BEFORE: Two more weeks in September, that's 14 days, but I've only got 8 films scheduled, so I've got to really space them out now - OK, so no more than four films this week, and four next week, that should do it. I'm working more so that will fill up some of the time, but not all of it. So maybe I'll start watching "Ahsoka" or start on season 3 of "Murders in the Building", that should help. "Survivor" and "The Masked Singer" are supposed to start airing, too, plus "Hell's Kitchen" and "Halloween Baking Championship", so that could account for the rest of my time. Yeah, I realize I just turned an easy schedule to a very difficult one, it's what I do.
Tom Hanks carries over again from "Pinocchio". I've got another screening of "A Haunting in Venice" to work tomorrow night, but I can still get a couple more movies in before fall officially starts on Saturday, then just a few more before I have to switch over to horror movies.
THE PLOT: Otto is a grump who's given up on life following the loss of his wife and he wants to end it all. When a young family moves in nearby, he meets his match in quick-witted Marisol, leading to a friendship that will turn his world around.
AFTER: Well, in "Asteroid City", Tom Hanks played an older man with a deceased daughter, and in "Pinocchio" he played an older man with a deceased wife and son - so is it any surprise tonight that he plays another older man with a dead wife? Not to me, these things apparently come in waves, or sets of three, I guess. I can't control what carries over and what doesn't, not with any certainty, at least - but also this is two films in a row where he plays a character whose name ends in -TTO. Weird, huh? Geppetto, Otto - and very few names end in those three letters, if you think about it.
Also there have been a number of films about suicide this year, most notably "Paddleton" and "Dear Evan Hansen", and before the end of the year I'll have to check to see just how many others there were - maybe "Just Before I Go", although that ended on a happy note. I'm going to assume that the universe is not trying to send me some kind of message through my selected movies. That would just be weird - anyway even if it is I should endeavor to not listen to it. But there's a disclaimer before this film to inform us that it features scenes of someone trying to off themself, and that these scenes might be disturbing to some viewers. Yeah, thanks, also there should be a Spoiler Alert on your Viewer Discretion Advised message. (EDIT: It turns out that September is National Suicide Prevention Month. SO there's the message from the universe. Whew...)
All I saw in the trailer for "A Man Called Otto" was a character who was bothered by his neighbors, and by the annoying actions of other people - and if the movie was JUST about that, I would have been here for it. The suicide angle, eh, I'm not so sure, because it's a big bummer of a topic, and even if his attempts are not successful, such things really shouldn't be played for comedy - I mean, there's nothing funny about a man trying to hang himself, or poison himself with the fumes from his car. You have to tread REALLY carefully to find any humor in those situations, and even then, probably the wrong people are laughing at the gags, if I can call them that.
Otto Anderson is a 63-year-old man who's just been forced to retire from his job - and still they made him go to his own retirement party, and of course he wasn't happy about that, and didn't feel like celebrating. (Sure, he got a severance package, but maybe retirement isn't for everyone.). And in short order, he's bothered by his weird hipster neighbors and their weird workout routines, also people who don't know how to properly separate their recycling, who let their dogs pee on his grass, who don't have the parking permits to be on his streets, and who litter his stoop with supermarket sale ads. (Man, I feel you, Otto, I've been known to pick those up and throw them right back at the guy on the bike who threw them onto my steps.)
He's further challenged by the new family that's renting a house across the street - they don't know how to park their car and trailer, they need to borrow his ladder to fix their windows, and the husband calls an Allen wrench an "Alvin wrench". Which should be enough justification to beat him with an Allen wrench, or at least not loan him one. Worse, they keep interrupting Otto as he's trying to hang himself. Later Tommy falls off that ladder and Otto needs to drive Marisol to the hospital to visit him, and then help watch their two young daughters as Tommy gets medical treatment.
The cracks in Otto's armor are also vulnerable to the stray cat that keeps hanging around on his porch and then his garage. Otto's not really a "cat person", but when winter sets in and Jimmy, the only other person willing to take the cat in then remembers that he's allergic, Otto winds up taking care of the cat, because once a cat chooses you as their person, really, what else can you do? The other neighbors on the block that Otto cares about are Anita and Reuben, who we later learn he was friends with, years ago, before there was some kind of falling-out - and now Reuben has some kind of medical condition that makes him mostly unresponsive, and Anita is trying to hold on to their house, while her son keeps trying to move them into some kind of senior living facility.
Through it all, we're shown flashbacks of how the young Otto met his wife, Sonya, and during most of these scenes, the twenty-something Otto is played by Tom Hanks' own son, Truman Hanks. Well, it makes sense if the casting director wants to hire someone you could believe really looks like a young Tom Hanks. I think this is rather commonplace in Hollywood now, the daughters of Susan Sarandon, Meryl Streep and Glenn Close have been cast to play younger versions of their mothers' characters when needed - and of course James Gandolfini's son was cast as the younger version of Tony Soprano in "The Many Saints of Newark".
It takes most of the film for the flashbacks to catch up and reveal all of the information about how Otto's wife, Sonya, died, but of course when it finally comes, then we understand why Otto is the way he is, and then of course through finding ways to care about other people he determines that Sonya would want him to keep on living, which of course becomes easier when you have something to live for. Yeah, I'll admit that this movie got me in the end, but I maintain that it was a sucker punch, and those are rarely fair play.
Also starring Mariana Treviño (last seen in "Overboard" (2018)), Rachel Keller, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo (last seen in "Sweet Girl"), Truman Hanks (last seen in "Asteroid City"), Mike Birbiglia (last seen in "The Fault in Our Stars"), Cameron Britton (last seen in "The Girl in the Spider's Web"), Mack Bayda, Juanita Jennings (last seen in "Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her"), Peter Lawson Jones (last seen in "Judas and the Black Messiah"), Kelly Lamor Wilson, Christiana Montoya (last heard in "The Guilty"), Alessandra Perez, John Higgins, Lily Kozub (last seen in "My Friend Dahmer"), Max Pavel, Kailey Hyman, Peter Sipla, Patrick Stanney, Cindy Jackson (last seen in "Concussion"), Bodhi Wilson, Ira Amyx, Greg Allan Martin, Jon Osbeck, Elle Chapman, Bryant Carroll (last seen in "White Noise"), Aaron Marcus (ditto), Julian Manjerico, Jon Donahue (last seen in "A Hologram for the King"), Josephine Valentina Clark (last seen in "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood"), Josefine Lindegaard, Spenser Granese (last seen in "Alone Together"), Emonie Ellison, Laval Schley, David Magee, William Paul Clark (last seen in "Kill Bill: Vol. 2"), Rachel Layne, Nayab Hussain, Robin K. Johnson.
RATING: 6 out of 10 pieces of "Happy Retirement" cake
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