BEFORE: I spent part of yesterday doing voices for an animated feature, mostly the howls and growls of a giant bug monster. Don't ever believe me if I say I don't lead an interesting life...
Today, March 7, is "Kid Classics" day over at TCM - followed by "Historical" movies after 8 pm. Here's the line-up:
6:00 am "Gulliver's Travels" (1939)
7:30 am "The Green Years" (1946)
9:45 am "David Copperfield" (1935)
12:00 pm "Little Women" (1949)
2:15 pm "The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T" (1953)
4:00 pm "Jungle Book" (1942)
6:00 pm "Tom Sawyer" (1973)
8:00 pm "A Man for All Seasons" (1966)
10:15 pm "Julius Caesar" (1953)
12:30 am "Nicholas and Alexandra" (1971)
3:45 am "Cleopatra" (1934)
5:30 am "Marie Antoinette" (1938)
More bad luck, I've only seen three of these, "A Man for All Seasons", "Julius Caesar", and let's assume I saw "Tom Sawyer" when I was a kid. That's only 3 out of 12, so I'm only up to 40 seen out of 81, and I've dropped below 50%.
Will Arnett carries over from "Monster-in-Law", and I know it seems like "Shotgun Wedding", with both Jennifer Lopez and Josh Duhamel would have been a natural fit here, but it was a late arrival to the list, and adding it would have extended my romance chain a bit too long, so I'm holding off on it for next year, maybe - it's tough to know where to draw that line, but I need to save some films with linking possibilities in order to build a proper chain next year, if there is a next year.
THE PLOT: Beth is a young, ambitious New Yorker who is completely unlucky in love. However, on a whirlwind trip to Rome, she impulsively steals some coins from a reputed fountain of love and is then aggressively pursued by a band of suitors.
AFTER: Well, this one's just silly - not stupid silly like yesterday's film. Well, OK, maybe it is quite stupid silly. This one was on Hulu for the longest time, only I guess it took me a bit too long to program it, because it wasn't there last night when I went to look for it. AND it's not on any other streaming service we subscribe to at the moment, so what a pain, I had to rent it from iTunes. I got lucky with "Green Card" and found it for free on YouTube with Greek subtitles, but no luck tonight, I had to pay extra. I did a quick look to see if there was another film that might link to tomorrow's movie and keep me on track, but I didn't find anything. I've come too far to scrap the whole plan now, with six films left in the romance chain, and I've got five of those on DVD or DVR, and the sixth one is on Tubi. I can't wait to get off this topic!
This film created a whole mythology around the process of throwing coins into a fountain - specifically that one in Rome where people throw coins in and wish for someone to love. (The Trevi fountain?). Beth is in Rome for her sister's wedding and after connecting and then striking out with the best man (she sees him kissing another woman) she decides for some reason to take coins OUT of the fountain. It's a bit of a stretch, she decides there's no such thing as love so she's going to "save" four people from their wishes by removing their coins. Umm, yeah, this just isn't how fountains work. And in doing this, she accidentally triggers some weird old magic where the four people who threw those coins in fall in love with her, even though they've never met her, even if they don't know what's happening.
NITPICK POINT: People come to Rome from all over the world, and sure, perhaps they all throw coins in fountains based on local legends. But what are the odds that the five coins (OK, four coins and a poker chip) that she chooses were all thrown in there by people from New York? And that she would encounter all of those people when she returned back home? People in NYC tend to stick to just a few neighborhoods, but not Beth - she's all over town, in Central Park, at the Guggenheim, and JUST the right cafés to encounter the men who tossed those coins into the fountain. Umm, yeah, sure. And what would have happened if a woman had thrown in one of those coins? Or someone who lived in, say, Seattle? It feels like a lot of comedic short-cuts here to bring about a certain result, and I'm not sure this whole trip was worth the effort.
I'm sorry, I'm making all this much more complicated than it needs to be, I wish I could just switch off my brain and try to enjoy the ride, but I don't think I have that in me. I just want every film to WORK and if the story is all clunky or far-fetched, or in this case, BOTH, I'm going to point all that out. Beth assumes that the poker chip from the fountain belongs to Nick, who she's starting to have genuine feelings for, but now she's convinced that he's also under some kind of spell, and when she returns the coins to the fountain, the love and attention from Nick's going to go away, when she really just wants the attention from the other four weirdos to stop.
Did you spot it? The ridiculously simple solution to the problem? It's RIGHT THERE. Even if these five dudes could be controlled by a magic fountain-based love spell, and Beth's problem is that five men are hopelessly enchantedly in love with her, but she only likes one of them, here's the quick fix. She could just give back the four coins to the four men she doesn't care for and NOT give back the poker chip to Nick. Problem solved. But then she would always feel guilty for manipulating him and she'd always doubt whether Nick's feelings for her were real, or part of the spell. Jes-US, take the win already! Now this one's on her, she's making the situation much more complicated than it needs to be, just marry Nick and ride that train to the end of the line and get over yourself.
I can't help but think this is all some giant metaphor for something, only I'm not sure what it is or how it's supposed to work. Is the magic coin some symbol for early love, which interests us and keeps us busy and can't possibly last in that state for long BUT any kind of long-lasting relationship has to go through that initial freshman stage, and you hope that it develops and turns into something greater and longer-lasting. "Nature's first green is gold, her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf's a flower, but only so an hour." That's from the Robert Frost poem "Nothing Gold Can Stay", I remember it from high school English class. There's some truth to that when applied to relationships.
Anyway, I've already made too much of this - the four losing suitors are dismissed when Beth returns their coins, in a manner similar to Dorothy saying farewell to her companions at the end of "The Wizard of Oz". I can't help but wonder if the real point here wasn't to get THESE four actors together on-screen and into a tiny Italian car for comic effect. Jon Heder did well as a weird street magician (think David Blaine or Criss Angel) and Danny DeVito perfectly cast as the Sausage King of NY, Will Arnett was a bit over-the-top as the too-Italian caricature artist and then of course there's a HUGE inside joke because the narcissistic male model Gale is played by Dax Shepard, who's married to Kristen Bell in real life.
All the way through, what this movie suffers from is a need to over-explain everything - it feels like 90% of the dialogue is exposition, right from the start. I mean, of course you have to introduce the characters and explain how they're all connected to each other, but this process continues for the whole film, it JUST. DOESN'T. STOP. They over-explain the restaurant that serves food in the dark, they over-explain the process of booking art for a museum show, they over-explain the fact that Nick got hit by lightning in the middle of a football game, and what that means. Just please, for one minute, stop explaining everything! If you think the process of undoing a love spell caused by taking coins out of a fountain is complicated, really, the film's just getting warmed up at that point. The removal of British troops from Dunkirk seems relatively simple by comparison.
Also starring Kristen Bell (last seen in "Hit and Run"), Josh Duhamel (last seen in "Fire With Fire"), Alexis Dziena (last seen in "Fool's Gold"), Peggy Lipton (last seen in "Quincy"), Luca Calvani (last seen in "The Man from "U.N.C.L.E."), Jon Heder (last seen in "Just Like Heaven"), Danny DeVito (last seen in "The Sparks Brothers"), Dax Shepard (also last seen in "Hit and Run"), Anjelica Huston (last seen in "The French Dispatch"), Kate Micucci (last seen in "I Used to Go Here"), Don Johnson (last seen in "A Good Old Fashioned Orgy"), Lee Pace (last seen in "Driven"), Bobby Moynihan (last seen in "Killing Gunther"), Kristen Schaal (last heard in "The Bob's Burgers Movie"), Alexa Havins (last seen in "Professor Marston & the Wonder Women"), Francesco de Vito (last seen in "The Young Messiah"), Keir O'Donnell (last seen in "The Runaways"), Judith Malina, Brian Golub, Natalie Joy Johnson, Eugene Cordero (last seen in "The High Note"), Charlie Sanders, Eric Zuckerman, Geoffrey Cantor (last seen in "Man on a Ledge"), with cameos from Shaquille O'Neal (last seen in "Hustle"), Lawrence Taylor (last seen in "Shaft" (2000)), Efren Ramirez (last heard in "Lightyear"), Ghostface Killah (last seen in "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story").
RATING: 4 out of 10 sets of night-vision goggles
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