Unplugging

Year 15, Day 47 - 2/16/23 - Movie #4,348

BEFORE: I'm not even halfway through the romance chain, but I have to start thinking about what comes after - I had the chain worked out up to TWO Irish-themed films for St. Patrick's Day, but what happens after that?  I've got an Easter film left from two years ago (I couldn't link to it last time) and I think that if I can get to "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever" a few days after St. Pat's, I've got not one but TWO paths that get me to Easter in the right number of days. There's some overlap, fortunately with a bunch of cool films that I definitely want to see sooner and not later.  But OK, THEN what?

The Easter film has an intro, just not much of an outro - the only thing I can link to is a documentary, but then do I program a bunch of docs or just get straight to "Top Gun: Maverick"?  It's a dilemma - I usually save my Rock & Doc Block for summer, but the linking's kind of telling me that maybe it should be in April. I guess it all depends on how much time I need to get to something for Mother's Day, and there's just no way to figure that out right now.  I'll have to table this discussion until late March or early April - maybe I can do a small doc chain in the spring and then another one in summer?  Maybe I'll never do another 40-film doc chain like last year ever again, so I should just work them in wherever I can.  It's a stumper.

Lea Thompson carries over from "Sierra Burgess Is a Loser".

THE PLOT: To revive their marriage and reconnect, a couple takes a self-prescribed digital detox weekend to a remote mountain town. What starts as a perfect weekend getaway without technology quickly spirals out of control. 

AFTER: This is one of those films that "means well" - as in it definitely has a point to make, and that point may even be an important one, namely that some of us are spending so much time on our phones, what with work e-mails, personal e-mails, texts, updating our calendars, buying stuff, booking flights and hotels, finding a place to eat dinner, trying to figure out where we've seen that actor before, paying the cable bill, checking our bank balance, and then don't even get me started on all the great games and all the movies to watch on those streaming apps. Does anybody even remember what life was like before we used our phones for everything?  It's got to be affecting our relationships, and if it's not all that time your significant other spends on their phone that's bugging you, it's probably that STUPID ring tone they have, you know the one, or it's that you don't "get" the videos they watch on YouTube, where people just unwrap stuff or describe how other people play video games. I mean, what IS the point?

Umm, but THAT'S the point of this movie, and I'm not saying the movie's wrong, but the message is buried under so much lame comedy and so many dead-end subplots that go nowhere, how are we even supposed to FIND the message?  Jeez, the Wiki page for this movie doesn't even give a breakdown of the plot, as if to say, "Wait, there was a PLOT?"  Well, no, not really. A couple goes on a vacation to a place where there's bad cell service, that hardly counts as a plot.  There are also a bunch of drones flying around, and the locals act weird, so you might think that there's some secret military thing going on, or aliens have taken over the town, or everyone's a Russian spy - it's none of those things, but any of those things would have been better.  This is just a place in Oklahoma or Indiana or something where there's bad reception, and these two married people end up going bonkers because of it. 

They steal a car, they almost kill a chicken, they shoplift from a gas station - not their finest moments, to be sure.  Admittedly, they're concerned about their daughter that they left with her grandmother because they found their daughter's inhaler in the car, and the last half-message they received before their phones died was something about going to the hospital.  But is that enough reason to panic and cause damage to themselves and others, just because they DON'T know for sure what's going on back in Chicago?  Umm, no it doesn't. Maybe if I had kids, I might feel differently, but then again, maybe not. Dumb plot is dumb plot. 

The whole thing started because of a funeral, the husband was friends with the UPS guy, because he's got an artisanal hot sauce business and the UPS guy made frequent pick-ups.  The UPS guy died, and this maybe made the husband realize that he himself was mortal, and too much of his life and his time and his wife's time was being spent on the phone.  Yeah, it's a bit of a stretch - you'd think that someone's death might encourage you to get a better career because you realize your own personal clock is ticking, but this guy chose to instead push for a weekend in the country re-connecting with his wife, without any devices.  That was the plan, anyway.

His wife is the total opposite, she works for a commercial real estate leasing company or something, and she's on the phone all day every day, if she can't sleep she's sending out company e-mails in the middle of the night, and in fact she's TOO eager around the office, the head of HR got complaints about a JibJab video she sent, so she's invited to take a couple of weeks off to decompress and maybe develop a less eager approach to work.  Yeah, I find it hard to believe that a company would ask someone to stop working so eagerly, but that's where we find ourselves with this story.  

Again, this is NOT about the struggle to stay married, that part's sort of never in question - these two kind of deserve each other, despite being opposites. (Umm, opposites attract, right?). It's about how some people have let the phones come between them, because any time spent on your phone is time that you're NOT connecting with your partner.  But then, if you had to quit using your phone cold turkey, you probably wouldn't know how to do anything, and you'd also go a little mad from withdrawal - all those apps on your phone reward you with SOMETHING, whether it's "likes" or an in-game reward, or that movie you've been dying to see, or just seeing someone who isn't you falling down.  If you stop getting those little rewards, it's going to be a letdown, I'm just saying.  We've all come too far to stop now - sure, get off social media if you can, but you'll be back if you can't find satisfaction and gratification somewhere else. 

This movie grossed just $52 thousand last year, and if not for taking suggestions from Hulu, I never would have heard of it.  I'm entertaining the possibility that I might be the first person to both watch AND review this film, simply nobody else cares.  I get it, there's not anything here to really draw anybody in.  Essentially, since it's about city people having awkward interactions with the local yokels, this is just a re-packaged version of "Schitt's Creek", which itself was a re-packaged version of "Green Acres". Right? 

Also starring Matt Walsh (last seen in "Brigsby Bear"), Eva Longoria (last seen in "Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It"), Keith David (last seen in "Gamer"), Nicole Byer (last heard in "The Bob's Burgers Movie"), Al Madrigal (last seen in "Morbius"), Johnny Pemberton (last seen in "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story"), Hala Finley, Joel Kim Booster (last seen in "The Week Of"), Tina Parker (last seen in "The Ridiculous 6"), Brad Morris (last seen in "Bombshell"), Stacie Greenwell (last seen in "Vice" (2018)), Gail Cronauer (last seen in "Dr. T and the Women"), Krista Perry, Heath McGough (last seen in "Please Stand By"), Lureena Cornwell, Anthony Parker, Nancy Friedrich, Morgan Walsh, Emmett Walsh, Pat Walsh, 

RATING: 3 out of 10 Chinese conspiracy theories