BEFORE: Well, I've got a lot of time this holiday weekend, since we decided not to drive up to Massachusetts my parents, as the traffic would be a nightmare in both directions - it could easily take 8 or 10 hours each way, based on what we encountered last Thanksgiving, so really, that would leave like maybe ONE day with them in-between the two travel days, so what would be the point? We're going to drive up in early June instead, but travel mid-week, that may be easier.
I'm working at the theater tomorrow, just an afternoon screening of "The Little Mermaid", it was going to be a double-feature but now it's just one-and-done. Just like on Mother's Day, everyone else at the theater wanted the holiday off, so I'm happy to pick up the shift and work by myself. So the rest of the weekend, now that I've worked out my linking through July 4, will be devoted to movies and also clearing some TV shows off the DVR. I watched 5 episodes of "Chopped", the recent tournament featuring active members of the four military branches (but still, I've got like 67 episodes taking up space...) and my wife and I also began season 2 of "BBQ Showdown" on Netflix. So TV, BBQ and the military, yeah that sounds about right for Memorial Day Weekend. I've got a big military movie coming up in two days, you can probably guess what it is, as I'm still working through the blockbusters from last year. (As of the halfway mark for 2023, I'll have watched 30 films with 2022 release dates - that's not bad, about 20% of my films being just a year old. Another 23 films were from 2021, another 11 from 2020 and 3 from 2023.)
Blake Lively carries over from "The Rhythm Section" to a film from 2018. I did have one more Jude Law film, but it's been moved to June - it's needed there to help me get to Father's Day. You'll see.
THE PLOT: Stephanie is a single mother with a parenting vlog who befriends Emily, a secretive upper-class woman who has a child at the same elementary school. When Emily goes missing, Stephanie takes it upon herself to investigate.
AFTER: The year this film was released kind of tells the whole tale - it came out four years after "Gone Girl" from 2014. That's just about enough time for some studio to jump on board a trend and follow up a very popular movie with a very similar movie that they were hoping would be equally as popular. But obviously I'm making a comparison to THAT film for a reason, but come on, no spoilers here, you're going to have to watch this one cold so you can try to figure it out yourself.
But there is a woman who goes missing, Emily Nelson - before that happens, she becomes friends with Stephanie because their sons go to school together, and they drink martinis together and they share their deepest secrets and maybe they even make out a bit - you know, as women do when they're alone together, or is that just what men imagine they do? Stephanie also gets a peek into Emily's marriage and of course that's a tricky thing, it seems solid and Emily's husband turns out to be the author of a book that Stephanie read in her book club, though he never followed it up with another one. Probably because he was too busy trying to keep his crazy marriage together?
Yeah, a lot of information comes at Stephanie (and by extension, the audience) pretty quickly, and there are so many different stories being told that they can't all possibly be real, especially because some of them seem to contradict each other. Is Emily a good person, a bad person, a sane person or a crazy person? Then when she asks Stephanie for a simple favor, to pick up her son from school, it leads to other questions, like are they really friends or is Emily just using Stephanie as a free nanny service, while she deals with her high-profile job doing publicity (or something) for a fashion designer? Then Emily never comes back to pick up her son, Stephanie asks around and some people say she went to Miami on business, her husband (on a personal trip of his own) confirms that she does this from time to time, and Emily's co-workers just say, "Well, if she went to Miami on short notice, it must have been critically important, and really, the less we know about it the better." It's hard to tell if those co-workers have learned over time to just give Emily a wide berth, or they're so busy doing their own jobs that they just don't care.
OK, then something happens, and I can't say any more without giving away the plot, but let's just say that the longer somebody is missing, the greater the chance they're not coming back. Stephanie and Sean, Emily's husband, start spending more time together because it's just easier to care for their sons together, and naturally you can kind of predict what's going to happen next, spending time together brings them closer together as a potential couple. A detective interviews Stephanie and lets slip that Sean took out a very large life insurance policy on Emily, so that leads to a whole new set of questions about what's really going on here. I mean, the first suspect is always the spouse, right?
The IMDB lists this as both a mystery AND a comedy - which can be a very, very fine line to try to walk. If you lean too far into the mystery, you've got "The Girl on the Train", or "The Woman in the Window", but if you lean too far into the comedy, you've got "Murder Mystery" or "True Crime". It's almost a contradiction for a film to be both a mystery AND a comedy, but since this one isn't ever really laugh-out-loud funny, I'd have to say that it did manage to walk that fine line without veering off too far in either direction. Kudos, I think. Maybe being based on a novel helped. Anyway, I'm glad I didn't slip up and include this one in one of my February romance chains, it does seem to link to several of the relationship-based films on my list.
Stephanie heads out on her own to dig deep into Emily's past, and of COURSE there's an explanation for what's taken place, and like most explanations, it makes perfect sense after you hear it, but in a perfect world you also won't see it coming. Stephanie follows the evidence to New York and then Michigan, playing amateur detective and gleaning whatever information she can from Emily's exes and relatives. Again, no spoilers here so I'll say no more.
But of course Stephanie is a vlogger, and the film uses the word "vlog" so many times that I never, ever want to hear it again. It's an important part of the plot that she makes videos for suburban moms, and also talks about Emily's disappearance and the finer points of the case - but it's still very annoying. It was an annoying practice in "Eighth Grade" (Gucci!) and it's just slightly less annoying here to have Anna Kendrick making YouTube videos - and it's a cheap narrative short-cut here, too. It's not quite breaking the fourth wall, but it's damn close, and pretty much amounts to the same thing. I don't listen to podcasts or even read any other blogs beside my own, so I have no idea whether people would tune into a YouTube channel that dispensed parenting tips, recipes, and the details of true crime cases, all in one. Like, maybe pick just one of those things to focus on?
Also starring Anna Kendrick (last heard in "Trolls World Tour"), Henry Golding (last seen in "Last Christmas"), Joshua Satine, Ian Ho, Andrew Rannells (last seen in "The Prom"), Linda Cardellini (last seen in "Legally Blonde"), Jean Smart (last seen in "Life Itself"), Rupert Friend (last seen in "The French Dispatch"), Eric Johnson (last seen in "Legends of the Fall"), Dustin Milligan, Bashir Salahuddin (last seen in "Marriage Story"), Glenda Braganza, Kelly McCormack (last seen in "Special Correspondents"), Aparna Nancherla, Danielle Bourgon, Gia Sandhu, Paul Jurewicz, Sarah Baker (last seen in "The Death of Dick Long"), Nicole Peters, Lauren Peters, Ava LaFramboise, Lila Yee, Zach Smadu (last seen in "Miss Sloane"), Andrew Moodie (ditto), Patti Harrison (last seen in "The Lost City"), Jason Oliveira, Melissa O'Neil, Roger Dunn (last seen in "Owning Mahowny"), Olivia Sandoval, Jamie Jones, Stephanie Moua (last seen in "The Circle"), with a cameo from Rosanna Scotto (last seen in "The Object of My Affection").
RATING: 6 out of 10 quarters in the "oopsy" jar
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