The Object of My Affection

Year 15, Day 56 - 2/25/23 - Movie #4,357

BEFORE: At home today, nothing to do and nowhere to go, but it's too cold to go anywhere, anyway.  It hasn't been THAT cold all winter long in NYC, and so far none of the you-know-what falling from the sky, so our shovels remain stored in the basement.  I know this is not normal, because other parts of the country have been slammed with winter weather, for some reason we've been lucky.  But in previous years when we've been THIS lucky, then we get massive blizzards in March, so I'm not celebrating just yet.  There's word of some possible snow for Tuesday next week, that's a day I'm scheduled to be home again, so I could deal with it if it happens and not lose any work. Though, honestly at this point I wouldn't mind a snowstorm if it kept me out of the office for a day or three.

Liam Aiken carries over from "Sweet November". 

THE PLOT: A pregnant New York City social worker begins to develop romantic feelings for her gay best friend and decides she'd rather raise her child with him, much to the dismay of her overbearing boyfriend. 

AFTER: I've had this on the list for a while, but it's time to clean house, get some of these films that have been outstanding for a long while OFF the damn list, even if I have to resort to extreme measures to FIND them.  This one is NOT running on cable, it's not on Netflix or Hulu or Tubi or Roku - it's on Amazon Prime, but at a prime cost.  Sure, there's always iTunes to fall back on, but the film is 25 years old and iTunes is still charging $3.99 for rental?  When exactly is the price going to come down?  An old film from the previous century should be $1.99 to rent, tops.  If I start paying $3.99 per film on top of all the monthly subscriptions we have, I'll go broke really fast - or probably not, but I'm going to FEEL like I'm spending money I don't have. SO, I kept looking and I found the film on DailyMotion, in two parts, for FREE.  OK, gotta do what I gotta do to save $1.99...

This was kind of a mistake, because there was a 2-commercial ad break every 5 minutes. Really?  I started to feel like maybe I should have paid the damn $3.99 just to avoid the ads for Botox Cosmetic - with people so self-absorbed they can't stand to have a couple wrinkles on their forehead, I simply hated them for that.  3-second ads for pet treats I can stomach, but not the damn "WAAH, I don't want crow's feet or frown lines!" commercials.  Anyway, I put up with it because at least it was a break from the movie every 5 minutes, but COME ON, even Tubi doesn't have that many commercials for its "free" movies.  "The Object of My Affection" should be on YouTube for FREE by now.  

But, I have to wonder, WHY isn't this film available on any streaming platforms right now?  Maybe it's been on all of them already at various times and I just didn't watch it.  Maybe it aged out of the Netflix and Hulu programs - watch, with my luck this movie will probably pop up on HBO Max next month.  (Speaking of which, there are three movies on HBO Max that are crucial to my March and April chains, and it looks like they're disappearing from the platform on February 28. So now I have to hustle this weekend and dub them to VHS just so I'll be able to watch them when I get to them in the chain.  Naturally, HBO movies on VHS won't dub to DVD, so it seems my only choice will be to watch them on VHS tape, very old school.  I can't just hope that these three films will pop up on Tubi or Roku, because they may not. I'll admit it, I took too long to watch them, but why can't all films just stay available where they are?  And two of these films are definitely NOT on iTunes, so it's HBO Max to VHS or nothing at all.)

I'm getting off track - I'm forced to conclude here that there's SOMETHING about this plot that was kind of OK in 1993, but just isn't P.C. any more?  Something about a straight woman choosing to live with her new gay friend instead of the straight father of her baby?  I have a feeling this was new plot territory back then, but maybe it's weak sauce now that there are more gay couples with children, so it's not exactly groundbreaking any more?  OR perhaps this is offensive to liberals because it implies that a woman might try to "change" a gay man into a suitable companion, AND it's also offensive to conservatives because it she's going to be living with a man, it should be the baby's father, not the gay friend.  Wow, if these are both true, then congratulations for pissing off people on both ends of the political spectrum, I guess?  

This was a really fine line to walk, even back THEN, I can't imagine this kind of story plays well on TV now, unless it's on a wacky sit-com, but I somehow doubt CBS would air this kind of thing now, after "Ghosts" and "The Neighborhood".  FOX, maybe, because they have that "Call Me Kat" show that featured a number of prominent gay actors in it, at least until Leslie Jordan died. (Huh, that show is still on, and new episodes are airing this month.  FOX must be desperate. The CBS crowd skews older, anyway, but their clocks are ticking...).  Again, straight woman, pregnant, chooses to raise the baby with her gay best friend instead of the straight boyfriend.  Clearly she doesn't have any confidence in her boyfriend as her soulmate, call it a hunch, but she turns out to be right when he doesn't react well to her choices. Well, it's probably better to get off the Titanic before there are icebergs in the water. 

Eventually, her gay friend George finds a new boyfriend, because getting back together with his ex didn't really work out, so what if the new boyfriend has a much older, live-in mentor and boyfriend?  Gays aren't big on monogamy, or at least that was the stereotype back in 1993.  (Seriously, it was, the "common wisdom" among straights then was that gay people were incapable of forming long-lasting committed relationships, which is B.S. for two reasons - some of them obviously ARE capable of that, and meanwhile straight people don't really have a great track record with monogamy, either.). Anyway, Nina feels betrayed when George gets a boyfriend, but what did she THINK was going to happen?  He'd suddenly turn straight while helping to raise a child that wasn't his?  

If I were inclined to end the romance chain early, this would have been a great place to drop in "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania".  But I'm not really excited enough about that film to drop everything and rush out to see it.  It'll be on Disney Plus in three or four months, probably, and I'll work it in then.  I know, last year I worked in "House of Gucci" and "The Power of the Dog", but that was different, those movies were more relationship-themed, and they fit right in between other movies, I didn't have to change a thing.  I could link to the latest Marvel movie via Paul Rudd, but then I would have no link back to the chain I've designed, which constitutes a sure path to St. Patrick's Day, Easter and Mother's Day.  So I've gotta stay the course, I've still got 16 more romance/relationship films to watch!

Also starring Jennifer Aniston (last seen in "Dumplin'"), Paul Rudd (last heard in "The Bob's Burgers Movie"), John Pankow (last seen in "Life as a House"), Allison Janney (last seen in "Ma"), Alan Alda (last seen in "Marriage Story"), Tim Daly (last heard in "Superman: Braniac Attacks"), Joan Copeland (last seen in "The Private Lives of Pippa Lee"), Steve Zahn (last seen in "Shattered Glass"), Amo Gulinello, Kevin Carroll (last seen in "Velvet Buzzsaw"), Nigel Hawthorne (last seen in "Amistad"), Kali Rocha (last seen in "The Crucible"), Gabriel Macht (last seen in "Middle Men"), Bradley White (last seen in "The Night We Never Met"), Sarah Hyland, Hayden Panettiere (last seen in "Scream 4"), Bruce Altman (last seen in "Irresistible"), Daniel Cosgrove, Damian Young (last seen in "Hello I Must Be Going"), Samia Shoaib, Audra McDonald (last heard in "Beauty and the Beast" (2017)), Lauren Pratt, Paz de la Huerta (last seen in "The Limits of Control"), Marilyn Dobrin, Kate Jennings Grant (last seen in "United 93"), Salem Ludwig, Antonia Rey, Edward James Hyland (last seen in "Bridge of Spies"), John Roland, Rosanna Scotto (last seen in "Ghostbusters" (2016)), Miguel Maldonado, Peter Maloney (last seen in "Desperately Seeking Susan"), Bette Henritze (last seen in "Far from Heaven"), Iraida Polanco, Sarah Knowlton, Kia Goodwin (last seen in "Swimfan"), with archive footage of Gene Kelly (last seen in "Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It"), Debbie Reynolds (ditto). 

RATING: 5 out of 10 ballroom dance lessons

Sweet November

Year 15, Day 55 - 2/24/23 - Movie #4,356

BEFORE: I'm working at a screening of "Cocaine Bear" tonight - I have no plans to WATCH "Cocaine Bear" tonight, because I can't really do both things, watch the film and manage the screening.  But I also have little interest in the film, it does seem really out there, but also very silly and borderline ridiculous.  Maybe at some point in the future, but it doesn't really fit in with my movie-watching plans at the moment.  But sure, whatever, I'll put it on my list when it hits one of the streaming platforms, just not in a hurry to watch it now.  My plans are already made for most of the spring - I think I'll wait a while before I try to connect Mother's Day to something for Memorial Day or Father's Day.

Greg Germann carries over from "The Night We Never Met". "Cocaine Bear" is just 90 minutes long, so let's see what I can say about today's romance-based film while that other film runs in the theater.  

THE PLOT: A workaholic executive and an unconventional woman agree to a personal relationship for a short period, during which she changes his life. 

AFTER: Wow, for a second there on IMDB I got excited, because this film has three nominations listed.  Really?  For Best Actor? Best Actress? Best Adapted Screenplay?  Well, no, it got three Razzie Awards, so that means nominations for WORST Actor, WORST Actress and WORST remake or sequel.  Jeez, I didn't think it was THAT bad, but hey, that was 2001, it was a different time.  Standards were higher, maybe. 

Or maybe people focused on Keanu Reeves' acting ability at the time, which, quite honestly, still needed some work, perhaps. He's come a LONG way since "Bill & Ted", movies, I think, even if he slipped back into that mode three years ago to make the long-awaited third film in the series. Here he starts out as a completely self-centered asshole who's incapable of having a lasting relationship (you know, because he hasn't done the work on HIMSELF). Someone who's completely career-oriented, somebody who think's he's the greatest creative mind in the world of advertising, who's so full of it that he can't take criticism, if the client doesn't like his campaign, then there MUST be something wrong with the client, not his own terrible ideas. 

So I don't know why this film wasn't a bigger hit with women, don't all women just LOVE a bad boy, one that only THEY can change?  That's what this film is really about, the free-thinking radical hippie-chick woman with some weird kind of love in her heart that makes her BELIEVE that she can convince a man to give up his jerk-like behavior, to dig beneath the hard candy surface to discover the soft, sweet and nougatty center within.  Right?  I mean, if a man and a woman get together and continue being the same people they were before, what's the point?  Love is infectious, love is transformative, love makes you want to BE a different sort of person, the kind of person that your lover will admire. Otherwise, what are we even doing? 

A woman wants to be the kind of woman who makes the man want to be a better man, and vice versa.  Or am I way off base here?  That was the quote from that Jack Nicholson movie, "As Good As It Gets", he said, "You make me want to be a better man."  And if that's not love, well, at least it's something positive, something that enacts change and not stagnation. 

Sara is a giver, and Nelson starts out as a taker - the troubles start when he needs to pass a driver's license exam and tries to cheat by asking her for the answers.  SHE gets in trouble, not him, and has to wait 30 days to re-take the test - so then she bugs him for rides, since it's HIS fault now that she doesn't have a driver's license.  It's kind of the opposite of a meet-cute, it's more like a meet-jerk.  But she gives him a proposition, to move in with her for 30 days and live the way she does, this (theoretically) will give him a new outlook on life. Of course he says no, but then he loses his job and his girlfriend dumps him on the same day, and it's late October.  So, with nothing more to lose, he spends a day with her, and then another, and before long, he's become her "November project".  They have wild, happy times and fall in love, meanwhile he's slowly coming around to seeing things from her somewhat wacky point of view. 

He comes so far, so fast, that he even proposes to her before the month is over.  But there's something else standing in the way, some reason why she's convinced that the relationship is not going to last more than a month.  No spoilers here...  But bear in mind that she's clearly done this before in previous months with other partners.  Maybe she knows something that we don't, about how every relationship has an expiration date, even if it's self-imposed by her rules. I'll admit that I found this all very corny and trivial, right up until the ending, that is, which then seemed very powerful, and again, I'm not sure why this didn't appeal to more women on a purely emotional level.  

Quick question, though, which may have more to do with yesterday's film than this one - when Nelson moves in with Sara for a month, did he still have to pay rent on his other apartment?  Did he sublet it for a month?  Remember, he lost his job so maybe he can't really afford to pay the rent on the apartment he's not using.  Am I the only one who thinks about these things? 

Also starring Keanu Reeves (last seen in "The Matrix Resurrections"), Charlize Theron (last heard in "The Addams Family 2"), Jason Isaacs (last seen in "Operation Mincemeat"), Lauren Graham (last seen in "One True Thing"), Liam Aiken (last seen in "The Killer Inside Me"), Frank Langella (last seen in "Robot & Frank"), Ray Baker (last seen in "Hard Rain"), Michael Rosenbaum (last seen in "Hit and Run"), Robert Joy (last seen in "Don't Look Up"), Jason Kravits (last seen in "Morning Glory"), Tom Bullock, Susan Zelinsky, Adele Proom, L. Peter Callender, June Carryl, Kelvin Han Yee (last seen in "Lucky You"), David Fine (last seen in "The Diary of a Teenage Girl"), Elizabeth Weber, Garth Kravits (last seen in "Don't Think Twice"). 

RATING: 6 out of 10 calendar pages

The Night We Never Met

Year 15, Day 54 - 2/23/23 - Movie #4,355

BEFORE: I'm going back again to the early 1990's for this one, 1993, which was also the year that "For Love or Money" got released, and one year after "Prelude to a Kiss". These films are all still running somewhere, be it on cable channels or streaming services, so I guess these have stood the test of time, and they lasted long enough for me to record them, avoid them for a couple of Februarys and then finally feel satisfied (?) when I cross them off the list.  And these actors (Meg Ryan, Alec Baldwin, Michael J. Fox, Matthew Broderick) were all kind of in their prime, most of them are still around, umm, except for the ones that aren't.  When I see a big gap in somebody's career (Bitty Schram), I have to wonder if they quit acting or moved into producing or just got married and moved to Montana.  Haven't seen Garry Shandling in anything in a while, either, I hope he's OK. 

Jeanne Tripplehorn carries over from "Gloria Bell". 

THE PLOT: Brian, Ellen and Sam timeshare an apartment on different days.  A shift on Mondays/Wednesdays causes mistaken identity as Ellen and Sam have never met but leave notes and food behind for each other. 

AFTER: Oh, man, this storyline is so clunky that it HURTS.  It feels like the screenwriter/director just doesn't understand how most things in the world work, like apartments, for example.  The writer needed to set up the mistaken identity thing, so he created a world in which people rent a beautiful apartment for just two nights a week.  Is this a thing?  Who does this in the real world?  I guess I can see if somebody worked on Wall Street and lived in the suburbs, didn't want to commute every day, so maybe they would have a Manhattan apartment for the week and then go home to their family on the weekends, but this also seems very problematic, over time they could grow apart from their spouse and also be tempted to cheat.  Commuting sucks, sure, but in the long run it's probably the best option.

Why would any landlord agree to this, setting up three people who live in an apartment for two nights each in a normal week - this is not normal, that means three sets of keys, lord knows how many houseguests, issues about cleaning and storage and personal space, a whole host of problems when it's probably SO much easier to rent one apartment to one person or one couple.  THAT'S why the world works that way, and not as seen in a bedroom-farce screenplay.  

The men don't come off well here - Brian is the guy with the rent-controlled apartment, and he's about to get married, and still wants to keep the apartment, thus he takes on two roommates who only get the space two nights each a week, and this gives him two nights with his buddies, where they can drink, play poker, watch the football, and apparently dance like nobody is watching (terribly, in other words).  Yeah, that's what guys do, they keep an apartment just to drink and dance with each other.  Wait, what?  Sam takes the deal, paying 1/3 of the rent, which comes to $92 per month (per week?) just so he can have a nice place to cook meals for his dates - he gets Mondays and Saturdays, so Saturday can be date night, but bear in mind he's still paying FULL rent for a crappier apartment with like eight other roommates who don't respect his privacy or his personal space.  How is it not easier and cheaper for him to just get a better apartment with, say, two better roommates?  I guarantee I've already thought about this much more than the screenwriter did.

The mistaken identity comes about when Brian needs to change the schedule, and I guess Sam gets a Wednesday instead of Monday?? Wait, I thought he wanted date nights, back then Wednesday wasn't considered "the new Friday". But this leads to Sam leaving behind gourmet leftovers for Brian, only the next night, they're eaten by Ellen, who thinks they were left by Brian.  Look, I can't devote any more brain space to this, supposedly Ellen didn't get the information about the swap, but as a plot point, I'm sure this doesn't work somehow.  Sam had Mondays, and he knew that Ellen had Tuesdays, so why would he leave food for Brian, who's not going to there until Wednesday?  OK, so I get that Ellen thinks Brian left her the food on Wednesday in advance of her Thursday stayover, but doesn't anybody sign a note with their name?  That seems like common courtesy - but again, who cares how things work in the real world because we just HAVE to set up this whole mistaken identity thing. 

Ellen is married, by the way, and clearly there's something wrong in her marriage if she also needs to rent an apartment for two nights a week, just to have a place to paint.  But this is so clunky, too, she comes all the way in from Queens just to spend time away from her husband?  Or does she have a job in Manhattan and she needs a place to crash?  Queens isn't that far away, but her husband wants to buy a house on Long Island, like Exit 52, and that actually IS a fair distance from the city.  So it would have made more sense if she already lived out there and didn't want to make the trip home a few nights each week, that way she'd be in Manhattan already, first thing in the morning.  By the way, what is Ellen's job?  She's a dental hygienist, she works at the dry cleaners, she's an artist, which is it? 

For that matter, is Sam a chef, an actor or a cheese salesman?  I guess he's got aspirations to be a chef, but then what is really going on in his life?  He works at the cheese counter at Dean & Deluca, which for some reason never saw fit to institute the same "Take a number" policy as every other market in the world, so instead twelve people have to hover around the counter, hoping that he'll choose them next?  That's a terrible system, and like everything else in this movie, bears no resemblance to the way that things work in the real world. Also, NITPICK POINT: He's an expert on cheeses, but he doesn't realize that an omelet isn't vegetarian?  To be fair, there was a lot less vegetarian and vegan awareness back in 1993, but still, he should know where eggs and milk come from.

So many loose threads here that don't connect with anything, like Sam's relationship with his ex, Pastel, who's some kind of performance artist.  And she ends up dating some guy from Texas or something who's also crashing, but in Sam's apartment full of roommates. Completely awkward, sure, but do you know how many apartments there are in New York City? The chances against this happening are astronomically huge. Then there are the "nosy neighbors", seen again and again, but it's all a plant just to have somebody to give the wrong information to Brian's fiancée when she finally comes around to see what he's been up to. Then there's Shep, only who the hell is Shep, and who is "Shep's New Date", also listed in the credits?  And Sam's friend/co-worker, who's also an actor or writer or something, but this is never really explained or fleshed-out either. I can't understand half the directions that this film is firing in, or begin to fathom the WHY of it all.  Clunky, clunky, clunky.

BUT, we still have today's "Love Tip" to get to, and it's an easy one - if you're going to sleep with your roommate, make sure you sleep with the right one.  Simple as that.  I was asked a few years ago by my boss, who was animating an opening "couch gag" for "The Simpsons" in which the couch fell in love with the TV, what the title should be. I thought for a minute and said, "Roomance" - and he liked it.  Later on, I did discover that the term already existed, a portmanteau term for a love affair between two roommates.  Oh, well, I guess I wasn't as innovative in that moment as I thought I was. 

The Dean & Deluca store seen in the film was located at 560 Broadway, which was their Soho "flagship" location - as the company started having financial troubles, more and more locations closed during the 2010's, probably due to the rising cost of NYC rent.  Eventually that flagship store was the last location open, but it closed in October 2019, ending a 32-year run for the business. And just a few months before the pandemic, too, they auctioned off their equipment to raise money to pay off some food vendors before shutting down for good. 

Also starring Matthew Broderick (last seen in "Addicted to Love"), Annabella Sciorra (last seen in "The Kitchen"), Kevin Anderson (last seen in "Rising Sun"), Justine Bateman, Michael Mantell (last seen in "Gun Shy"), Christine Baranski (last seen in "Miss Sloane"), Doris Roberts (last seen in "The Heartbreak Kid" (1972)), Dominic Chianese (last seen in "The Family"), Tim Guinee (last seen in "Adrienne"), Louise Lasser (ditto), Bradley White, Greg Germann (last seen in "Miss Firecracker"), Dana Wheeler-Nicholson (last seen in "Tombstone"), Billy Campbell (last seen in "The Rocketeer"), Michelle Hurst (last seen in "The Trial of the Chicago 7"), Ranjit Chowdhry (last seen in "It Could Happen to You"), Richard Poe, Katharine Houghton (last seen in "Mr. North"), David Slavin, Brooke Smith (last seen in "Bombshell"), Bitty Schram (last seen in "Marvin's Room"), Billy Strong (last seen in "Just a Kiss"), Catherine Lloyd Burns (last seen in "Keeping the Faith"), Michael Mastro (last seen in "Tesla"), Jose Evelio Alveraz, Paul Guilfoyle (last seen in "Don't Look Up"), Davidson Thomson, Kathryn Rossetter, Mary B. McCann (last seen in "Phil Spector"), Steven Goldstein, Suzanne Lanza, Paul J.Q. Lee, Geoffrey Grider, 

with cameos from Lewis Black (last seen in "The Last Laugh" (2019)), Naomi Campbell (last seen in "Always at the Carlyle"), Michael Imperioli (last heard in "The Many Saints of Newark"), Garry Shandling (last seen in "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work")

RATING: 4 out of 10 sloppily-made sandwiches on poker night

Gloria Bell

Year 15, Day 53 - 2/22/23 - Movie #4,354

BEFORE: It's Ash Wednesday, but who the hell cares?  To me that just means that it's only 46 movies until Easter - and I rest easy knowing I've got my Easter film all picked out, I just have to get there.  Two years ago I watched "Mary Magdalene" on Easter Sunday, last year I tried to link to "Paul, Apostle of Christ" but I couldn't find a way to get there, so I watched "Three Christs" instead.  This year I'm going to try for that movie about St. Paul again, I think I have the path to get there, but it's going to put me in a weird place, where I'll have to get back to fiction movies through documentaries.  (The only valid link out of "Paul, Apostle of Christ" takes me to a documentary about Val Kilmer. Whatever.)

Brad Garrett carries over from "My Best Friend's Girl", where he had a vocal cameo as an unsatisfied customer calling a company's complaint line. Which reminds me that I have a talent for identifying actors from their voices, which also reminds me that "The Masked Singer" is back on the air, 2nd episode of the season tonight, so I know where I'll be at 8 pm. 

THE PLOT: A free-spirited woman in her 50s seeks out love at L.A. dance clubs. 

AFTER: I'm not sure about the WHY of this film - maybe I've just watched too many rom-coms already this February, and that's very damaging for the brain, after several weeks of things working out for the best and people finding their soulmates after some minor confusions, you sort of come to expect that, and that's...well, it's not healthy.  I know many people find their soulmates in real life, or at least they believe that they do, but just as many people don't - or they let them get away or there are troubles they can't overcome, or who knows.  Everybody's story is different, few of them are linear, and so we should never come to "expect" such success in real life, but instead learn to live with what happens and try to enjoy the journey along the way. 

This is not a rom-com because it's not a comedy, there's very little that's funny about it, unless you find certain things ironically funny.  A lot of sad and borderline pathetic things happen here, so that makes it what?  A rom-dram?  That works if you pronounce the "dram" in "drama" a certain way, if you say "drama" like it rhymes with "gramma" it's just not going to catch on. But you never here anyone talking about rom-drams, I wonder why that is?  Surely they must exist, but I guess maybe people want to feel good, not bad, whenever possible, so they don't seek them out?  Look, Shakespeare had the right idea, something's either a comedy or a tragedy - if nobody dies and they fall in love instead, it's a comedy.  When the bodies start piling up, like in "Hamlet" or "MacBeth", it's for sure a tragedy.  Things were simpler then, it was a different time. 

Gloria is a middle-aged divorced woman with two adult children - a daughter who's a yoga instructor and a son who's married and takes care of his baby son, but has no idea where his wife is. (You can go ahead and put a pin in that one, but the movie just refuses to do a deep dive and explain this part.). Gloria spends her nights going to dance clubs that play disco music - who knew these were still around?  I thought they defiantly blew up all the disco records in Comiskey Park in 1979.  Club-owners in L.A. didn't get the memo, I guess. 

Gloria meets Arnold at the clubs one night and they start a relationship - but it's filled with problems, like the fact that he won't tell his ex-wife that he's dating someone new, and in fact he's still supporting his wife and daughters, who can't get jobs for some weird reason. Gloria, on the other hand, brings Arnold to her son's birthday party, and introduces him as her "friend", but she has such a good time reminiscing with her children and ex-husband that Arnold feels left out, and he disappears from the event. 

Gloria's daughter is pregnant, and intends to move to Sweden to be with the baby's father, who's a Swedish surfer (who knew?).  Meanwhile Gloria's best friend/co-worker gets fired and Gloria also finds out she's got a degenerative eye problem, so her eyesight's just going to get worse and worse.  Thankfully her psycho upstairs neighbor accidentally (?) left his weed on her doorstep, so she tries some.  They give marijuana to glaucoma patients, don't they?  

Arnold keeps calling her to apologize, and finally she calls him back, and they go on a trip to Las Vegas. But shortly after checking in, Arnold gets a call from his daughters that his wife has had an accident, and he refuses, at first, to travel back to check on her condition.  But despite having a nice dinner with Gloria (for some reason, NOT at a Vegas buffet, WTF?) he excuses himself and disappears, probably back to L.A. to see his ex-wife.  Gloria has a wild night in Vegas by herself, drinking and sex and probably some kind of hallucinogen, because she wakes up on a pool chair, and has to call her mother to take her back to L.A. 

I can't really tell if this film goes anywhere, if all the pieces add up to something bigger, to make some kind of point, or if it's all just random occurrences.  I mean, sure, it fits into my theme fine, because it's about how complicated relationships can get, and it calls into question why we bother with them in the first place, because life would be so much simpler if we could learn to be happy by ourselves and all that.  But as the story of two people who never can quite seem to get on the same page, it's also kind of sad in some respects.  You can find somebody who loves you and wants to take you to dinner and read poetry to you, but can you ever REALLY be sure that you can trust that person to be there when it counts?  I don't have an answer here, I'm asking for all the divorced people who live in constant fear that it's going to happen again.  If not today, then someday. 

A record is a great metaphor for a relationship, because it's easy to feel like you're going around in circles and not making much progress - but still, the needle is inevitably moving closer to the end of the groove.  At some point the song is going to be over, and it's bound to be at a point when you just wanted to keep on dancing.  Well, the good news is that you can just play a different record, just like you can start up a new relationship.  Or you can flip the record over and play the other side, or play that record again, it's up to you. You can even keep listening to disco music, even though it's WAY out of vogue. That metaphor is today's "Love Tip", sorry if it's a bit of a confusing one.

Also starring Julianne Moore (last seen in "Being Flynn"), John Turturro (last seen in "Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me"), Caren Pistorius (last seen in "Slow West"), Michael Cera (last seen in "Person to Person"), Holland Taylor (last seen in "Legally Blonde"), Jeanne Tripplehorn (last seen in "Steal This Movie"), Rita Wilson (last seen in "Everything Is Copy"), Chris Mulkey (last seen in "The Purge"), Cassi Thompson, Tyson Ritter (last seen in "Peppermint"), Barbara Sukowa (last seen in "Romance & Cigarettes"), Alanna Ubach (last seen in "Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde"), Sean Astin (last seen in "The Do-Over"), Jesse Erwin (last seen in "Walk of Shame"), Chopper Bernet, Gerard Sanders (last seen in "Iron Man"), Roberta Hanlen, Francisco Rodriguez, Sarah Lowe, Jeff Leibow, Derrick Redford, Aileen Burdock (last heard in "The Guilty"), Ari Schneider, Heather Messal, Jennie Fahn, Barbara Scolaro (last seen in "The Hero").

RATING: 5 out of 10 paintball guns

My Best Friend's Girl

Year 15, Day 52 - 2/21/23 - Movie #4,353

BEFORE: Kicking off the second half of this year's romance chain, Alec Baldwin carries over from "Prelude to a Kiss". Today's film got stranded as a "leftover" last time after I watched "Good Luck Chuck".  Or maybe it came to my attention just after I watched "Good Luck Chuck", it's hard to remember. But the point is that it would have been EASY to get here from there, and often my linking system is anything but easy. This week is about catching up on romances from the previous two decades that have somehow fallen through the cracks of previous Februarys.  I've cobbled a bunch of these stranded films together this time around, and I put together a new chain from the remains of whatever didn't fit into the old chains.  I'm going to have to do the same thing this October when Halloween rolls around, as it inevitably will.  

The good news is that once I determined what I'd missed before, and strung those films together, adding what I needed to add to join those little bricks together, the vast majority of those films were available SOMEWHERE, it might not have been the same channel or streaming service where it was before, but at least every film is available somewhere, so I'm going to be OK again, at least for this year. Hey, there's always iTunes, too - I think I'm going to have to rent 2 or 3 films there to make it through March, but that's just what I'll have to do. 

Oh, and I think I'm definitely moving my DocFest to April this year, it's really the only way to link out of my Easter film.  It's just 15 documentaries right now, which takes me to about April 24, but it's possible I might squeeze a few more into that chain.  The key question, though, is how to get from there to Mother's Day on May 9.  I've got about 6 or 8 films on topic for Mother's Day, I'll leave it up to fate and the linking system which one(s) will be watched this year. It's impossible to program the whole year, but if I just program from one holiday to the next, chances are good that when put together, those chains could fill up the whole Movie Year. 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Good Luck Chuck" (Movie #4,071)

THE PLOT: Tank faces the ultimate test of friendship when his best friend hires him to take his ex-girlfriend out on a lousy date to make her realize how great her former boyfriend is. 

AFTER: It's the opposite film to "Good Luck Chuck", which was released a year before this one.  In that film, Dane Cook plays an asshole who dates a lot of women who then go on to meet the love of their lives right after him.  In this film, Dane Cook plays an asshole who dates a lot of women who then realize that the love of their lives was the man they dated right BEFORE him.  Big difference?  Not really.  The key point, however, is that in "Good Luck Chuck", he's a loser at love, but not necessarily a terrible person at heart. 

But wait, I hear you say, he's only PRETENDING to be an asshole here, for a grander purpose, his actions allow these women to realize they had a pretty good relationship before, which they left because they assumed there MUST be a better relationship out there for them somewhere, but then they date Tank and think, "No, it's hell out there.  My ex looks pretty good by comparison."  Ah, so that's OK then, we're supposed to like this guy, he's only pretending to be a jerk.  This might work, but then Tank says something about when he's not pretending to mistreat women, he attracts them in their spare time by making them feel terrible about themselves - so if they didn't have low self-esteem before, he gives it to them and then they're attracted to him, I guess because he projects that air of self-confidence?  And this works, it gets him laid when he insults women and makes them feel terrible about themselves.  So, therefore, Tank is just an asshole all the time, when he's being paid to drive women back to their boyfriends, and also when he's not, just for his own personal gain.  OK, now I hate him again.  

Does this work in real life?  I would hate for this to work in real life.  Umm, why does this happen in real life?  Are some women attracted to the "bad boys"?  Are some of them looking for people to "fix", as in "Oh, I'm going to change him, I'll grab him when he needs work and make him toe the line?"  Not gonna happen. Or did these women get messed up by their fathers or exes and are just somehow nostalgic for the terrible way they were made to feel about themselves?  I can't imagine any of this is healthy - but this film is set in Boston, and I can speak from personal experience, some people there are fairly messed up. This maybe explains a lot about this movie.  Still, that's today's "Love Tip" - if you encounter an asshole, maybe DON'T date him.  Seems like that should go without saying, right? 

The movie's only 16 years old, but something tells me it just wouldn't work today - you couldn't release a film now where a guy gets ahead by mistreating women.  We've had two or three female empowerment and awareness movements since then. I don't think Dane Cook got cancelled, but he hasn't been in a movie since 2019, and it feels like he belongs in that group with Louis CK and Joe Rogan, where half the audience just can't stand them.  He probably makes more money from comedy tours, but he hasn't done one of those since 2019 either.  

The film was directed by Howard Deutch, who also directed "Pretty in Pink" and "Some Kind of Wonderful", but now works primarily on TV shows.  I honestly can't tell if this film was meant to be some kind of parody of romantic comedies, or a serious one that was designed to flip the genre around.  Deutch is married to Lea Thompson, who directed "The Year of Spectacular Men", which I watched last week.  Umm, advantage Howard Deutch, I guess?  

The title is taken from the Cars song of the same name, which is played several times in the film.  It's appropriate, I guess, because the band is from Boston and the film is set there.  I have something of a history with the song, because back when I was in an a cappella group I would arrange songs for the group, and in one session where we were pitching song ideas, someone else suggested "Jessie's Girl" and I suggested "My Best Friend's Girl", and when we played one after the other I realized they were nearly the same song - you could sing one song while you played the other.  So, I set about arranging them as one song, called "My Best Friend Jessie's Girl" - but I think the group broke up before we ever got around to singing that for an audience. I just did a Google search for song mash-ups, and surprisingly nobody but me ever put these two songs together, despite similar titles and subject matter. 

Let's face it, a film like this was never going to be Shakespearean in nature, was never going to compete with "Twelfth Night" or "Much Ado About Nothing" (I've heard good things...).  But it's probably good enough to just match everybody up with somebody at the end and roll the credits. I just can't spend much more time finding faults here, because I've still got three more weeks of romance-based films to go, I've got to pace myself.  By March 12 I'll probably be all curled up in a fetal position, rocking back and forth, mumbling, "No more rom-coms, no more rom-coms..."

Also starring Dane Cook (last seen in "Good Luck Chuck"), Kate Hudson (last seen in "Glass Onion"), Jason Biggs (last seen in "Jay and Silent Bob Reboot"), Diora Baird (last seen in "Hot Tub Time Machine"), Lizzy Caplan (last seen in "Save the Date"), Riki Lindhome (last seen in "Knives Out"), Mini Anden (last seen in "Prime"), Hilary Pingle, Nate Torrence (last heard in "Zootopia"), Malcolm Barrett (last seen in "Swimfan"), Taran Killam (last seen in "Killing Gunther"), Faye Grant (last seen in "Internal Affairs"), Richard Snee (last seen in "Don't Look Up"), Amanda Brooks (last seen in "Flightplan"), Alberto Bonilla (last seen in "Cop Out"), Michael O'Toole (last seen in "Surrogates"), Sally Pressman, Kate Albrecht, Andrew Lewis Caldwell (last seen in "The Matrix Resurrections"), Tom Kemp (last seen in "The Purge: Election Year"), Tony V. (last seen in "World's Greatest Dad"), Andria Blackman (last seen in "Chappaquiddick"), Melina Lizette, Josh Alexander, Jenny Mollen (last seen in "Crazy, Stupid, Love"), Rob Rota, with a vocal cameo from Brad Garrett (last heard in "Tarzan 2: The Legend Begins") and archive footage of Demi Moore, Patrick Swayze. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 crucifix-shaped pizzas (Is this really a thing?  Should it be?)

Prelude to a Kiss

Year 15, Day 51 - 2/20/23 - Movie #4,352

BEFORE: Clearing another one today - this one's been on my list, and my DVR, for at least tow years.  But even before that, I avoided this film for about 30 years - there's a twist to the story, and once you know it, there's little point in watching the film, or so I was led to believe.  And I personally found that twist to be stupid, so that's probably part of the reason why I avoided the film for three decades, then another two years.  At this point I want to watch it just to get it out of the way. 

Debra Monk carries over from "For Love or Money". 

THE PLOT: A couple fall in love despite the woman's pessimistic outlook. As they struggle to come to terms with their relationship, something supernatural happens that tests it.

AFTER: Yeah, I still think this is pretty stupid, but at least now I never need to watch this again.  You should stop reading now if you don't know the twist, or if you don't WANT to know the twist. Seriously, turn back now, because there's no way to talk about this movie without spoiling it, and then, like me, you may not want to watch the film once you know its secrets.  OK, don't say I didn't warn you.

The big twist is that it's a "body-switching" comedy, two people swap bodies, or they swap souls, however you want to look at it - and honestly, I'd rather watch films like "Big" or "13 Going on 30" where characters age overnight than deal with this body-swap nonsense.  I mean, it can't happen in real life, so why are there so many movies that use this as a plot point?  There's "Freaky Friday", both versions, there's "Vice Versa", "Like Father, Like Son", and "The Change-Up" with Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds - none of these films are any good, right? They just can't be.  Then there's a sub-class of films with the gender-switching, like "Goodbye Charlie" and "Switched" and "The Hot Chick".  Which Hollywood executives thought these were good ideas, or a trend worth continuing?

"Prelude to a Kiss" is both, a body-switch and a gender-switch - hell, it's an old-young switch as well, they really went for it, with a young bride swapping bodies with a really old man.  The "magic" takes place when they kiss on her wedding day, and here's the "secret sauce", the source of the magic, they both wanted it to happen.  Obviously, the old dude wanted to feel young again, but then for the bride supposedly it was a passing fancy, like, "Oh, I wonder what it would be like to have your whole life behind you instead of ahead of you, to have everything worked out and to be secure in who you are."  Umm, yeah, except no young people wish for this, because they're too busy being young and enjoying that.  So this just didn't work for me. 

The only thing that's moderately interesting is that the swap takes place at the wedding, so the bride doesn't get to go on her honeymoon, because she's in the wrong body.  This leads the groom to believe that his wife is acting differently just because they got married - as if it was the wedding that suddenly made her have a more positive outlook on life and be cured of her persistent insomnia.  But then there are intimate things she doesn't want to do any more, and that's a stereotype about people who get married, right?  As soon as the honeymoon is over, the sex life dies down - well, for some people, anyway.  But here it probably has more to do with the fact that the old dude in the young woman's body isn't into sex with men?  OK, sure, but we're getting into a very weird set of plot points, then.  

Also, you can imagine a new spouse saying, "Oh, she's a different person since we got married," but they don't usually mean that literally.  Except for here, Peter convinces himself that his wife is suddenly a different person since they got married.  Besides the sudden ability to sleep better, she doesn't seem to remember the recipes for any of the drinks she made at her bartending job, so there's that.  Also, she starts pushing for them to go out for dinner at four o'clock and get to bed by eight, and she keeps asking for the senior discount at the movies, which is all a bit odd. Plus she starts listening to talk radio and voting Republican. 

For some reason the young Rita in the old man's body never says, "Whoa, hey, how did I switch bodies?" or "Hey, everybody, something weird just happened..." allegedly because she didn't think anyone would believe her - but this just seems like a dodge, a screenwriting ploy just to keep the story going a bit longer.  Instead she goes back to live with the old man's family and she waits to die, I guess. Well, at least she's being well-cared for - I guess this is the downside of being a pessimist and a fatalist, she won't take any steps to fix her problem, she just sits around and waits for Peter to figure out that somebody elses soul is in his wife's body.  Couldn't she write him a letter or something to explain the situation?

I guess this was a play before it was made into a movie, but how exactly did THAT work?  You can obviously do a lot more with effects in a movie than you can on the stage, so was the play even clunkier than this movie was?  Supposedly the play was designed to be an oblique commentary on the AIDS crisis, but I don't really see the connection there.  The movie instead reminds us that life is precious but finite, and no matter what we do, we're going to get old and die sooner than we'd like, and in the best case scenario, we'll also get to watch everyone we love die before we do.  Yeah, thanks for that, "Prelude to a Kiss", but please stop helping me. 

Today's "Love Tip", I guess, is to have some foreign phrases or other code words worked out with your life partner, ones that only you two would know, just in case you need to prove to them that somebody's swapped bodies with you, and instead of a petite young blonde you're now in the body of a large old man. I hope you never need to use that tip, though.  

Also starring Alec Baldwin (last seen in "Dean Martin: King of Cool"), Meg Ryan (last seen in "Everything Is Copy"), Kathy Bates (last seen in "Bad Santa 2"), Ned Beatty (last seen in "The Killer Inside Me"), Patty Duke, Richard Riehle (last seen in "Pee-Wee's Big Holiday"), Stanley Tucci (last seen in "The Witches"), Sydney Walker, Rocky Carroll (last seen in "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks"), Ray Gill, Ward Ohrman, Annie Golden, Frank Carillo, Fern Persons, Rob Riley, Jane Alderman.

RATING: 4 out of 10 rolls of microfiche

For Love or Money

Year 15, Day 50 - 2/19/23 - Movie #4,351

BEFORE: Well, "Swimfan" was released in 2002, but now this week I'm going further back, to the land of the 1990's, because I've got romance films left over from previous Februarys and I'm trying to clear the decks around here.  Everything must go, I've got inventory problems - through no fault of my own, the way that the linking works I've tried every year to put together the best possible string of love-based media properties, but if you think about it, there are dozens of possible connections for each movie and I can only follow ONE of them each day.  So films sometimes get "stranded" because I followed a different path, big-picture style to make a fully connected month.  This 1993 film with Michael J. Fox has been taking up space on my DVR for about two years, and it's time to clear it, even if it turns out to be a terrible film. 

I can't even remember what the original intended linking was supposed to be - but maybe tomorrow's film will remind me.  Once two films of a similar genre that share an actor get placed next to each other on my list, they tend to stay that way, unless one is needed somewhere else to fix a linking emergency.  Michael J. Fox didn't star in that many romances, so maybe that was part of my problem, I recorded this one and then had no way to get there.  I had one this year, actually I had two because Gabrielle Anwar, the young love interest in this one, played another character's MOTHER last week in "The Last Summer". So, yeah, that's how long this one's been slipping through the cracks.  As I go through the credits, I'll expect to find several actors who are no longer alive, and I'll try to not get depressed about that. 

Dan Hedaya carries over from "Swimfan". 

THE PLOT: Doug, a concierge at a luxury hotel in Manhattan, saves all his tips towards his plan for his own hotel. A potential investor seduces the girl he loves, with false promises of leaving his wife. Doug's dilemma: hotel project or girl?

AFTER: Here's today's "Love Tip" - sometimes, a relationship is all about the real estate. I don't mean to sound flippant about relationships, but when you break it down, when you love somebody you want to share your lives, share your space, and maybe share an apartment or a house. And then when the relationship is over, something has to change, one person usually moves out or maybe lawyers get involved and decide who gets the house, or it may even get sold at that point.  Even in the best case scenario, where two people stay together until "death do us part", there's still the matter of the real estate, it's just easier to figure out who gets it.  

I had a tacit agreement with my first wife that if one of us should want to leave the relationship, they should also leave the premises.  Not that it would make things any easier for the one left behind, but hey, at least they'd have a consolation prize, they wouldn't have to move all of their stuff.  We had just watched a couple of friends ALMOST go through a break-up, and the husband wanted to leave the marriage AND keep the apartment, and to us, this was a total break-up faux pas. Not cool. So when my wife had mentally "checked out" from our marriage by coming out of the closet, yeah, I asked her to pack up and leave - but I was just following the terms of the discussion we'd had a couple years before.  The person who wants to leave should have to physically LEAVE, because that's work, and it should take work to get what you want.  

(This is on my mind because I just scanned through that documentary about Kurt Vonnegut - with the sound off - to see who else appears in it, if I want to watch it in April then I need to know if it's going to connect with my other docs, and thankfully, it does. Fits in like it was meant to be. When Vonnegut left his first wife he LEFT, moved to NYC and she got the house on Cape Cod, so it seems he was kind of on the same page with this as a set-up.)

I bring this up because the lead character here in "For Love or Money" is a hotel concierge with big dreams, he wants to open up a hotel of his own on Roosevelt Island, which is a strip of land between Manhattan and Queens, in the East River.  To the best of my knowledge, there are no hotels there in real life, and I would imagine that putting one there would be difficult.  Not just turning an abandoned building into a working hotel, but also getting people to stay there on a regular basis, because the best way to get there is by a tramway over the river, similar to the trams used to get to the tops of mountains.  Why would anyone stay on Roosevelt Island when they can stay in Manhattan itself, within walking distance of plays, attractions and subways?  (Actually, there is one subway stop on Roosevelt Island, the "F" train has a stop there.). Apparently there IS at least one hotel on Roosevelt Island now, and surprisingly it's MORE expensive than the average NYC hotel, not less. 

So, it looks like somebody out there had a similar dream to Doug's. But it was an uphill battle for Doug to get there, he had all the plans and some of the legal bits figured, and he'd saved for years to put a down payment on the property, but what he needed was to partner with someone with deep pockets, someone to finance the rest of the deal so he could become at least part owner of this new hotel, instead of just working for someone else's hotel.  Then in the process he got caught in a love triangle, as the fashion mogul willing to back his hotel plan is also having an affair with the girl he likes who works at the perfume counter in a department store.  Wow, this film came out in the 1990's, but clearly it was written in the spirit of the 1980's - Doug's does things like recommending hair stylists by saying "Ivana (Trump) goes there...".  I'm surprised that the screenplay didn't have him getting in bed with a Trump-like real estate mogul. 

Instead the "villain" here is a fashion designer, someone who lives out in the Hamptons with his third wife.  (And somehow the fashion guy is having an affair with a woman, not a man...). He keeps saying that he's going to leave his wife, but come on, he's never going to, and Doug's wanna-be girlfriend, Andy, is just too naive to figure this out.  She's got a burgeoning singing career, and apparently sees her relationship with Christian Hanover as her ticket to stardom, like maybe he'll finance a Broadway show that she can appear in.  Stranger things have happened, I suppose, but as anyone who's seen a romantic comedy before knows, her real destiny is probably with the younger lead character, who is torn between covering for his prospective business partner and looking out for the best interests of the attractive perfume counter girl. 

This leads him to do all kinds of crazy things like take a helicopter out to the Hamptons to intercept Andy at a party (Hanover claims it would take Doug "days" to drive out there, and he's not that far off...) or take her to dinner and explain why her boyfriend couldn't make it - or worse, go watch her perform in her cabaret show, which is, umm, not very good.  But he doesn't complain about having to hear her sing, which means that there's some hope for them in the long run.  As the title suggests, it's going to come down to a choice for him, he can have the real estate deal or the girl, but probably he can't have both.  Or can he? 

Beyond that, this is a crazy look at the life of a hotel concierge, which involves getting the hotel guests whatever they want, even if they don't ask in advance, or even if they don't know that they want it.  This could be Broadway show tickets, concert tickets, box seats at Yankee Stadium, singing lessons for a bird, etc. The hotel lobby has some kind of "in" with the concert promoters that's gone back YEARS, so if you were one of the millions of people who couldn't get Taylor Swift tickets, because TicketMaster is corrupt and thousands of tickets get filtered off to other sources, this film might show you how this situation came to be.  Greed and connections, that's how - and even if we could create a level playing field for concert tickets, eventually the brokers, scalpers and hotel concierges would create a new way to get around the new system, and we'll be right back where we started, because greed and connections. 

You might as well also hate the system that allows a young woman to think that sleeping with a famous married fashion designer is a short-cut to fame and fortune, while it's very un-PC these days to suggest something like that, in the 1990's people probably didn't think much about it, but hey, it was a different time.  Or a suggestion that the garbage disposal industry in NYC is run by the mob, or the fact that a rich person could probably bribe an IRS agent to threaten an audit.  This was all part of the game back then, probably still is now, but you just don't hear about these things as much. 

The filming locations included Tiffany & Co., FAO Schwarz (which closed in 2015), the Pierre Hotel (5th Ave. and 61st St.), Yankee Stadium, and a Gray's Papaya up on Amsterdam Avenue.  The property that Doug wants to buy on Roosevelt Island is an old smallpox hospital, so, umm, good luck with that. And the film ends on the Queensboro Bridge for some reason, not a great place to have a conversation. Just saying. 

Also starring Michael J. Fox (last seen in "Bad Reputation"), Gabrielle Anwar (last seen in "The Last Summer"), Anthony Higgins (last seen in "Taste the Blood of Dracula"), Michael Tucker (last seen in "The Purple Rose of Cairo"), Bob Balaban (last seen in "The French Dispatch"), Isaac Mizrahi (last seen in "Always at the Carlyle"), Udo Kier (last seen in "Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot"), Patrick Breen (last seen in "Just a Kiss"), Fyvush Finkel (last seen in "A Serious Man"), Saverio Guerra (last seen in "Lucky You"), Daniel Hagen, LaChanze (last seen in "The Help"), Paula Laurence, Donna Mitchell (last seen in "The Goldfinch"), Debra Monk (last seen in "One for the Money"), Sandra Reaves-Phillips (last seen in "Lean on Me"), Nicole Beach, Simon Jones (last seen in "Matilda"), Dianne Brill, Susan Blommaert (last seen in "Down to You"), Richard B. Shull (last seen in "Trapped in Paradise"), Mike Moyer (last seen in "Never Been Kissed"), Susan Ringo, John Cunningham (last seen in "Shaft" (2000)), Ann McDonough, Richmond Hoxie, Alice Playten (last seen in "I.Q."), Erick Avari (last seen in "Mr. Deeds"), Douglas Seale, David Lipman (last seen in "The Wizard of Lies"), Le Clanché du Rand, Hikari Takano, Gabor Morea, Tim Gallin, Steven Randazzo (last seen in "The Family"), with cameos from Bobby Short, Kimora Lee Simmons and archive footage of Yvonne DeCarlo, Al Lewis, Butch Patrick. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 packets of duck sauce