BEFORE: I'm falling behind again because November is another busy month - and it will be until Thanksgiving week, I think. Saturday I worked a guild screening of a film called "American Fiction" - yeah, it's awards nomination time again, so notices about Academy screenings are filling up my boss's e-mail, and that also means more shifts at the theater, for films that THINK they have a chance at qualifying for awards. They can't ALL be right, but I have to believe that the process might work for some films. I want to think that the real films worthy of nomination don't need to have so many screenings, they just have to be great, but I know that's not the way it works. Even the biggest or most likely Oscar contenders still have to hold these screenings in order to get the maximum number of voter eyeballs on their films for consideration. So that means both the worthy and the unworthy have to go through this same process, and a "worthy". film that doesn't hold a lot of screenings might not get the nomination it deserves, and by extension, a "non-worthy" film could hold more screenings than needed and also qualify for awards. And no film can really coast, they all have to go through this - so it's probably a mad scramble every year to book up every theater in town and everybody's trying to out-screen their competition. I worked a number of "Licorice Pizza" screenings two years ago, and now other films are trying the same tactic - screen, screen, screen.
Sunday we went out for a nice steakhouse early dinner, to celebrate our anniversary, which was a few days before, but we certainly didn't want to go out on a Friday night and compete for a table with everyone else going out on Friday night. Nope, 4 pm on a Sunday is the smarter move, because we practically had the place to ourselves - why don't more people do this, eat at unusual times and get better and faster service? It's worth upending your schedule just a bit so you're not competing with everyone in town who's trying to eat dinner at 6 or 7 pm. Jeez, think outside the box - or don't, because we liked eating in a nearly-empty restaurant and maybe let's keep it that way. If we're the only older people going out to dinner at 4 pm, that works fine for us.
Tonight (Monday) I have to work a premiere screening of a new comedy from the Please Don't Destroy writing team from SNL. The film's probably not great, but who knows, it comes out on Peacock later in the week, which is the "Cocaine Bear" release strategy. Maybe I'll see a few VIPs, but those SAG rules are still in place that prevent actors from attending and promoting union-made work, so who knows. All I know is I have to stay there until about midnight because somebody needs to supervise the workers taking down the press tent.
Glenne Headly carries over from "Just Getting Started".
THE PLOT: 48 hours of intersecting lives and crimes in Los Angeles.
AFTER: I wish I had a word for films that I tried to watch 10 or 20 years ago and I couldn't get through, the film was just not doing it for me and I bailed - or I was busy and couldn't finish the movie, or tired and I fell asleep, or whatever. This is one of those films - or maybe I just watched it for the nude scenes, I'm not sure - which meant I would have fast-forwarded through most of the film, and I have no idea about the main plot. Yeah, that's probably what happened here, I just focused on a few scenes with Charlize Theron and didn't care about the rest of the film. Mea culpa. Can you blame me? There just can't be many more films like that out there, I've taken care of so many of them, and tried the second time to figure out the plot and pay attention to everything else that the film might have to offer, beyond the nudity.
Well, honestly, I don't even know if I should have bothered with this one, it's a freakin' mess. There are several different messed-up plotlines going on, and then they're all kind of brought together and forced to intersect with each other, but it's just not done in a believable way. Which seems sad, somebody crafted this intricate crazy thing, and then it doesn't end up making sense or being meaningful in any way. Do I want to watch a plotline about an Emmy-winning TV director who can't get hired in Hollywood any more, and also his wife is dead and also he's getting kicked out of the apartment he's crashing in, and also he wants to kill himself? No, that story is not appealing at all, but I have to watch it to get through this.
There's also a former Olympic athlete (ice-skating? track? curling? it's unclear...) who's sleeping with her ex-husband because she's apparently out of relationship options, and that's kind of sad also. Then there's a British art dealer who's suffering from kidney stones (although we don't know this at first, and it's very confusing why he's getting out of his car and writing in pain) and some car thief outside a gay club helps him get home, but also steals his wallet. And there are two policemen on the vice squad, trying in vain to close down a massage parlor in the Valley. The younger cop is ambitious and wants to work bigger crime cases, and the veteran cop is getting penalized for his erratic behavior and about to get kicked off the force because there are so many complaints about him. How could these stories POSSIBLY be connected?
Well, it gets worse before it gets better. A couple of hitmen arrive on the scene to interrogate the athlete's ex-husband, they drug her so she'll sleep through this process, they ask him some weird questions about the woman he slept with, who was working for the Koreans, then they give him a minute to answer their questions, or they'll kill him. But they kill him anyway, so did he answer the questions right or wrong? It just doesn't seem to matter.
The hitman in charge then tries to kill his associate, and the movie sort of splits in two - the lead hitman goes on to interact with the athlete and also the attractive girl named Helga, who's not as dead as she looked in the photograph he had. And we start to get the feeling that the murder of the ex-husband might have been a murder-for-hire, arranged by his ex-wife. It happens, right? Meanwhile the lesser and older of the hitmen survives the car explosion, and has to try to get back to civilization by holding that art dealer and his assistant hostage, and also he's afraid of dogs for some reason, so naturally he keeps encountering them, when he just wants a change of clothes and maybe some pasta so he can get on with his life. Wait, what?
Meanwhile (if that means anything) the suicidal TV director meets a woman in the cemetery, they bond because they've both lost people, and he decides he wants her to have his dog, who's going to need a home after he kills himself. But then she's going to give the dog to her brother, and invites him along - yeah, the brother turns out to be that art director with the kidney stones, who's being held hostage by the lesser hitman. WOW, they really forced these people together, you can see the hand of the writer trying to prove to us that everybody is connected somehow.
Also meanwhile, the younger vice squad cop starts to suspect that the Olympic athlete had something to do with her husband's murder, so he goes back to the crime scene, where he encounters the other hitman, who was there to collect his money before the cops could find it - but the vice squad cop doesn't know that the guy he finds there is really the hitman and not a cop himself, so yeah, another very contrived confusion over somebody's identity. Another case where the writer had to bend the plot over backwards to get these two people in the same room at the same time.
In the end, what does this film end up being ABOUT? A murder-for-hire? A cop trying to move out of the vice squad? A second-rate hired hit-man who's afraid of dogs? It's all of those things, but also none of those things, and if someone tries to be about too many things, then the film just ends up being about nothing. It's the "Seinfeld" of crime films, only not that, because "Seinfeld" was funny and entertaining.
Look, I'm all for coincidence, and finding the connections between characters and trying to make use of them, but this film makes it feel like only 10 or 12 people live in Los Angeles, and I know that's just not the case. There's a woman at that steakhouse in Brooklyn who's sort of related to my wife, they both have aunts who are married to each other, but in the end that just doesn't seem like it's a very big deal, it's just how the world works. It wouldn't be worth making a movie about, in other words, we're just friendly to her when we go and eat dinner.
Bottom line, this film couldn't decide if it wanted to be the next "Pulp Fiction" or the next "Short Cuts", and it ended up being neither, just a mess.
Also starring Danny Aiello (last seen in "Lucky Number Slevin"), Greg Cruttwell, Jeff Daniels (last seen in "An Accidental Studio"), Teri Hatcher (last seen in "The Big Picture"), Peter Horton (last seen in "Happy Endings"), Marsha Mason (last seen in "Nick of Time"), Paul Mazursky (last seen in "They'll Love Me When I'm Dead"), James Spader (last seen in "The Watcher"), Eric Stoltz (last seen in "The Rules of Attraction"), Charlize Theron (last seen in "Sweet November"), Keith Carradine (last seen in "The Power of the Dog"), Louise Fletcher (last seen in "The Cheap Detective"), Austin Pendleton (last seen in "She's Funny That Way"), Kathleen Luong, Michael Jai White (last seen in "Breakfast of Champions"), Cress Williams (last seen in "Never Been Kissed"), Lawrence Tierney (last seen in "Arthur"), Micole Mercurio (last seen in "The Grifters"), Ada Maris (last seen in "About Last Night").
RATING: 3 out of 10 golf balls hitting the house
No comments:
Post a Comment