but I'm not quite sure what the point is. A lot of comparisons are made to Van Gogh, as if to suggest that the two things, madness and artistry, went hand-in-hand for him, therefore by extension they might be joined together for a great number of people, but I'm not sure if this is accurate either.
The problem here seems to be that film is a visual medium - and how can a filmmaker best express, visually, the highs and lows of this condition? During the low periods the characters are just lying in bed, staring out into space, almost catatonic, and that's not very visual, it doesn't really tell us much about what they're going through, does it? It's the opposite of activity, how do you depict that? And then during their creative, manic periods, what do they do? Here it's a lot of running - running away from the hospital, running away from people, and then they go camping. Ugh, I hate camping - I'd almost rather watch the lead characters in bed, staring into space than to see them around a campfire with smores on a stick. Sure, they go hiking, they go swimming in a river, it's...nice, but that's not visually interesting either. There are also shots of them running past giant Van Gogh paintings, it's probably the most interesting part of the film, but that only goes so far, too.
It's kind of like a 100-minute version of a pharmaceutical commercial, where you have people talking about their symptoms, and then we see those people doing the outdoor activities that they couldn't do before because they had plaque psoriasis or extreme constipation or diabetes, and now that they're taking the medication, they can go windsurfing or play cornhole or drive along the Pacific Coast. The one thing that the lead characters do here that you probably WON'T see in a pharmaceutical ad is they throw their medication away into a fountain in the park. Yeah, Big Pharma doesn't want you to do that.
There's a sun/moon thing going on here symbolically, since Marco prefers to be called "Luna" and Carla had an issue with staring directly into the sun. I get it, the woman is the sun and the man is the moon, or he's the "Man in the Moon". The woman gives off light, and the moon reflects it - and we learn some very wrong things about astronomy when a mental patient says that you can't see both of these objects at the same time - which is totally wrong. You can see the moon during the day, if you know where to look, because the moon revolves around the Earth, not the sun, and it's not always on the opposite side of the Earth as the sun is. Very often both objects are visible during the day, it's just EASIER to see the moon at night. Perhaps it's best not to learn astronomy from people in a mental hospital.
Marco also believes that he's not an earthling, he sees himself more like "The Little Prince", and Carla wants to find out what the "trigger" was that caused her condition, but don't hold your breath because if she doesn't get an answer about this, then neither do we. These two celestial objects do occupy the sky at the same time, but since they're in different orbits I guess they're fated to drift apart? Actually that was very unclear, too, what happens at the end of the film - I don't think they end up together, but because of the inconsistent editing and lack of a linear structure I'm not really sure. The director appears in a cameo as one of the patients, and he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, too - I wonder if he was too close to the subject matter to properly explain the plot points in a coherent fashion. Don't assume that we can all figure out what's going on, at some point everything needs to be made clear.
"Roomance" has been an ongoing theme here for the last few days - people who share space also spend time together, and that can lead to some form of relationship, that's clear. Characters shared apartments in "The Night We Never Met" and "The Object of My Affection" before getting involved with each other, this also happened in "Sweet November", though reluctantly at first, and now two people living in the same mental hospital got together, at least for a short time. From a screenwriting standpoint, this all feels a bit like putting the cart before the horse, some kind of shortcut, because in the real world most people usually date for a time before they share living space. Let's see if this pops up again in any of the 15 romance films left in the chain.
Also starring Katie Holmes (last seen in "Alone Together"), Luke Kirby (last seen in "Shattered Glass"), Christine Lahti (last seen in "Miss Firecracker"), Griffin Dunne (last seen in "Last Night"), Alex Manette (last seen in "You Were Never Really Here"), Edward Gelbinovich, Daniel Gerroll (last seen in "Still Alice"), Genevieve Adams, Rob Leo Roy (last seen in "No Reservations"), Maryann Urbano (last seen in "Happythankyoumoreplease"), Patrick Byas, Roca, Jennifer Falu, Paul Dallio, Ted Sod, Catherine Combs (last seen in "13 Going on 30"), Annie Golden (last seen in "Prelude to a Kiss"), Russell G. Jones, Chaske Spencer (last seen in "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2"), Kay Jamison, Wayne Wilcox (last seen in "Rent"), Erick Abbate (last heard in "My Life as a Zucchini").
RATING: 4 out of 10 hecklers at the poetry slam.
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