BEFORE: John Krasinski carries over from "Something Borrowed" and now I'm really getting close to the end of the romance chain - just THREE films left on this topic after tonight, I can't wait. Still using episodes of "Andor" and "The Mandalorian" to break things up so I don't go completely bonkers - I'm really ready to pack up this topic for the next 11 months.
It's Day 10 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, and today's themes are "Teens on Screen" (before 8 pm) and "Science Fiction" (after 8 pm). Here's the line-up:
10:00 am "Janie" (1944)
12:00 pm "The Human Comedy" (1943)
2:00 pm "Strike Up the Band" (1940)
4:00 pm "The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer" (1947)
6:00 pm "Rebel Without a Cause" (1955)
8:00 pm "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" (1977)
10:30 pm "2001" (1968)
1:15 am "The Time Machine" (1960)
3:15 am "Destination Moon" (1950)
5:00 am "Forbidden Planet" (1956)
Well, at least today they're speaking my language. I've seen 6 out of these 10: "The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer" (because I did a whole Cary Grant thing), "Rebel Without a Cause" (because I did a whole James Dean thing), and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", "2001", "The Time Machine" and "Forbidden Planet", because that's my jam, I'm a sci-fi geek. So I'm now at 57 seen out of 114, or exactly 50%.
THE PLOT: A family's relaxed dynamic is tested after they take in a young artist so she can complete her art film.
AFTER: Well, this was a weird little film, from back in 2012, it was nominated for 2 Jury Prizes at Sundance, but that's not how I heard about it. Come to think of it, I'm not really sure how I did learn about it, it must have been from those monthly e-mails that I get from IMDB telling me what's new on the streaming services at the start of each month. But it's strange, I didn't get one for March 2023 - I thought maybe that was because February was a short month, and so it would probably arrive a couple days after March 1, because somebody got caught off guard by the short month. Nope, it's March 10 and I STILL haven't received one for March, so I'm left to conclude that either someone in charge of this is on vacation (or quit their job...) or perhaps it's not a very big month for films debuting on streaming services. Probably the latter, there's a bit of a dead zone in the streaming world right now.
It's not the movie I was expecting, perhaps, but I'm going to take it, because the world sort of brought it to me, HOW is not important. What's important is that I take what life brings to me and that I try to make the best of that, whatever it is. Kind of like lunch today, I saw that the Smashburger on the corner was offering two-for-one fish sandwiches today, it being a Friday during Lent and all, so I walked into the Smashburger and ordered one, therefore TWO fish sandwiches - no fries, no tots, no drink, because that's how they GET you. And I really wanted to maximize the savings here, if I bought a bunch of extra stuff then they start making their money back, right? OK, so two fish sandwiches, but I asked if I could get pickles on them instead of sliced tomatoes. (Seriously? Who puts tomatoes on FISH? Pickles are better, right?)
Five minutes went by, ten minutes went by, and I noticed the kitchen staff were MAKING a lot of burgers and fish sandwiches, but not GIVING anything to the people waiting. There was activity, sure, a lot of moving food around, sliding it down to the next person, but not a lot was getting DONE. Then they threw out all the fries and tots that had been sitting around waiting for burgers, they'd all grown cold after waiting for burgers that just weren't coming. One guy waiting for his lunch lost it and started screaming, because his lunch hour was almost over and he still hadn't gotten any food. The food preparers seemed to be doing a bunch of repetitive yet useless tasks, clearly they'd been trained to do things a certain way and they didn't feel comfortable rushing things, they were like human robots who could only do certain things in certain sequences - however, the whole point of a restaurant is to get the food to the hungry people, and for whatever reason, it just wasn't happening. Eventually my order came up in the queue, and two fish sandwiches were wrapped, but I could see as they wrapped them that one had tomatoes on it, which I did NOT want. I took it anyway, because it was getting so late in the day, and vowed to never return to that restaurant.
"Nobody Walks" is kind of like that, it's the fish sandwich with tomatoes that you didn't want at first - but I'm so close to the end of the romance chain that I'm going to try to just take the sandwich life has given me and not complain about it. Not much, anyway, I still HAVE to complain, I just DID complain about it to you, but at some point I'm going to stop. I ate the fish sandwiches, even the one with tomatoes, and I lived to tell the tale, so life could be a lot worse, I could be starving or I could still be waiting at Smashburger for my lunch. I could be poor and unable to afford one fish sandwich, let alone two, but I'm not, so clearly things could always be worse than they are.
As the film points out, marriage is complicated. Here a couple's marriage is rocked when a "free spirit" of a young woman comes to stay with them while the husband, Peter, helps her with the sound design for her film about ants. Yes, ants. Should the ants speak English? Should they talk in the ant language, and if so, what does that sound like? Should there just be ambient noise throughout the film, or synthesizer music, or what? All good questions, but none of them really get answered because Peter is attracted to Martine and they, you know, end up doing it. Well, I guess that should be expected when you invite an attractive young free spirit into your home.
At the same time, Julie, Peter's wife, who is some kind of therapist or shrink, has to deal with a patient who says he's been having sex dreams about her. To some degree I think this is natural, to have feelings for your therapist, but this guy is very explicit about it, and later in the film when he bumps into Julie at a party he puts the moves on her, and she doesn't stop him, at least, not right away. This kind of becomes a breach of ethics at some point - Julie didn't nip this in the bud during their sessions, as she should have. It's still not her fault, the patient's a total creepozoid, but she maybe could have handled her reactions to it in a better way.
Julie also has her ex-husband, Leroy, over for dinner, and he's some kind of famous or semi-famous musician. Leroy and Julie have two kids together, so yeah, it's important to maintain a good relationship with the father of your children, even if you're no longer together, I get that, but it's also not cool to have your ex-husband over for dinner and get along so well with him, right in front of your current husband. This kind of hearkens back to what happened in "Gloria Bell" a few weeks ago, when Gloria ignored her current boyfriend and chose to go through an old photo album with her ex during her son's birthday party. I'm also thinking back to "Juliet, Naked", which was another movie that featured an aging rock star who has several children but is also no longer married to their mother. So I'm kind of tying a few of this year's running romance themes together with this one.
At the same time, Julie and Leroy's daughter, Kolt, is pining for attention from Peter's assistant, David, who seems to be a few years older than her, and also getting lessons in conversational Italian from a guy who's a LOT older than her. And this reminds me of yesterday's film, "Something Borrowed" where each person was in love with one other person who didn't love them back, and that person was in love with another person, in a 5 or 6-person chain. Here Marcello has a thing for Kolt, who's got a thing for David, who's got a thing for Martine, who's sleeping with Peter, who's married to Julie, who's getting some weird attraction thing from her patient, Billy. It's just like that old J. Geils Band song that had the lyrics "You love her, but she loves him, and he loves somebody else, you just can't win." That song was called "Love Stinks".
But, umm, how old was the daughter, Kolt? The actress was 18 at the time of the film's release, but how old is her character supposed to be here? It's kind of important. If she's still in high school pining for a college kid, this makes sense, but it also makes the weird flirtation she's having with her Italian teacher very creepy. And if she's 16 or under, it's extremely creepy, like disgustingly so.
Also, what's with the title? Does it literally mean that nobody walks, like everybody in L.A. drives everywhere? Is it from the song "Walking in L.A." by Missing Persons, which has the line "Nobody walks in L.A."? Or does it mean that nobody walks away from a relationship without getting hurt? Based on the plot synopsis on Wikipedia, I think it's the latter.
One thing that the film really gets right is the voice-over recording session - the actors get frustrated when Martine doesn't really give them any constructive advice on how to speak the dialogue of the ants for the film. What's really weird is that just four days ago, I was also recording dialogue and sounds for a film, and I was also providing the voice for a bug. What a weird coincidence. As a part-time voice actor, I can confirm that this really does happen - the director could give you very little instruction or a lot of instructions that aren't helpful - I don't know why directors can't just give simple commands like "louder" or "softer" or "higher" or "lower", I guess most of the time they don't even know what they want until they hear it, or they don't. I tried to create the sounds this giant bug would make just based on what he looks like, and that's not an easy thing to do. But if it were easy, then I suppose anybody could do it.
Also starring Olivia Thirlby (last seen in "Being Flynn"), Rosemarie DeWitt (last seen in "The Professor"), India Ennenga (last seen in "Charlie Says"), Dylan McDermott (last seen in "King Richard"), Justin Kirk (last seen in "Molly's Game"), Rhys Wakefield (last seen in "The Purge"), Emanuele Secci (last seen in "The Hundred-Foot Journey"), Sam Lerner (last seen in "Envy"), Mason Welch, Jane Levy (last seen in "Frank and Cindy"), Anthony Saludares, Samantha Ressler (last seen in "Home Again"), Emma Dumont (last seen in "Licorice Pizza"), Lucy Engelman, Chet Grissom (also last seen in "King Richard"), Blaise Godbe Lipman, Joshua Polit, Carlos Velazquez.
RATING: 4 out of 10 glow-in-the-dark stars on the walls of a kid's bedroom
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