BEFORE: Well, I spent my last day of freedom (for a while, anyway) out on Long Island, we headed out so my wife could buy cigarettes and then we did some shopping and had lunch in one of the area's many fine diners. BUT, before lunch I ducked into the Native American smoke shop that my wife frequents and saw they sell pot now, which is suddenly legal somehow. I've heard various things, however, about certain shops just pretending to sell pot, like the touristy ones near Times Square don't OFFICIALLY sell pot, just pot-flavored lollipops and pot-scented vapes and stuff like that. So mostly it's a rip-off to get more money from clueless tourists.
BUT, I figured I could trust this smoke shop to sell the real deal - she buys cigarettes there and they're real tobacco, just cheaper than the name brands. So I splurged on a chocolate bar that contains cannabinoids, whatever that means, and I figured I'd give it a whirl - I haven't had any type of marijuana in over 30 years, back in the NYU days. Though I never really felt stoned back then, so it's possible that my clueless dorm-mates had just fallen for the classic "oregano switcheroo" scam run by the dealers in Washington Square Park. But this was a real, pot-infused candy bar I was holding in my hands yesterday, so I kind of felt like a stoner Charlie Bucket - I asked the clerk for some advice, because I was about to be taking my first recreational drugs in three decades. She said to just take a little bit, until I knew what affect it would have on me, because I guess weed is more potent than it used to be back in the late 1980's.
So I got back home, and this thing was segmented just like a regular Hershey bar, into little rectangles. I figured I'd take eat half of a rectangle and wait for the fun to begin - then I did the math, the whole bar contained 600 mg of cannabinoids, and one little rectangle was 1/12 of the bar, so 50 mg. I'd eaten half of that, or 25 mg, before finding out online that as a newbie I should start out with 5 mg or 10 mg. Now I panicked, I'd clearly taken too much to start, but after a half-hour I felt nothing. After an hour, same thing. So I ate the rest of that little rectangle, and again nothing. Then I flashed back to college, when the pot didn't seem to affect me - so I figure I've either got some kind of superhuman tolerance, or I fell for a scam myself yesterday and paid $40 for a regular Hershey bar. I had to work early on Sunday, so I couldn't experiment with more of the chocolate bar, I'll have to wait for next weekend to eat maybe two squares to see if the drugs kick in, or if I got hosed. I switched over to drinking beer just to feel SOMETHING, and also so I'd be sleepy enough to get to bed early and up and out by 7:45 am on Sunday.
Toni Collette carries over from "Dinner with Friends". And I've been SO busy with work and chasing down pot-infused chocolate bars that I've neglected posting the annual "31 Days of Oscar" line-ups from Turner Classic Movies - this is one of my favorite things to do, to keep track of how many I've seen, and now here we are, five days into March, and I just couldn't be bothered. Should I go BACK and add all these line-ups to my posts, or just forge on ahead from here? Or should I abstain and just forget about it this time around? I don't think I can do that...
Today, March 5, is "Romance" day over at TCM - huh, that's funny, it's been "Romance" day here at the Movie Year for 33 days straight now. Stop copying me, TCM! Here's the line-up:
6:15 am "Brief Encounter" (1945)
8:00 am "Now, Voyager" (1942)
10:15 am "An Affair to Remember" (1957)
12:30 pm "Doctor Zhivago" (1965)
4:00 pm "Gone with the Wind" (1939)
8:00 pm "Casablanca" (1942)
10:00 pm "The Way We Were" (1973)
12:15 am "Lost in Translation" (2003)
2:15 am "Marty" (1955)
4:00 am "Camille" (1937)
Most of the day will be over by the time I post this, so I realize this schedule isn't going to do you much good, this is really for my own record-keeping. I've seen all of these EXCEPT for "Brief Encounter" and "Camille", so I'm off to a great start, 8 seen out of 10, or 80%. But now I have to go back and look at the line-ups for March 1 to March 4 - so it won't stay at 80%. My running total for the first 5 days of March is really 35 out of 56, or 62.5%. Hey, if you want to waste four hours of broadcast time on a Sunday by running "Gone with the Wind" for the 873rd time, by all means, go ahead. But I watched it years ago so I would NEVER have to watch it again.
THE PLOT: A young man's life is thrown for a loop when he is asked to be a pallbearer for the funeral of a classmate he doesn't remember and his old high school crush temporarily returns to town.
AFTER: This was the first feature directed by Matt Reeves, who would go on to direct "Cloverfield", two "Planet of the Apes" movies and eventually the most recent "Batman" film, the one with Robert Pattinson, which is already being retconned away by James Gunn's plan for the future DC Movie Universe - even though there's a sequel coming up, it's going to be part of something called "DC Legends", meaning it takes place in a different part of the multiverse. The Star Wars books that were set after "Return of the Jedi" with Han and Leia staying together and raising three kids, now those didn't happen, but they're still being published as "Star Wars Legends".
This is a romance in that people do date and perhaps have feelings for each other, but ultimately this one belongs in the "It's complicated" section, because there are SO many cases of mistaken identity and SO many times when people just can't seem to get on the same page. Whether this then feels "real" to you or even close to real then sort of depends on your own experiences. Perhaps as a younger man or woman you experienced a time when everything was confusing, nothing was certain and even if you liked somebody, you weren't sure how to act or what to say or even if the whole process was worth the effort in the grand scheme of things. Yeah, I feel you.
Tom gets contacted by Mrs. Abernathy about the death of his classmate, Bill Abernathy - only Tom doesn't remember Bill at all, and the yearbook's no help because apparently Bill was absent on Class Picture Day. (WHY is this only ONE day at every school? Sure, I realize that there are a lot of schools and only so many companies that work in this arena, but still, if somebody missed class picture day on Monday, cameras still work on Tuesday and Wednesday and explain to me why somebody can't have their picture taken later on...it's just laziness, right?). Bil also left his car in his will to his "best friend, Tom" only funny story, that was a totally different Tom, I guess estate lawyers aren't big on last names?
So Tom gets roped in to being a pallbearer at Bill's wedding, also he gets roped in to delivering the eulogy, and then later on he gets roped in to cheering up Mrs. Abernathy, in a sexual way. Which is weird because that's not usually part of the grieving process for people's mothers, for them to sleep with their dead son's best friend. But whatever works, I guess. Something tells me that Tom has some kind of problem with saying "No" to people, he's kind of a doormat. But how do you give a eulogy for someone that you don't even remember? It's a lot like writing a book report if you didn't read the book - so Tom fakes it, and it does NOT go well.
Julie DeMarco doesn't remember Bill either, and I think she dated him - hey, maybe Bill was just a forgettable kind of guy. But this bothers everyone that they can't remember Bill, because it's a reminder that someday we're all going to die, and then at some point after that, nobody will remember us because we never did much that was worth remembering, or even if we did, those people who remember those things will also die someday, and that will be that. You're only truly dead when there's nobody still alive who remembers you.
Tom remembers Julie, only Julie doesn't remember Tom - or she thinks he's someone else, I'm not sure. But these are the two characters we want to see get on the same page, the only things standing in the way are Tom's insecurity and awkwardness and the fact that he's still sleeping with Bill's mother. (What could POSSIBLY go wrong?) The question remains, however: is this film referencing "The Graduate" or is just another film with a love triangle involving a college-age man and an older woman? And then for good measure, there's a love quadrangle added into the mix when Scott and Cynthia come along on a double date with Tom and Julie, only Scott connects with Julie and throws everything into question.
Also starring David Schwimmer (last seen in "The Laundromat"), Gwyneth Paltrow (last seen in "Mortdecai"), Michael Rapaport (last seen in "Higher Learning"), Carol Kane (last seen in "Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond"), Michael Vartan (last seen in "Colombiana"), Bitty Schram (last seen in "The Night We Never Met"), Jean De Baer (last seen in "A Perfect Murder"), Elizabeth Franz (last seen in "Sabrina"), Mark Margolis (last seen in "Tales from the Darkside: The Movie"), Barbara Hershey (last seen in "Breakfast of Champions"), Edoardo Ballerini (last seen in "I Shot Andy Warhol"), Matthew Faber (last seen in "Bob Roberts"), Robin Morse (last seen in "For Keeps?"), Tony Machine, Robert Katims (last seen in "Mulholland Drive"), David Vadim (last seen in "The Last Thing He Wanted"), Joseph D'Onofrio, Todd Schrenk, Joel Y. Zion, with cameos from Greg Grunberg (last seen in "Connie and Carla"), Zak Orth (last seen in "Down to You"), Kevin Corrigan (last seen in "Walking and Talking")
RATING: 5 out of 10 vinyl records (hey, it's 1996 - plus they may come back in style one day)
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