Life Partners

Year 15, Day 35 - 2/4/23 - Movie #4,336

BEFORE: It's freaking cold in NYC today - we've managed to avoid the worst of the winter weather until now, we've just had a bunch of rain this season.  Well, no more, we're finally getting one of those arctic blasts that have been menacing the Midwest.  We had snow two days ago, but it was just a dusting, after nearly a year without any snow here.  We still have to fight climate change, I know, but there's a side-benefit to it once in a while - I know that's not right.  Well, it's a good day today to sit inside, watch movies, catch up on "Law & Order", maybe make some cocoa or play yahtzee. 

Gillian Jacobs carries over from "Ibiza: Love Drunk". 

THE PLOT: Sasha and Paige's co-dependent friendship is tested as Paige gets together with a guy for the first time. 

AFTER: OK, now we're getting somewhere with the whole "relationships are complex" thing.  This film is about two female best friends, one straight and one gay, and the way their relationship changes when they start to have serious (and not-so-serious) relationships with other people.  This is tough for everybody, perhaps, juggling both kinds of "ships", friend- and relation- and resolving the inevitable conflicts that pop up in both cases or the combination of them.  It's tough to say if the title refers to the two friends, Sasha and Paige, as a euphemism for people with a strong bond who are NOT romantically involved, or for the relationships that they're both looking for. I guess it doesn't matter. We all need life partners, or at least we all think that we do, who wants to go through this maddening world by themselves?  

But we're raised to think that we can have it all - successful career, solid relationship, and at least one strong bonded friendship.  What if we can have it all, just not all at the same time?  That might be true for many people.  Plus, the more you're juggling, the greater the chance that there are going to be conflicts, especially if you invite your significant other over to watch "America's Next Top Model" with your bestie, and that was supposed to be your special time together.  Paige eventually learns over the course of this film that she's got an obsessive need to be right about things, she has difficulty admitting that she makes mistakes.  When her car hits a neighbor's car, she hides the fact that she was texting and doubles down on the fact that the neighbor's car was sort of blocking her driveway.  So she's willing to lie and rewrite history rather than admit she was in the wrong.  And this is just one of many examples, she thinks she knows what's best for other people and even when she commits a personal foul, like trying too hard to improve someone else's life, she can't admit it.  But on the verge of turning 30, she's got to improve herself before she can be a good partner for another person.  

Sasha, on the other side of the equation, is a struggling musician who's working as a receptionist, only she hates the job, hates being called a receptionist, and then manages to self-sabotage while working by forgetting to mail out important packages. We see Sasha have a string of bad dates and failed relationships, which unfortunately reinforces the stereotype that lesbians are incapable of having long-term relationships.  Maybe it just appears that way, perhaps the stats will show that they have the same number of bad relationships as straight people, I don't know because nobody's really keeping records of this.  Perhaps they tend to bail as soon as things start to fail, and there's less pressure from society to fix things and make them work out.  Perhaps years of keeping these sort of relationships quiet has had an effect, it's tough to say.  But they do happen, and there's probably an equal chance of them lasting long-term.  Still, Paige secretly questions Sasha's partner choices, because she tends to choose only immature girls who have moved back in with their parents and are thinking of applying to art school.  

This is all set in some very gay-friendly community, I think it's Minneapolis, it's tough to say - and back in the year 2014, which was clearly a different time.  Since then the youngs have come up with a number of potential solutions to relationship problems, like thrupples and open relationships and polyamorous situations, but something tells me those probably make peoples lives more complicated, not less.  To each his own, I guess. But mostly this is a peek inside the lesbian community, the unwritten rules about not dating your friend's ex or when to go public with the fact that you ARE dating your friend's ex, because there are only so many lesbians in Minneapolis, after all.  And since there's a pride parade every year, they all do know each other. 

The running joke here is that when Sasha and Paige are driving their cars and encounter each other, they pretend to be two people who don't know each other, and they have a very public fight over a parking space or over who cut who off in traffic. Perhaps the screenwriters do this in real life (it's based on a real friendship between director Susanna Fogel and co-writer Joni Lefkowitz) but I just didn't find those scenes very funny.  Still, there's a lot to enjoy here, and todays "Love Tip" is obviously that you've got to work on yourself as an individual before you can be a good partner for somebody else. 

Gillian Jacobs seems to have cornered the market on playing unaware but completely neurotic women in their late twenties, while it turns out that the actress who played Sasha (the lesbian) and Tim (Paige's boyfriend) are married in real life. 

Also starring Leighton Meester (last seen in "Going the Distance"), Gabourey Sidibe (last seen in "All In: The Fight for Democracy"), Beth Dover (last seen in "The Oath"), Abby Elliott (last seen in "Fun Size"), Kate McKinnon (last seen in "Yesterday"), Adam Brody (last seen in "Promising Young Woman"), Mark Feuerstein (last seen in "In Her Shoes"), Elizabeth Ho (last seen in "Save the Date"), Greer Grammer, Julie White (last seen in "A Very Murray Christmas"), Monte Markham (last seen in "Midway" (1976)), Anne O'Shea, Simone Bailly (last seen in "Good Luck Chuck"), AJ Meijer, John Forest (last seen in "Young Adult"), Zee James (last seen in "Straight Outta Compton"), Matty Cardarople (last seen in "Free Guy"). 

RATING: 6 out of 10 rounds of beer pong (I never understood this game - who wants to drink a beer after a dirty ping pong ball that bounced on the ground has landed in it?  You know you can just drink a clean beer without a game telling you that you HAVE to, right?)

Ibiza: Love Drunk

Year 15, Day 34 - 2/3/23 - Movie #4,335

BEFORE: Michaela Watkins carries over from "Person to Person". Whatever happens in this film, at least I get to clear it off my Netflix list - that's some form of progress, at least.  It's been on my watchlist for a while, I know I couldn't link to it last February, but I'm trying clean up all the films left over from Februarys past, I think this is one of them.  And with a running time of just over 90 minutes, it won't take up too much of my time on a Thursday night/Friday morning. 

THE PLOT: A young American woman and her two best friends seek out a hot DJ in Spain. 

AFTER: Well, I don't know how your February is going so far, but mine's not off to a great start - I keep thinking I'm going to find a great romance film and so far this month's been a bust.  The awkwardness of "Licorice Pizza" and the non-romance plotlines of "Person to Person" has now been followed by a whole bunch of stupid in "Ibiza". If tracking down a DJ in Spain counts as romance these days, then maybe romance is dead.  I'd say that maybe the pandemic killed romance as we know it, but this film was released in 2018, pre-COVID - although in the first scene, Harper's boss is wearing a face-mask so she doesn't get sick.  I guess she was ahead of her time by about two years - really, we should have been wearing masks all along, especially during flu season, right? 

Ugh, the millennials are the WORST, right?  Like, how is DJ still a valid job?  How was that a job to begin with - when I was growing up DJs worked for radio stations and they spoke for a bit in between songs on LITE-FM and also maybe gave you the time and temperature and threw to the traffic guy during rush hours.  The kids today think that being a DJ is close to being a rock star, they get up in front of hundreds of people in a club and mix records together, but I'm thinking that a chimp could probably do that just as well, so I don't get it. But I'm old. These kids also think that being an "influencer" is also some kind of job, but I think that's just an excuse to be online posting on social media all day long.  

Harper works for a PR firm, which is almost as bad as being an influencer - her nasty boss who's always yelling at her sends her to Barcelona, though, to land a new client.  While to some this would seem like an opportunity to finally prove her worth to the company, Harper instead treats this like a company-paid vacation and invites her two best friends along.  Umm, this is not how a business trip is supposed to work, you'd think the screenwriter would know this. (NITPICK POINT: Who paid for the friends' tickets?  Certainly not the company...am I the only one asking?)

Once in Barcelona, the three friends immediately start ignoring the boss's calls and texts and head out to a nightclub.  Sure, what could POSSIBLY go wrong?  This is where Harper meets the DJ, Leo West, and he helps her out by removing a vulgar image that someone has drawn on Harper's cheek in glow-in-the-dark paint.  Harper's pretty stupid for letting a guy draw on her face in the first place, but don't worry, she's going to get a lot stupider before the end. 

The three friends get invited to a party by a shady man, who insures them that the DJ will be at his house later.  They believe him, so basically they're all pretty dumb.  Harper's friend Leah starts fooling around with a married man and gets threatened by the wife with a knife, and Nikki takes a bunch of drugs after being told they're ADHD medications, and even if they were, which they probably weren't, that's not a great idea.  I don't get it, this film basically took every opportunity to depict young American women as oversexed, gullible sluts, and what kind of message does this send out to the young women watching at home?  It's supposed to be a comedy, or is it?  Maybe this is supposed to be a training film, telling young girls how not to act when they're adults?  I think that's giving the movie too much credit, it's just plain stupid. 

Despite their missteps and bad decisions, they keep failing upwards, though - Harper gets the phone number of the DJ, and when the trio learns that he's flying to Ibiza for his next gig, they just have to follow him there.  Sure, who cares about the business meeting, which was the whole reason for the trip in the first place?  I'm sure it will be fine, they'll be back in time, unless they party too much and have sex and then oversleep the next day...well, guess what. So, you had your fling with the DJ, was it worth it?  It was, but my point is that it shouldn't have been - you can find another DJ, but it could be a bit harder to find another job.

I'm going to be kind with my rating, because this is the first sign of something akin to romance, at least between Harper and Leo.  The other two girls just act like pure id, they're only motivated by sex, but since they're also depicted as rather stupid and foolish the rest of the time, how am I supposed to take them seriously as strong female characters?  And doesn't Vanessa Bayer ever get tired of playing idiots?  I guess not, if that's her bread and butter. 

But the worst thing about this film is probably the dialogue. EVERY time somebody says something the next line is "Wait, did I just say that out loud?  I probably shouldn't say that.  But what I meant to say was THIS, I just wasn't sure what you would think of me if I said THAT, though."  Ugh, every conversation is like this, and it's extremely ponderous, plus people just don't talk like this all the time, or if they do, they're very annoying.  And stupid. 

I'm not even sure if the title of this film is just "Ibiza" or as Netflix lists it, "Ibiza: Love Drunk".  My guess is that they tried to market the film with just the title of the island, and nobody in the younger generation knew what that was, so they had to add more words to the title so the kids would understand what it was about and maybe go see it.  There's a lawsuit pending from the island of Ibiza because the film was shot in Croatia, and also because it depicts the island in such a negative light, namely that it's full of stupid American women partying and getting drunk and taking drugs and acting irresponsibly by missing their business meetings.  Yeah, I'm with the island on this one, I hope they win their lawsuit.  

Wait, wait, I almost forgot today's "Love Tip" - umm, never let anybody draw on your face?  I'd say "Maybe don't party the night before your business meeting" but that's a career tip, not a love tip. 

Also starring Gillian Jacobs (last seen in "The Contractor"), Vanessa Bayer (last seen in "Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar"), Phoebe Robinson (last seen in "Becoming"), Richard Madden (last seen in "Eternals"), Félix Gómez, Jordi Molla (last seen in "Term Life"), Augustus Prew (last seen in "About a Boy"), Anthony Welsh (last seen in "The Personal History of David Copperfield"), Humphrey Ker (last heard in "Missing Link"), Miguel Angel Silvestre (last heard in "Ferdinand"), Marina Salas, Nelson Dante, Anjela Nedyalkova (last seen in "T2 Trainspotting"), Albert Suárez, Alex Hernandez, Jose Luis García-Pérez, Lolo Herrero (last seen in "The Cold Light of Day"), Michelle Noh, Bojan Ban. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 pieces of sushi served on a naked woman (Do people still do this? How very un-PC...)

Person to Person

Year 15, Day 33 - 2/2/23 - Movie #4,334

BEFORE: Benny Safdie carries over from "Licorice Pizza".  Probably the toughest part of putting the February chain together is knowing when to STOP linking, where do I draw that line?  If I didn't make some cuts, then the romance chain might extend into June - and I'd miss a few holidays like Easter and Mother's Day.  Plus, I have to think about leaving enough material to work with for next year, assuming there is a next year.  For example, there's a film called "Love Is Strange" with John Lithgow and Alfred Molina as a gay couple, and it's also got Harriet Sansom Harris in it, so I had that next to "Licorice Pizza" for a long while.  BUT, it was running on cable and I missed it, so I take that as a sign that maybe it wasn't meant to be part of the chain, at least not this year.  It also links to another romance film, "Untamed Heart", so both of those films stay on the list, and this fall I'll check to see if they can be part of the chain next time around. 

There's another film called "Boys and Girls" with Freddie Prinze Jr. in it, that I missed out on last year. It became available on cable after I'd already watched "She's All That", "Head Over Heels" and "Down to You".  So now it's on the list, and I have to look for another way to link to it - Jason Biggs is also in it, so I decided to cut "Loser" from this year's romance chain to increase the chances of linking to it next year.  Thankfully I found that after cutting "Loser" and one other film, there were two films that could slip right into their places, making links through other connections. That's also something I take as a sign, if I notice that a replacement like that can be made, it means that I should probably do it. 

Then there's this new film, "Shotgun Wedding", with Jennifer Lopez and Josh Duhamel.  I'm already planning to use Josh Duhamel as a link, so this new film could slip right in-between those two films with him in it, so that's a sign, right?  If I see a film can be added to the chain, I should probably do it, right?  Not so fast - here I also have to think about next year, who else is in this movie and what else does it link to?  Well, it links to "Marry Me" which also has Jennifer Lopez in it, and "Austenland", which also has Jennifer Coolidge in it - so that could really help me out in 2024, it would turn a 4-film block into a 6-film block, and then maybe I can link up that 6-film block with a few other blocks and put a whole month together, you just never know. 

THE PLOT: Follows a variety of New York characters as they navigate personal relationships and unexpected problems over the course of one day. 

AFTER: Well, I was talking about "Magnolia" yesterday with regards to Paul Thomas Anderson, and then this film comes along from Magnolia Pictures. Coincidence?  How about the fact that both this film and that film are set in a 24-hour period, and detail a bunch of relationship problems and unexpected events taking place?  How about the fact that Philip Baker Hall appears in both movies?  See, there's no such thing as coincidence, there's just this stuff that happens. The difference is, however, that "Magnolia" is often regarded as a masterpiece of filmmaking, and this one, not so much.   

If anything, this feels like a student film, or a film made by somebody just out of film school, who knew one semi-famous actor from class and met a more famous actor at a party, and then used those connections to get two or three more veteran actors involved.  The rest of the cast is made up of actors I'd never heard of before, so either they're the director's friends or there was some kind of "act in this film for free and get your SAG card" scam going on, like in "Narrowsburg". 

They apparently only had access to two locations, a watch repair shop and a thrift store, and then sort of built the whole story around that.  For the rest of the shots, the plan was to just film on the street and use Central Park, and let me know if you see the cops coming, we can hide the camera if needed because we don't have permits.  I mean, come on, that newspaper office set looks completely bogus, it looks like those government offices in "Eraser" where some set designer thought that all they needed was a computer, desk and two filing cabinets, and the audience would buy it.  Right, because every major newspaper editorial office in NYC is a third floor walk-up. 

I think this was supposed to be one of those films where we all learn that we're all interconnected, because each day we interact with so many people and we usually fail to realize how our actions affect others, but really, we're all part of one big social network thing. Bleargh. What is this, "Crash"?  More like "Thud". There's the fleetingest bit about romance here, as a girl who's clearly into girls starts to maybe think she likes boys, too, after being forced to interact with a guy named River (again, Bleargh) while her best friend makes out with her boyfriend. Oh, if only she didn't have to choose between girls and boys!  Quel problemme!  Come on, you just know she wants to get it on with her best friend, but she just doesn't have the nerve. Why don't all four of you drink that beer or smoke that weed and then whatever happens, happens. 

In other news, a woman applies for a job at a newspaper and the editor takes her on a stakeout, trying to figure out if a woman killed her husband, and they think the answer can be found in a watch shop.  This part of the film feels a bit like a madcap Woody Allen film like "Scoop" or "Cassandra's Dream", only without any of the charm. OK, maybe the newspaper editor likes this girl and is trying to get some action, but since he's played by Michael Cera, he's a nebbish who can't quite get it together.  And by the end of this storyline, I promise you that you really won't care whether the woman killed her husband or not.  

There's also a record collector who gets a hot tip about somebody selling a rare Charlie Parker album, who obsesses over whether the shirt he's chosen for the day suits him, or perhaps it's too fancy for him.  He's got a friend crashing on his couch, he's hiding out because he put some nude pics of his ex-girlfriend on the internet, and now her brother is out to hurt him.  That's it, that's the movie, three or four intersecting storylines, all of which get put on hold when there's a stabbing near Central Park, and I guess that's supposed to put everything in perspective or something.  

The "Love Tip" for the day, I guess, is "Never post nude photos of your ex online", which is a lot more helpful than the Love Tip from January, which I think was "Never have sex with a horse."  Good advice, all around.  Other than that, there's just not a lot here, so my romance chain is starting out a bit slow, but hopefully I'm building up to something better. I'm hard-pressed to figure out the "why" of this film, and the "how" - like HOW did this get on to HBO Max?  It's a mystery. 

Also starring Abbi Jacobson (last heard in "The Mitchells vs the Machines"), Michael Cera (last heard in "Cryptozoo"), Tavi Gevinson (last seen in "It's Me, Hilary: The Man Who Drew Eloise"), Bene Coopersmith, George Sample III, Philip Baker Hall (last seen in "The Amityville Horror" (2005)), Isiah Whitlock Jr. (last heard in "Lightyear"), Michaela Watkins (last seen in "The Way Back"), Olivia Luccardi (last seen in "Drunk Parents"), Ben Rosenfield (last seen in "A Most Violent Year"), Buddy Duress, Eleonore Hendricks, Marsha Stephanie Blake (last seen in "An American Pickle"), Okieriete Onaodowan (last seen in "A Quiet Place Part II"), Brian Tyree Henry (last seen in "Don't Let Go"), Marvin Gurewitz, Steve Urbanski, Craig Butta, Dakota O'Hara, David Zellner (last seen in "Ain't Them Bodies Saints"), Hunter Zinny, William Sydney, Eric Hynes, Maxwell Apple, Duke Stewart, Jim Fletcher, Jicky Schnee. 

RATING: 4 out of 10 killer doughnuts

Licorice Pizza

Year 15, Day 32 - 2/1/23 - Movie #4,333

BEFORE: So long January, and HELLO February!  If you've hung around the Movie Year for a while, then you know that as soon as I flip that calendar page, I start my theme month (or month-plus) where all the films are about romance - or relationships.  I sort of equate the two with Shakespeare's "comedy" or "tragedy", not all films about love are happy ones, so if there's a darker film here in the bunch, well, OK it's about "relationships" then, and not all of them work out, so I feel I'm justified including a few tragedies in the mix.  

Sean Penn carries over from "Flag Day" (reminder, "The Weight of Water" has been re-scheduled for March) so this was the plan all along, to start with "Licorice Pizza".  HA! Of course it wasn't, I had this whole chain flipped over and I even tore it apart once or twice and built it back together again.  I maintain my right to make changes until I'm happy with the entire sequence, and even beyond that point, if necessary.  What happened was, I had created a chain that I was fine with, and then I double-checked it to find I had two movies next to each other and they DID NOT share an actor or actress. WHAT? Why didn't I notice that before mid-December?  I scrambled over the holiday break to find a new way to put the SAME films in a DIFFERENT order and then I triple-checked the path to make sure it would work.  

So now, a bit about this year's chain - it's 40 films long, which I know, that's more days than February has, so we're going to run into March BUT since I have close to 120 films about romance (or relationships) on my radar, I've got to make a big dent in that number, or I'll be just as flooded with love films next year, and I won't feel like I'm making progress.  St. Patrick's Day is just 45 films away, so this chain was designed to end on a film that will be just a few steps away from TWO films set in Ireland - and they share an actor, of course. 

Also, this chain was cobbled together from a bunch of smaller chains, and I looked for films that would connect those small chains to make the bigger chain.  Also, some of those little chains were leftovers from last year or the year before, they got stranded and unlinked when certain films were suddenly not available on HBO Max or Netflix - so in addition to fitting perfectly into the space I had for it, this chain was designed to rescue a bunch of films that were previously left behind.  So if it seems disjointed, it's because I really struggled to get back to those poor unwatched, orphaned films - I can save them all, I know it!  Plus I love a tough challenge - and I'm only going to strand one or two more films by watching these 40.  24 out of the 40 films I already had on DVD or on my DVR, and the other 16 are coming from streaming services - but I'm not going to say which films are the bricks and which are the mortar, we can all find out together. 

Bottom line, here in my fifth year with a perfect chain (so far) I really can look at this year's line-up and say, yep, this is about the best I can do with this topic at this point. So here are the links for the rest of February, after Sean Penn: Benny Safdie, Michaela Watkins, Gillian Jacobs, Julie White, Daniel Eric Gold, Keira Knightley, Eleanor Tomlinson, Jack Farthing, Kristen Stewart, Melissa Leo, Becky Ann Baker, Wolfgang Novogratz, Lea Thompson, Jesse Bradford, Dan Hedaya, Debra Monk, Alec Baldwin, Brad Garrett, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Greg Germann, Liam Aiken, Bruce Altman, Luke Kirby, Wallace Shawn and Ethan Hawke.  If you want to know in advance what I'm going to watch, just pick two consecutive people on that list and find a movie with the two of them in it. Be careful, don't hurt yourself, remember, I'm a trained professional. 

THE PLOT: The story of Alana Kane and Gary Valentine growing up, running around and going through the treacherous navigation of first love in the San Fernando Valley, 1973

AFTER: I worked a lot of screenings of "Licorice Pizza" in the last few months of 2021 - I guess because somebody thought it would be eligible for a number of Oscars - and it was, it got three nominations, plus a SAG Awards nomination, a DGA nom and a PGA nom. (It would go on to win ZERO Oscars, but nobody knew that at the time.).  The big draw at the theater where I work, though, was that some of the screenings were on 35mm, which is a rarity these days.  Some people came out JUST to watch a film on film, the way it used to be, everything's all DCP and digital these days, except for once in a while.  So quite a few guild screenings took place in my workplace, and for one of the screenings I worked, there was a panel afterwards with the director and the two leads, Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim.  So after putting the chairs out on the stage in front of the screen, I was standing there in the dark RIGHT NEXT to Paul Thomas Anderson, and I was waiting for the cue from the projectionist so I could cue him to walk out on stage. That's it, that's the story - thankfully I didn't freak out and start asking him questions about "Boogie Nights" or tell him what a great film "Magnolia" is, still, after all this time. He knows. 

Another thing I had to do for the screenings was check inside the theater every 20 minutes or so, you know, just to make sure the picture looked good and the sound was audible and there wasn't a riot going on for some reason. (Why? I don't know, maybe somebody was talking too loud or their phone rang or something. I just have to check.). So I'd seen a few clips from the film, here and there, something about selling waterbeds and something else about a truck running out of gas.  I just hoped that when I finally sat down to watch the whole film, those scenes would make some kind of sense, there would be bridging material that would allow me to grok the whole narrative. Nope, didn't happen.  As best I can tell, this film is just a bunch of vignettes that are strung together, without a consistent throughline that justifies and explains everything.  

Not that that's necessarily a dealbreaker, because what were "Boogie Nights" and "Magnolia" but a series of events, little vignettes that were strung together, overlapping each other and all being connected in some way, even if we weren't aware of exactly how.  And both of those films worked out, right?  I mean, "Boogie Nights" started in one place and then got WAY off track, with some weird cop movie that the porn stars were making, that part didn't really work for me.  But "Magnolia" is like PTA's "Pulp Fiction", you're not necessarily going to realize how everything geniusly fits together until you watch it for the third or fourth time.  Maybe "Licorice Pizza" is like that, maybe on the third viewing you'll say, "OH, I GET IT NOW!" because you see how something very subtle in one scene foreshadows something else, or that THIS guy turns out to be the father of THAT guy, and wow, that really ties everything together.  But I doubt it. 

I think it's much more likely that there's nothing TO get, or maybe I should say there's not much to get, because there's certainly something here, I just don't think the pieces add up the way the director intended, and so therefore I have to treat it like a series of NON-connected scenes, except that at least one of the main two actors is in every one of them. It's supposed to be about how difficult it is to be in love for the first time, because you're not sure if you're moving too fast, or not fast enough, or if this is really the right person for you, or if you're just happy that you're finally getting some action, and that kind of colors your perceptions.  I do approve of this theme, plus it's also a great way to kick off my romance chain, by exploring the initial stages of a romance between a 15-year old boy and a 25-year old woman. Is she 25, though?  Because her stated age seems to change a lot during the film.  

Look, I get it, when I was a freshman in high school, I had a crush on a senior, who was also involved in the same community theater groups that I was, so I thought, well, maybe there's a chance I'll be in a play with her and we have to kiss or something.  Didn't happen.  And I let several opportunities to tell her I liked her go by, because I was too shy, plus I had no idea what the hell I was getting myself into. I had a few crushes in high school that I never acted on, because the few times I did reach out, I got shot down.  So I didn't have that first real relationship until the third year of college - and looking back on it, my perceptions at the time were probably colored by the fact I was finally getting some action. Hey, you live, you learn, you get married, get divorced and you try to do better next time. 

So Gary is a teen actor who's also got big business plans - he opens up a waterbed business at JUST the right time, and then it turns out to be the wrong time.  He gets into pinball machines and decides to open up an arcade - this is all very ambitious for a 15-year old, right?  Is this based on an actual person?  Because most 15-year olds in 1973 just wanted to get high and somehow make it through midterms, right?  Very few would have the wherewithal and the means to start not just one, but TWO businesses.  

And after meeting Alana on school picture day, he sets his sights on her, just like that, despite the age difference.  The rest of the film is them circling each other, dating other people, then wondering why they don't just fall for each other and simplify things.  I'm down for this, but is tha really enough to fill up two hours?  No, it's not, which is why there are these sidetrack vignettes about Jon Peters having a crisis during the gas shortage, and another actor played by Sean Penn being convinced to do a late-night motorcycle stunt.  This is all great fun, but these things have almost nothing to do with the main narrative, our young not-a-couple not-lovers. 

I'm thinking a lot of these asides came from Paul Thomas Anderson's life, or at least his memories of what 1973 was like, or, since he was born in 1970, what he imagines that 1973 was like. I'm going to go check now to see if any of these things really happened to him or to people that he knew.  But I learned during the Q&A panel that "Licorice Pizza" was the name of a record store in the Valley, and from that I surmise that "Licorice Pizza" might also be slang for a vinyl record (LP), but this is a bit unclear.  (Ah, IMDB once again has the answer - Gary Valentine is roughly based on the life of Gary Goetzman, who was a teen actor in the film "Yours, Mine and Ours" and later opened both a waterbed company and a pinball arcade.)

There are a bunch of people in this film who seem one degree removed from fame, like Leonardo DiCaprio's father plays a waterbed salesman, the lead actor is obviously Philip Seymour Hoffman's son, Maya Rudolph is married to the director and their daughter has a small role in the film.  There's also a few Spielbergs and Demmes in the credits, relatives of the famous directors - what's the hot term these days, "nepo babies"? 

I'm going to be a bit generous with my rating tonight - because this served as a great kick-off to the Romance Chain - ultimately it's about two people getting together, and that works for my theme.  The ultimate message is that even if people don't see each other as romantic partners right off the bat, if they spend time together and do enough things together, there's still a chance they can change their minds.  Two people don't have to be the perfect couple, it can still work out if both of them just plain run out of other options.  Hey, that's tonight's "Love tip", maybe. 

Also starring Alana Haim, Cooper Hoffman, Tom Waits (last seen in "Domino"), Bradley Cooper (last seen in "Hit and Run"), Benny Safdie, Skyler Gisondo (last seen in "The Starling"), Mary Elizabeth Ellis (last seen in "How It Ends"), John Michael Higgins (last seen in "After the Sunset"), Christine Ebersole (last seen in "The Wolf of Wall Street"), Harriet Sansom Harris (last seen in "Phantom Thread"), Ryan Heffington, Nate Mann, Joseph Cross (last seen in "Mank"), Isabelle Kusman, Destry Allyn Spielberg, George DiCaprio, Iyana Halley (last seen in "The Hate U Give"), Ray Chase, Emma Dumont (last seen in "Inherent Vice"), Yumi Mizui, Megumi Anjo, Maya Rudolph (last seen in "Hubie Halloween"), Tim Conway Jr., Emily Althaus, Milo Herschlag, Danielle Haim, Este Haim, Moti Haim, Donna Haim, Griff Giacchino, James Kelley, Will Angarola, Dan Chariton (last seen in "Glass Onion"), Phil Bray, Greg Goetzman, Max Mitchell (last heard in "The Boxtrolls"), Lori Killam, Ray Nicholson (last seen in "Promising Young Woman"), Zoe Herschlag, Pearl Minnie Anderson, Henri Abergel, Rogelio Camarillo, Eloy Perez (last seen in "Ad Astra"), Jon Beavers, Luigi Della Ripa, with a cameo from John C. Reilly (last seen in "Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny") and archive footage of Richard Nixon (last seen in "Summer of Soul")

RATING: 6 out of 10 newspaper ads for porn movies

Flag Day

Year 15, Day 31 - 1/31/23 - Movie #4,332

BEFORE: Here we go, the last film of January - man, it's been a ride. That's what I get for programming a bunch of action movies, I feel like I've been bounced around by drug dealers and safe crackers, mobsters and con artists, and then on the other side a bunch of FBI agents, detectives, black ops contractors and, umm, ice road truckers. Yeah, that happened. And let's not forget that Adam Sandler played a basketball scout, Orlando Bloom defended Jerusalem, Jon Hamm replaced Chevy Chase as Fletch, and Michelle Yeoh became the best version of herself and saved the multiverse.  Also, we learned why you should never go to the private island of a mad genius, even if he's a chef, why you should never have sex with a horse, and why you should never watch a film if it's free on YouTube. Good to know. 

Here's the format breakdown for January: 

14 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): The Family, Leave No Trace, The Contractor, Bulletproof, Eraser, Confess Fletch, The Death of Dick Long, Everything Everywhere All at Once, The Marksman, Kingdom of Heaven, No Time to Die, Blood Father, Domino, Flag Day

4 Movies watched on cable (not saved): City by the Sea, Being Flynn, The Menu, See How They Run

7 watched on Netflix: Hustle, Wendell & Wild, The Ice Road, Glass Onion, The Informer, The Gray Man, Blonde

1 watched on Amazon Prime: Needle in a Timestack

2 watched on YouTube: Gun Shy, Welcome to Collinwood
1 watched on Disney+: Turning Red
1 watched on Tubi: Undercover Grandpa

1 watched on Pluto TV: Wind River

1 watched on commercial DVD: Narrowsburg
32 TOTAL

Dale Dickey carries over again from "Domino", and she's in the lead right now for the year, with five appearances.  Just over 10% through my movies for 2023, so it's doubtful that she'll finish in the lead, but she's followed by Ana de Armas, Robert De Niro and Liam Neeson with four films each, and James Caan, Ben Foster and James Hong with three each.  Tomorrow the annual romance chain starts, so expect strong showings from people like Julianne Moore and Andie MacDowell. 

THE PLOT: A father lives a double life as a counterfeiter, bank robber and con man in order to provide for his daughter. 

AFTER: This is a movie that doesn't give up much information, not without a fight - it's very light on the details when it comes to the life of John Vogel, a con-man who served time for bank robbery and then later counterfeited more than $20 million, the fourth-largest sum ever seized by federal agents. It's based on a book called "The Flim-Flam Man", written by his daughter, Jennifer, and the book focuses on the six-month period where her father was on the run from the authorities.  But the movie goes back to when she was younger, when she looked up to her father despite all his weird habits and eccentricities, then later when she left home and dropped out of high school, she traveled to find her father and re-connected with him. They both had substance abuse issues, they were both sort of lost and maybe helped each other out during rough patches in their lives - or maybe their lives were just big rough patches, I don't know. 

The movie also won't come out and tell you that John Vogel had a bunch of scams and schemes going on, had a habit of burning down buildings, and plotted murder, and then when he put his artistic and criminal talents together to make counterfeit money, he only spent the fake money at Wal-Mart, for his own political reasons.  Umm, OK - the movie just wanted to be very "arty" about it and focus on things like teaching his 10-year old daughter how to drive so he could take a nap in the car, or yelling at his 18-year old daughter for smoking his weed.  OK, so he wasn't going to win any "Father of the Year" awards, but apparently he was better than her step-father, who tried to sleep with her.  I can't decide if it's heartwarming or not, that this very damaged father-daughter pair re-connected over the years between his prison stints and tried hard to help each other through the tough times.  But even then, he claimed to land an executive job at a seaplane company and then she saw him just towing the planes around the airport - so he wasn't above lying to his own daughter.  Classy. 

I guess we're supposed to commend her for ALMOST following in his footsteps, like she got called out for lying about her background when she applied to journalism school, but the whole point of journalism is to uncover the truth, so she almost didn't get in.  I guess they're really sticklers over there at the University of Minnesota. 

So many things were confusing here - like, who was Josh Brolin's character, "Uncle Beck"?  Was he John Vogel's brother, or Jennifer's stepfather? Or Jennifer's mother's brother?  It's unclear, from his dialogue I couldn't be sure.  Dale Dickey played "Grandma Margaret", so I assume that was John Vogel's mother?  Look, I know that characters don't mention their relationships each time they talk, but come on, help a viewer out a bit, you've kind of got to explain how all these people are connected.  The problem here is that in such a flashback-heavy film that jumps around in time liberally, we've got to put all these pieces together, and we just don't know if we're doing it right.  I feel like maybe I fell asleep and missed some crucial piece of the movie, where all the information was given out, but I don't think that I did. Instead there's just arty montage after arty montage of Jennifer partying, hanging out, crying, and then riding on a bus somewhere - repeat as necessary.  Well, I guess it's better than footage of someone sitting in front of a typewriter, trying to think of something to write. 

I just went back and watched the last 15 minutes of the film again, I'm guessing I must have dozed off just when things were about to get exciting. Yeah, if you blink at the wrong times you're going to miss all the footage of John Vogel making those counterfeit bills, or really, doing much of anything that would have provided helpful information. Like everything else here, that information came in the form of an arty montage filled with flashbacks. I think it would have been nice to, you know, see stuff happen but it's just not that kind of movie, not until the ending at least. Anyway, I'm SO going to put this film on a DVD with "Blood Father" because the films have so much in common - alcoholic ex-con father looking for redemption, re-connecting with his drug-using daughter as an older teen, doing his best to protect her in his own effed-up way, and then a really depressing, futile pointless ending. 

Also starring Sean Penn (last seen in "An Accidental Studio"), Dylan Penn (last seen in "Elvis & Nixon"), Katheryn Winnick (last seen in "The Marksman"), Josh Brolin (last seen in "Dune"), Hopper Penn (last seen in "Between Worlds"), Regina King (last seen in "The Harder They Fall"), Norbert Leo Butz (last seen in "Fair Game"), Eddie Marsan (last seen in "The Contractor"), Bailey Noble, Jadyn Rylee, Addison Tymec, Beckam Crawford, Nigel Fisher, Adam Hurtig (last seen in "The Ice Road"), Terry Hamel with archive footage of Bill Clinton (last seen in "Listening to Kenny G")

RATING: 5 out of 10 halfway houses

Domino (2005)

Year 15, Day 30 - 1/30/23 - Movie #4,331

BEFORE: Dale Dickey carries over from "Blood Father" - I know, I know, I already used Dale Dickey as a link the first week of this year, to connect "Being Flynn" and "Leave No Trace".  Who says I can't use her as a link twice in the same month?  I make up the rules around here, and putting all the Dale Dickey films together just didn't work for me, I had to split them up into two groups to get the "proper" distribution of films for the month. She's so nice, I linked her twice. 

And she'll be here again tomorrow as I wrap up January - and you know what February's going to be about, if not, then you haven't been paying attention.  

THE PLOT: Domino Harvey turned away from her career as a Ford model to become a bounty hunter. 

AFTER: OK, here's what happened - I recorded this film several months back, after, well, avoiding it for years. Mea culpa. But I took the time and effort (and perhaps a $3.99 expense) to dub it to DVD, to clear off space on my DVR, which tends to fill up.  I greatly prefer to watch films on the DVR because I can then turn the subtitles on (I'm like half deaf in the right ear) - and when I burn films to DVD, the subtitles don't come through.  Maybe they would if I went from DVR straight to DVD, but I choose to dub to VHS tape first, just in case something goes wrong during the dub to DVD, I can't just "do it over", going to tape first gives me a level of control, I can make sure the film is THERE on the tape, all the way through, and sure, sometimes I have to re-dub, like if I used a bad VHS tape or something, but generally speaking this gives me a bit more control over the process - and this way I can set the DVD burner up with the signal from the VHS and walk away, I (usually) don't have to baby-sit the dubbing. 

So I've got the film on DVD, ready to watch it late last night, when I decided to check for the film on streaming services (it's not on any, which is a bad sign) or On Demand - OK, no longer available to stream on any of the major channels, but the film WAS scheduled to play at 2 am on one of the Cinemax channels, I think. It was midnight when I saw the film was going to air at 2 am, so I decided to wait, because this meant I could turn on the subtitles and then understand what everyone was saying.  Just an hour of "TMZ" and some phone games to fill the time, and before long it was 2 am and "Domino" started airing - although I didn't see Keira Knightley anywhere in the first five minutes, you'd think she'd be front and center.  And why does that guy look familiar...more importantly there are two cops in the opening scenes named Christian and Lars, and I don't see those character names anywhere in the IMDB listing for "Domino".  Am I watching the right movie? 

No, I was not.  There is another movie titled "Domino" that came out in 2019, starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (from "Gods of Egypt", "Oblivion" and most recently, "Kingdom of Heaven" and this so-called PREMIUM cable channel was running "Domino" (2019) but they'd listed it in the program guide as "Domino" (2005).  Jesus, doesn't anybody who works for a cable channel even CHECK to make sure they're running the right movie?  Or that the listing matches what's being played on screen?  This is what keeps happening with "Kicking and Screaming", the Noah Baumbach film from 1995 about college students - if you're hoping to watch this movie and you see it listed or you DVR it, you'll probably end up watching "Kicking & Screaming", the 2005 soccer comedy starring Will Ferrell.  Cable companies, we NEED you to do better!  Maybe try hiring somebody to WATCH your channel or check the listings for mistakes!  Hell, hire me to do that, I'll sit and watch all the channels all day long to make sure the listings are correct, and I'll only charge, let's say, $20 an hour.  But won't it be worth it to have good Quality Control?

Anyway, once I realized that I was watching the WRONG film named "Domino", i quickly switched the TV input to "DVD" and began watching the dub I made off cable months ago, with NO subtitles, and man, was I pissed.  I could have started the film two hours earlier, and also gone to bed two hours earlier, if not for this screw-up on the part of whoever programs the cable listings. The system's been hell since TV Guide closed up shop, amiright?

Even worse news, when I started watching the CORRECT "Domino", I realized that it was a hot mess of a movie - so maybe I should have stuck with the WRONG "Domino", only that would have broken the chain and thrown my life into (even more) chaos. No, I had to stick it out and watch the correct "Domino", but then I ended up staying up later than I anticipated, because THIS "Domino" was two hours long, not 90 minutes. But wait, I've got a whole bunch of reasons to hate this film, like the fact that it STARTS with the big showdown scene between the bounty hunters and the armored truck thieves, then it snaps back to the beginning, three weeks before, to spend the rest of the movie explaining how they got there.  Meanwhile, nearly EVERYTHING is a flashback, because model-turned-bounty-hunter (don't worry, we're gonna get THERE...) is narrating the whole story to a criminal psychologist (umm, yeah) so there's flashbacks within flashbacks and time has no meaning and everything happens randomly, and I just can't stand that technique. 

The whole movie is shot in that MTV "shaky-cam" style that was used on "Cribs" and "Remote Control" and will make you nauseous if you let it. Wait, I'm just gettin' started - the shooting style is meant to disorient you and distract you from the fact that the whole plot here is confusing as hell, nothing adds up right, so really, it's all hot garbage - all flash and no narrative substance. 

Now, let's get to the details, this is supposedly based on a true story, but I really really doubt it - fashion models just DO NOT become bounty hunters, because there's no skill set overlap there.  The "real" Domino Harvey got into ONE FIGHT during a fashion show, and suddenly she's qualified to catch criminals?  I think not. She sees a newspaper advertisement for a bounty hunting training seminar?  I'm pretty sure that's not really a thing.  In fact, it's not, the whole thing was somebody's get-rich-quick scam, but she was the only person who complained that the seminar was useless and a rip-off, so that somehow qualifies her to become a REAL bounty hunter?  That's not how ANYTHING works.  If I took a bank teller training course, and I got scammed in the process, that wouldn't qualify me to work as a bank teller, I'd just be in the same exact place as I was before, namely NOT qualified.

But somehow this qualifies Domino to become part of a four-person team, three bounty hunters and a driver, working for a bail bondsman who also runs an armored car service (again, that's probably not how jobs work).  The bondsman has a mistress who works for the DMV and whose granddaughter is sick from a rare blood disease and needs a $300,000 operation - so the Bellini is to have four Mullinskis rob the owner of a casino, then have his four bounty hunters return the stolen money and collect $300,000 as a finders fee.  Umm, NITPICK POINT, if this guy runs an armored car business, why does he need to rob a mobster?  Why not just stage a robbery of one of his own armored cars, and then hire his bounty hunters to solve the case, and/or collect the insurance money like any other normal American would do?  This alternative is just plain stupid.

The woman who works at the DMV is also running a racket to hand out counterfeit licenses, and the FBI finds out about it, so she tells the FBI that these four kids who got fake IDs are also the ones who robbed the armored car, which makes things about ten times more complicated than they need to be.  Two of the kids getting fake licenses just HAPPEN to be the sons of the mafia boss who gets robbed, so in a weird twist of fate, these unlucky bastards are getting framed for stealing from their own mobster father, and they almost get executed by mobsters for the job they didn't do.  OK, NITPICK POINT again, wouldn't the mobsters trying to kill the robbers maybe have noticed that two of them are their boss's sons?  It is a "family", after all.  Or why wouldn't the teens have spoken up at that point, to say, "Hey, we wouldn't rob the casino, our father is Anthony Cigliutti, and he's YOUR BOSS!"  Again, the alternative to this is what happens, and it's just plain stupid. 

Meanwhile, the whole bounty hunting operation gets their own reality TV show, something akin to "Dog, the Bounty Hunter", I guess, only with a four-person team, and the show is hosted (?) by two former cast members of "Beverly Hills 90210" - one of which is the actor who's so stupid he doesn't know that his name is supposed to be pronounced "EE-an" and not "EYE-an". Just saying. The bounty hunters are tasked with tracking down the fake robbers, you know, for the TV show, and after they find them, the casino owner almost kills them, but after learning that they have no idea where the money is, he lets them go.  Sure, because that's what you do.  Meanwhie the bounty hunters, thinking they just got four innocent teens killed, are forced to do their jobs and track down the REAL bank robbers, which takes us back to the end of the movie that was seen at the beginning. Once they get the $10 million, it only makes sense that they should bring it back to the casino owner, clear the fake robbers' names, and collect their finder's fee.  So of course they DON'T do that, they do something completely stupid instead. 

The bounty hunters face off against the casino owner's crew and ALSO the mobster's crew, so yeah, there's a lot of shooting and a lot of explosions and it's all so very unnecessary.  And stupid. I guarantee you that whatever Domino Harvey's life as a fashion model turned bounty hunter was like, it was nothing like this. 

Also starring Keira Knightley (last seen in "The Nutcracker and the Four Realms"), Mickey Rourke (last seen in "Berlin, I Love You"), Edgar Ramirez (last seen in "Jungle Cruise"), Delroy Lindo (last seen in "The Harder They Fall"), Rizz Abbasi, Mo'Nique, Ian Ziering, Brian Austin Green, Joe Nunez (last seen in "Let's Go to Prison"), Macy Gray (last seen in "The Paperboy"), Shondrella Avery (last seen in "End of Watch"), Dabney Coleman (last seen in "You've Got Mail"), Peter Jacobson (last seen in "The Goldfinch"), Kel O'Neill, Lucy Liu (last seen in "The Man with the Iron Fists"), Jacqueline Bisset (last seen in "Two for the Road"), Lew Temple (last seen in "Adrienne"), Christopher Walken (last seen in "The War with Grandpa"), Mena Suvari (last seen in "The Rage: Carrie 2"), Jerry Springer, T.K. Carter (last seen in "The Way Back"), Charles Paraventi (last seen in "Man on Fire"), Frederick Koehler (last seen in "The Little Things"), Tom Waits (last seen in "The Dead Don't Die"), Stanley Kamel, Ashley Monique Clark, Adam Clark (last seen in "The Ugly Truth"), Janet Gonzalez, Mike G. (also last seen in "The Way Back"), Eddie Hernandez, Mark Newsom, Jack McGee (last seen in "Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde"), Morgan Nagler, Ginger Kinison, Michelle Fabiano (last seen in "Must Love Dogs"), Phillip Darlington

with archive footage of Gabrielle Carteris, Shannen Doherty, Jennie Garth, Jason Priestley, Anne Robinson, Frank Sinatra (last seen in "The Many Saints of Newark"), Laurence Harvey (last seen in "F for Fake"). 

RATING: 3 out of 10 times the RV flips over

Blood Father

Year 15, Day 29 - 1/29/23 - Movie #4,330

BEFORE: William H. Macy carries over from "Welcome to Collinwood".  I forgot to mention yesterday that "Welcome to Collinwood" was available for FREE on YouTube, which is how I was able to watch it while in Massachusetts, away from my DVR.  You know a movie's probably not going to be great if you can see it for free on YouTube, right?  I can watch some movies that are taking up space on my DVR on my phone when I'm away from home, but not all of them, it depends on the channel.  Today's film is also on my DVR, but the Spectrum app WILL allow me to watch it on my phone when I'm traveling - like most things, there's no rhyme or reason to the system, some things you can do and some things you can't. I just wish all of streaming video could get organized somehow, under one big umbrella that would allow you to access Netflix, Hulu, AmazonPrime, Disney+, HBO Max, etc. through one system.  You know, like TV channels. We sort of had that through our Playstation, which I use to connect to SOME of those services, but then Hulu became incompatible with that system - between the PS3, my phone and my computer, I can get all the streaming services we subscribe to, but there's no one device that allows everything to be watched on a large screen, and that's annoying. 

Headed back to New York today, have to work on Monday, even though I really don't want to. It was nice to take Friday off as a Mental Health Day, but I can't really afford to do much of that. 

THE PLOT: An ex-con reunites with his wayward 17-year old daughter to protect her from drug dealers who are trying to kill her. 

AFTER: All right, lunch at Cracker Barrel in Connecticut, now we're back home. Drive took about 5 hours, but that included the stop for lunch and two rest stops - no real traffic to speak of, and we had good weather, so the traveling part could have been a lot worse.  And we stopped at the Foxwoods Casino on the way up, the buffet there is still closed, but it might re-open in March, according to the casino's web-site. I love that place - and they had renovated it just a few months before COVID shut it down.  We had lunch on Saturday with my parents at their senior living facility, the food was fine so at least I know they're eating well.  Then we had dinner at a place called the Midway in Dedham, MA, a place that's been there since 1947, largely unchanged.  I never ate there when I grew up in the area, but when I heard it was still around, even after the pandemic, I figured I should eat at this throwback place at least once in my life. I got their signature dish, the pot roast, which was, well, underwhelming.  There were better looking specials like meat loaf, prime rib and pork chops, I wish I had gotten one of those - but then I'd always have been wondering about the pot roast.  

This movie is a similar throwback, to the days of Mel Gibson action movies, like "Mad Max" and "Lethal Weapon", before he got in trouble for DWI or whatever and called some female police officer "Sugar Tits". Remember that?  He got himself cancelled before it was cool to be cancelled, and then he kind of built his career back, despite claims of sexism and anti-semitism. Maybe people just found other celebrities to be more mad at, like Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Matt Lauer and Bill Cosby.  Mel, on the other hand, has made quite few movies in the last five years, like "Boss Level" and "Fatman" and "Dragged Across Concrete", plus 6 movies with 2022 release dates!  Two of those are still on my list, but I can't link to them right now and still make it to February 1 on time. (For that matter, I could have linked to "Elvis" from "Blonde" via Xavier Samuel, but that would also have thrown me off track. Gotta know when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em.)

IMDB calls this a "French action crime thriller", but I'm not seeing the French part - OK, the director is French, but this film is in English and looks like it was shot in America, the villains are a Mexican drug cartel, as in "The Marksman", so, umm, how is this a French film?  

Mel's character here, John Link, is a tattoo artist, former prison inmate, recovering alcoholic/addict, and father to an absent teen, who turns up again needing his help when she gets in trouble.  Seems she accidentally shot her drug-dealer boyfriend during a shakedown - he'd been stashing drugs and money in various houses, and paying or allowing people to live there as cover, but then some things went missing, and he was threatening the residents to get them back.  Lydia's the one who bought the bullets at the Wal-Mart, so anything that went sideways would probably get traced back to her.  So out of desperation she calls her father, but just bringing her into his residence, with her being wanted and carrying drugs and a weapon, well that's a whole turducken of parole violations for him.  

The drug dealers show up at his trailer, and he learns everything he needs to know about them from their tattoos (convenient...).  They trash his trailer, but get scared off by the neighborhood watch.  Link goes on the run with his daughter, but the cartel keeps finding them, probably by tracking Lydia's phone.  This is a huge NITPICK POINT, why doesn't Link figure out how the cartel keeps finding them?  OK, maybe he didn't know his daughter had a cel phone and was getting texts from them, but maybe he should have figured it out or asked her about this?

John and Lydia hide out with an old army buddy of his, Preacher, who sells Nazi and Confederate army memorabilia on-line. Nice gig. But Preacher wants to turn Lydia in to the cops for the reward, so they take off again, with Link stealing back his old motorcycle, only to have the cartel track them down, again and again.  Link has to make another stop, back to his old prison to find his old cellmate, who's got a connection to the head of the cartel.  Turns out the drug dealer is the one who's been stealing the money and blaming his tenants, and John can go over his head and turn him in to the leader of the cartel.  But why, WHY would he leave his daughter alone to go run this errand?  This just gives the cartel an opportunity to kidnap her (and his AA sponsor) and drag him in to a final showdown. 

I guess how you feel about the way this one shakes down depends largely on how you feel about Mel Gibson - if you're still holding a grudge against him for whatever reason (the film "What Women Want" would be enough of one...) then you're probably not going to root for his character here, despite all his attempts to be clean, sober and a decent, protective father.  But if you're longing for the days of all those great action movies he made in the 1980's and 1990's, then maybe you'll give him a shot at redemption. It's up to you, really. 

Also starring Mel Gibson (last seen in "Listening to Kenny G"), Erin Moriarty (last seen in "Driven"), Diego Luna (last seen in "Berlin, I Love You"), Michael Parks (last seen in "Smokin' Aces 2: Assassins' Ball"), Miguel Sandoval (last seen in "Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her"), Dale Dickey (last seen in "Leave No Trace") Richard Cabral (last seen in "Snitch"), Daniel Moncada (last seen in "The Mule"), Ryan Dorsey, Raoul Trujillo (last seen in "Cold Pursuit"), Thomas Mann (last seen in "Lady and the Tramp" (2019)), Brandi Cochran, Katalina Parrish (last seen in "The Ridiculous 6"), Cameron Cipta, Tait Fletcher (last seen in "The Contractor"), Vic Browder (last seen in "The Marksman"), Chris Livingston, Tony Whitecrow, Lori Dillen. 

RATING: 5 out of 10