Dinner With Friends

Year 15, Day 63 - 3/4/23 - Movie #4,364

BEFORE: Just 10 more romance/relationship films to go - nine after tonight. Yes, it's been wearing me down but I've found ways to break up my viewing, I watched the first episode of Season 3 of "The Mandalorian", also I skipped through the first four episodes of "Andor" again - I started to watch it but dropped it at some point, now I want to finish it so I took an hour to just remind myself of the major plot points so I can continue on from here. 

Tomorrow's the start of a busy week, I'm working every day for seven days straight, just alternating days between the two jobs.  Some shifts will be 12 hours or longer, so I'm going to be worn out by this time next weekend. I think I should still have time to watch a movie each night, but it might be tough to stay on schedule. 

Andie MacDowell carries over again from "Green Card". 

EDIT: The TCM "31 Days of Oscar" line-up for March 4, added here after the fact, is: 

6:00 am "The Front Page" (1931)

8:00 am "Ninotchka" (1939)

10:00 am "Adam's Rib" (1949)

11:45 am "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town" (1936)

2:00 pm "Harvey" (1950)

4:00 pm "Born Yesterday" (1950)

5:45 pm "Some Like It Hot" (1959)

8:00 pm "Tom Jones" (1963)

10:15 pm "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" (1963)

1:15 am "You Can't Take it With You" (1938)

3:30 am "To Be or Not to Be" (1938)

5:15 am "Block-Heads" (1938)

Today's theme is "Comedy", and maybe this is where I hit my stride - I've seen everything here EXCEPT for "The Front Page" (I watched the 1974 remake), "Ninotchka" (though I have seen "Silk Stockings"), "Born Yesterday" (still on my list) and whatever "Block-Heads" is.  But I have seen 8 out of 12, which brings me up to 27 out of 46, or almost 59%.

THE PLOT: Two married couples have their twelve-year bond of friendship put to the test when one couple reveals they are splitting up. 

AFTER: This movie also got cut from my list last February when I learned that "Green Card" had been pulled from streaming services before I could watch it - and it's a good thing too, because without this one I couldn't pull off the Andie MacDowell three-peat, and "Love After Love" simply did not link to anything else on my list, so I'd be in the soup without this one.  Fortunately since HBO made this, they've kept it up on HBO Max much longer than usual - if it were a film they didn't have a stake in, they'd probably drop it after a year. I was afraid they were about to drop it because the cable listings said it was available until 2/28 - and I needed to watch it AFTER February 28 - so I dumped it to VHS just to be on the safe side.  But now it's March, and the film is still running on HBO on Demand, so they must have meant February 28 of some other year. It's a flawed system that I have no control over, I just have to be glad when a film stays available long enough for me to, you know, watch it.

But the five words in the opening credits of a film that I do NOT want to see?  That would be "Based on the play by..." because I just know that if a movie was based on a play, it's likely to be all talky-talky, and take place in no more than two locations, most likely the houses or apartments of the main characters, and ultimately it may go nowhere.  Plays turned into movies don't have a great track record with me, except some of the movies based on Neil Simon plays.  The 1999 play "Dinner With Friends" by Donald Margulies won the freakin' 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and based on only seeing the movie, I'm hard-pressed to understand why.  There are two couples, one of them splits up.  Who freakin' cares?  There's not really any new ground broken here, couples (real and fictional) split up all the time. I don't know, maybe the play was absolutely brilliant and it just didn't translate properly to a movie for some reason. 

Really, it's not good for me to watch so many movies about break-ups and failed relationships, it's taking its toll on me. It's (I would imagine) a bit like living next to a cemetery, every day you'd leave your house and walk past the cemetery and BOOM, you're thinking about death, there's no way around that, and yet you're still expected to continue down the street and go to work or school and carry on like nothing's wrong, but still, deep down, you were reminded that someday you will die, it's inevitable.  Movies with break-ups are the same kind of reminder that everything is transitory, one day despite your best efforts your relationship will be over, one way or the other. Yeah, thanks for that. Next movie, please. 

Gabe and Karen are the married couple who work for Gourmet magazine and talk too much about their gourmet-cations in Italy. They also have a second house on Martha's Vineyard, so how the hell am I supposed to like them?  (OK, so I'm a hypocrite because I've taken 3 BBQ-based road trips across the southern U.S. with my wife, but come on, that's a far cry from a pasta-based food trip in Italy.).  Tom and Beth are the foil characters, the other couple that splits up due to Tom's affair with a travel agent - but come on, haven't we all seen something like this before?  I was half expecting the double-switch, as in by the end of the movie Tom and Beth have gotten back together and Gabe and Karen are actually the ones separating, but that's not what happened. So, without that it's extremely predictable, the couple that's in trouble is the one that splits up. Yawn.  

Also, a Pulitzer? Really? This counted as a TV movie because it aired on HBO, not a movie movie, and it did get 2 Emmy nominations but no wins.  Clearly something got lost in the translation.  Even flashing back to that summer on the Vineyard when Tom and Beth were introduced to each other, come on, that sort of time-jumping is certainly old hat by now. This movie either needed more glorious footage of gourmet food, or some couple swapping, something new and innovative, I just don't know what. 

Also starring Dennis Quaid (last seen in "Midway"), Greg Kinnear (last seen in "Feast of Love"), Toni Collette (last seen in "Lucky Them"), Taylor Emerson, Jake Fritz (last seen in "Lucky Numbers"), Hollliston Coleman, Angus T. Jones (last seen in "The Rookie"), Beau Holden (last seen in "Something to Talk About"), Ruth Riechl, Caroline Neville. 

RATING: 4 out of 10 shucked ears of corn

Green Card

Year 15, Day 62 - 3/3/23 - Movie #4,363

BEFORE: Andie MacDowell carries over from "Love After Love", and I'm going WAY back to 1990 for this one. That's 27 years before the release of yesterday's picture - so yeah, Andie MacDowell's been around a while.  And I didn't talk about this yesterday, but "Love After Love" featured her first nude scenes, at the age of fifty-something, and good for her.  But she said in some interviews that she almost wished she'd done them earlier in her career, and there's probably a lot of male fans out there who wished that too.  OK, maybe female fans, too, whatever.  So umm, let that be a lesson to all you aspiring actresses out there, when you're in your fifties, like Andie, you may wish that you'd done more nude scenes in your 20's or 30's.  The moral is, don't wait, do those nude scenes as soon as you can!  OK, maybe that's a terrible moral.

(Andie seems to have conveniently forgotten about the film "Ruby Cairo". I guess the nude scene doesn't count if I'm the only person who ever saw that movie...)

I also hear you out there, thinking, "How could this guy have NOT seen "Green Card" already?"  True, it's been out on the market for 33 years now, and I just never got around to it.  It would be like if I never saw "You've Got Mail" or "Pretty Woman", I get that.  But that's where we find ourselves, I started this crazy journey 15 years ago to find all the "classic" movies that I SHOULD have already seen, but just hadn't.  This one definitely qualifies - watching it now is probably going to be something of an afterthought, but what the hell, let's get it over with and get it off the list. 

EDIT: The TCM "31 Days of Oscar" line-up for March 3, added here after the fact, is: 

10:15 am "The White Cliffs of Dover" (1944)

12:30 pm "Mrs. Miniver" (1942)

3:00 pm "Pride of the Marines" (1945)

5:00 pm "The Best Years of Our Lives" (1946)

8:00 pm "Double Indemnity" (1944)

10:00 pm "Mildred Pierce" (1945)

12:00 am "The Letter" (1940)

2:00 am "The Killers" (1946)

4:00 am "Crossfire" (1947)

The themes for the day are "On the Homefront" (first 4 films) and "Film Noir (last 5). But I think I've only seen four out of these nine, just "Mrs. Miniver", "The Best Years of Our Lives", "Double Indemnity" and "Mildred Pierce".  So that brings me up to 19 seen out of 34, or 56%.

THE PLOT: A French man who wants to stay in the U.S. enters into a marriage of convenience, but it turns into more than that. 

AFTER: As the poster points out, this is the story of two people who met, fell in love and got married, they just didn't do those things in THAT order. Ugh, how conventional, to do things in the same order as everyone else. (For extra difficulty, try getting married, falling in love and then meeting, it's MUCH harder.)  The 1990's were about breaking rules and breaking down the system, man, if you weren't there you wouldn't understand.  It was a different time, but people were also trying to BE different - men were dating men openly, women were dating women a bit less openly, and people were getting married to foreigners so they could stay in the country and work.  Because the word had gotten out that there was this loophole, if you could find an American to marry it was easier to become an American, instead of registering as an alien, waiting a few years to get approved for a job, then there were a few dozen more hoops to jump through before you could officially become a citizen.  

I remember working with a woman who was born in the U.K. and was trying to get her green card, and she had to place ADS in the newspaper, at her expense, for her own job, and then she had to have someone impartial (me) review the applicants for the job SHE ALREADY HAD and find reasons why they all weren't qualified to do her job at her salary rate.  All this so she could keep working her job at a film production company, she had to prove that she wasn't taking a job away from a qualified American, by showing the INS that there were no Americans with her qualifications.  But that means that some of the jobs you see listed are not real, it could just be posted by some immigrant close to getting their green card taking applications for a job that's already held by someone else.  What a terrible system. 

Or, you know, as an alternative you can sneak into the U.S., get a terrible job washing dishes or picking avocados or something, and try to remain under the radar for a few decades, always looking over your shoulder for the INS while trying to make ends meet.  Your choice.  But then WHY does the INS go to such lengths to disprove the cases of the people who register with the system the legal way instead of focusing their efforts on the illegals who are trying to hide from the system?  Because if they did that, I suppose we'd have nobody to wash dishes or pick avocados.

Now, you may say, of course, we see why this French fellow would marry someone he just met, because he wants to work in America and this will be a shortcut to that - illegal, sure, but for some it works as a shortcut.  But what does SHE, Bronte, get out of the deal.  Ah, the movie is one step ahead of you, they've got this covered because there's this apartment she wants, but the building's co-op board or whatever is very selective, and they don't want to rent to a single person, they would prefer to rent to a married couple.  Yeah, I'm pretty sure this is illegal, you can't discriminate against old, young, single, married, gay, straight, male, female when you're renting an apartment.  You can do a background check, but just saying "No single people" is a form of discrimination.  Yeah, this part doesn't really ring true - Bronte checks all the other boxes, she's got a solid job with the City Parks Department, no criminal record, AND she's offering to maintain the building's roof deck garden as part of her lease.  She should be in like Flynn, if only this silly movie needed a reason for her to get married.

The weird thing is, she's got a boyfriend already, so why not just marry the boyfriend, Phil?  Instead she agrees to marry a man she doesn't even know, just to get the apartment, and she doesn't tell her boyfriend about this arranged marriage / exchange for a sweet apartment deal. Why not?  Maybe Phil would like to live in the very nice apartment, also!  Gee, this secret marriage could be a problem later in the movie when Phil finds out about it, right?  This is where the story kind of falls apart, because there was a much easier solution RIGHT THERE and the character had to go and make everything five times more complicated to create conflict later. 

Then there's the whole INS audit process, which most of us only know about because of, well, movies like this one, where the American spouse and the foreign spouse are interviewed separately by immigration agents to see if they truly are a genuine couple who live together in a very legally binding way, and not a couple of charlatans just trying to scam the system.  So why didn't Bronté and Georges know about this, if the rest of us do?  Don't they watch movies, too?  It's kind of like a version of "The Newlywed Game", where the host asks the husband and wife various questions at different times, and they get points if their answers match - only here if they don't match, one spouse gets deported and the other goes to jail.  Fun times. 

And it's all for what, GARDENING?  She wants the very nice apartment because she's going to do gardening work and restore the building's roof garden as well as the one inside the apartment?  And she works for the Parks Department doing...gardening?  OK, landscaping, but this is all just way too much garden work for me, I don't get it.  This is one reason why I moved out of my parents' house at 18, because they have a giant lawn that I hated mowing.  I hated raking leaves even more, so I had to get out of there.  Now I have a house with a small backyard in Queens, NY and I hate taking care of that, so it's fallen into disrepair.  The first big home improvement we did was to pave the parts of the backyard that were dirt, leaving just a small area for a couple of trees, a rosebush and the grape vines.  STILL, the backyard gets taken over every year by weeds and those ambitious vines, and I have to get out there with a giant shears and cut everything back, and I hate hate HATE every minute of the few hours I'm forced to spend gardening each fall. 

But these two people weren't fooling anybody, come on, the INS agents were on to their shenanigans from the start.  For starters, Georges was here in the U.S. on a tourist visa, which had expired a few months previous, and then he suddenly gets married as a work-around, isn't that blatantly obvious?  And then during the initial interview, he doesn't know where the bathroom is in the apartment?  You can't live in a place for 12 hours without needing to know where the bathroom is, so that's a tip-off right there. But then the INS agents should have noticed that this couple doesn't fight or argue, see, that proves that they're not really together.  If they lived together for any length of time they would know how to push each other's buttons and start petty arguments over nothing at all. 

It doesn't matter if they fall in love as part of the process of learning all about each other just to fool immigration - it's still a crime and they need to be prosecuted for getting married.  Their punishment should to remain married until they are truly sick of each other's company, like real married couples.

Also starring Gerard Depardieu (last seen in "Paris, Je t'Aime"), Bebe Neuwirth (last seen in "Tick, Tick...Boom!"), Gregg Edelman (last seen in "City by the Sea"), Robert Prosky (last seen in "Gremlins 2: The New Batch"), Jessie Keosian, Ethan Phillips (last seen in "The Purge: Election Year"), Mary Louise Wilson (last seen in "Ocean's Eight"), Lois Smith (last seen in "Tesla"), Conrad McLaren (last seen in "Addicted to Love"), Ronald Guttman (last seen in "On the Basis of Sex"), Danny Dennis, Stephen Pearlman (last seen in "The Horse Whisperer"), Victoria Boothby (last seen in "The Goodbye Girl" (1977)), John Spencer (last seen in "The Negotiator"), Ann Dowd (last seen in "The Art of Getting By"), Vasek Simek (last seen in "Havana"), Rick Aviles (last seen in "Carlito's Way"), with cameos from Ann Wedgeworth (last seen in "Miss Firecracker"), Simon Jones (last seen in "For Love or Money"), Malachy McCourt (last seen in "The Bonfire of the Vanities"). 

RATING: 4 out of 10 faked Polaroid selfies

Love After Love

Year 15, Day 61 - 3/2/23 - Movie #4,362

BEFORE: I can't remember why exactly I put this one on the list, it must have been streaming somewhere, on one of the platforms I can access with a monthly subscription, but wherever that was, it's not there any more.  It's allegedly on AmazonPrime, but not with a main subscription, I'd have to get the AMC+ add-on.  Same goes for Roku, it's not available for free, I'd have to subscribe to one of two premium services, which I don't want to do. But hey, there's always iTunes, but it's $4.99 there, and only $2.99 on YouTube if I watch it in SD and not HD.  So YouTube wins the prize tonight, they get $3 of my money - I don't want to make a habit of that, but it's OK once in a while, I'm working every day next week so I'll have some extra money coming in.  February is a cruel month because it's so short, which means that the first of March comes a little earlier than you might think, and bills are due two days earlier than usual. Not cool.

Chris O'Dowd carries over from "Juliet, Naked". This film is important, because it's going to allow me to cross off those Andie MacDowell films that have been on the list too long, they're the ones I dropped last February at the last minute - but I'm having a clearance sale this year, everything must go. Watch, with my luck this film will probably turn up on "Reel 13" on PBS a few weeks from now as their "indie" film of the week. 

EDIT: The TCM "31 Days of Oscar" line-up for March 2, added here after the fact, is: 

6:30 am "Dillinger" (1945)

8:00 am "The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond" (1960)

10:00 am "Little Caesar" (1930)

11:30 am "Doorway to Hell" (1930)

1:15 pm "White Heat" (1949)

3:15 pm "I Want to Live!" (1958)

5:30 pm "In Cold Blood" (1967)

8:00 pm "Breakfast at Tiffany's" (1961)

10:15 pm "Wuthering Heights" (1939)

12:15 am "The Grapes of Wrath" (1940)

2:30 am "Around the World in 80 Days" (1956)

5:45 am "The Old Man and the Sea" (1958)
7:30 am "Lolita" (1962)

The theme for the first 7 films is "Gangsters/True Crime" and for the last 6, it's "Literary Adaptations".  I'm claiming another 7 of these as "watched", namely "White Heat", "In Cold Blood", "Breakfast at Tiffany's", "The Grapes of Wrath", "Around the World in 80 Days", "The Old Man and the Sea" and "Lolita".  So another 7 out of 13 gives me 15 watched out of 25, or 60%.

THE PLOT: Following the death of their father, two sons deal with the trials of their own lives while watching their mother explore new beginnings of her own. 

AFTER: Yeah, this one's got some indie cred, for sure.  It played at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2017 and got a limited release from IFC Films.  It was directed by Russell Harbaugh, who I think also coaches one of the NFL teams, so he must have made this during the off-season.  JK. 

It's not a romance, per se, because the characters don't do a lot of romantic things, except they do have relationships, but hardly anybody remains faithful to anybody, they mostly screw around and mess up their lives, but that is a real thing that some people do, so maybe this ends up being closer to reality than all those stupid silly Hollywood rom-coms.  It's tough to say, and as always, your mileage may vary, but perhaps you'll see a bit of yourself in one of the characters, or if not, then they may resemble somebody you know.  

The core family - a mother and two adult sons - are viewed in the aftermath of the patriarch's death, which is a rough opening to a movie, but then again it probably should be. We're all going to go through this or something like this sooner or later, if we haven't already.  One of the sons is a stand-up comedian, or a wanna-be stand-up comedian, and the most telling part of the film could be the comedy routine he performs about his father's death.  He's clearly working through some stuff, but within that routine, his take-downs of Jesus are pretty funny.  Neither of the film's co-writers seems to have a comedy background, so I wonder if this is in fact the actor's real stand-up routine.  It's possible - James Adomian has a background writing for comedy shows, but mostly political stuff (He's performed the voices of Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz on a bunch of late-night shows and cartoons.)

But this comedy routine also points out some hard truths about death in our society, how we go to funerals and pay our respects when close family members die, but then after feeling like crap for a week or so, we're (more or less) back to normal.  The same apparently goes for relationships, when they end it's kind of like a death, we get the urge to curl up in a ball and sleep late for a month or so, but before long it's business as usual, and we can start looking for the next love of our lives, we all use that metaphor about how you've got to get right back up on that horse, right?  We see that reflected in the other brother, Nicholas, who goes through about three life partners over the course of this film.  He's with Rebecca at first, a co-worker at the same publishing company, and when they start to have issues then he cheats with Emilie, and before long there's an engagement party to celebrate his upcoming marriage, and then shortly (?) after THAT, he sleeps with his mother's co-worker, Karen. 

I guess you can attribute SOME of this behavior to Nicholas dealing with his father's death, but maybe he's just a serial cheater, maybe he doesn't have it in him to be faithful to anyone.  There must be some people like this, right?  The problem is that he doesn't seem to be learning from his experiences, he just keeps doing the same thing over and over, and not changing the pattern. Well, I guess it is what it is, we're all serial monogamists to some degree, it's just that some people like to think, I don't know, that relationships are worth saving, that you do what you can to make them last longer, and maybe that you get out of it what you put into it.  But maybe he's just not that kind of person. 

You can choose to like these characters or hate them, that's up to you, I suppose - this may depend on your own experiences or whether you believe people are meant to play the field or try to stay with the same partner for as long as possible.  But a hundred years from now, it's not really going to make much difference, is it?  So I guess you do whatever you have to do to stay sane and get through your life as best as you can.  Sorry if I'm bringing the mood down, but don't blame me, blame the movie, I'm just the messenger. 

Also starring Andie MacDowell (last seen in "The Killing of a Sacred Deer"), James Adomian (last heard in "Recount"), Juliet Rylance (last seen in "Frances Ha"), Dree Hemingway, Gareth Williams (last seen in "Trust Me"), Francesca Faridany (last seen in "Black Panther"), Matt Salinger (last seen in "The Ice Road"), Romy Byrne, Alex Goldberg, Graham Mason, Doris Lowerre, John Magary, Andrew Beadle, Graig Thurtell, Rebecca Dreyfus, Kate Hoffman, Seth Barrish (last seen in "Margot at the Wedding"), Scott Sibilla. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 poached pears (what is it with Nicholas and those damn pears?)

Juliet, Naked

Year 15, Day 60 - 3/1/23 - Movie #4,361

BEFORE: Wednesday is once again "Masked Singer" night in our house, and things get VERY competitive. My wife knows more about music, especially pop or disco acts who might be from the 70's or 80's and are just the type of act that would appear on the show BUT I'm very good at spotting voices, like I can always tell you which actor that is doing the voice-over in a commercial, whether it's Jon Hamm for Cadillac or Donald Sutherland for orange juice.  We're kind of at a level playing field when it comes to guessing the contestants on "Masked Singer", because we both love solving puzzles, she's got the musical knowledge, and I'm a great guesser when it comes to trivia and pop culture.  They disguise the singers' speaking voices, if they didn't do that, I'd win our little game hands down, probably. 

About two years ago I had a very vivid dream about the show, and I remembered it when I woke up and jotted down notes - in my dream there was a singer disguised as a polar bear, and he sang the song "C'mon Everybody" by Eddie Cochran, I think - and was revealed to be Bono from U2 under the mask. A very specific dream - but we all know the show features mostly B-list talent and a few C-listers, someone as famous as Bono wouldn't need to appear on a silly TV show.  

So, before tonight's show, I had the movie "Across the Universe" on TV, while I was scrolling through the cable listings - and I asked my wife to name the singer who was covering "I Am the Walrus", which of course was Bono.  And I jokingly said, "Remember that dream I had about Bono being on Masked Singer where he was dressed as a polar bear?  It could happen tonight..."  I was totally kidding around, but then the show started, and they announced that the second act performing was...THE POLAR BEAR!  Jeez, I thought, my dream is coming true, I have the power to predict the future!  And my wife was astonished, she also thought I had the power of prophecy, for a brief moment.  The Polar Bear was dressed in a winter jacket, and he had on those big sunglasses that skiers might wear, but you know who else wears giant sunglasses like that?  Bono from U2!  So we were both convinced that somehow my dream had become reality...again, for just a brief minute.  The first thing they said about the singer wearing the polar bear costume was that he was from New York City, not Ireland, so there went my dream and my power to foretell the future.  I won't say who was revealed as the Polar Bear, just that it wasn't Bono from U2. I was so close, and yet so far. 

Ethan Hawke carries over from "Maggie's Plan", and here are the other links that will get me to the end of March:  Chris O'Dowd, Andie MacDowell, Toni Collette, Michael Vartan, Will Arnett, Josh Duhamel, Ginnifer Goodwin, John Krasinski, Rosemarie DeWitt, Mike Birbiglia, Shailene Woodley, Kyra Sedgwick, Maika Monroe, Leslie Mann, Judi Dench, Ciaran Hinds, Sarah Polley, Diane Kruger, Lupita Nyong'o, Michael B. Jordan, Don Cheadle, Benicio Del Toro, John Turturro, Tim Blake Nelson and Willem Dafoe.  Ciaran Hinds, like Bono, is Irish, so that's going to help on St. Patrick's Day, and then I guess you can probably see I'm going to get to "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever" this month, also Guillermo Del Toro's "Pinocchio" and "Nightmare Alley".  Should be fun! 

EDIT: The TCM "31 Days of Oscar" line-up for March 1, added here after the fact, is: 

6:00 am "The Magnificent Ambersons" (1942)

7:30 am "Life With Father" (1947)

9:30 am "East of Eden" (1955)

11:30 am "Meet Me in St. Louis" (1944)

1:30 pm "I Remember Mama" (1948)
3:45 pm "Auntie Mame" (1958)

6:15 pm "Father of the Bride" (1950)

8:00 pm "The Adventures of Robin Hood" (1938)

10:00 pm "The African Queen" (1951)

12:00 am "The Man Who Would Be King" (1975)

2:15 am "Mutiny on the Bounty" (1935)

4:30 am "Mighty Joe Young" (1949)

The themes for the day are "Family Ties" (first 7 films) and "Adventure" (last 5 films).  Damn, I don't like the "theme" years, I much prefer when TCM does proper actor linking like I do. Anyway, I feel like I can only claim 8 of these 12 films, I'm not counting "Life with Father", "I Remember Mama", "Auntie Mame" or "Mighty Joe Young" though I may have seen parts of those.  Still, 8 out of 12 is not bad, I'm starting off at 67% seen. (Yeah, I'm rounding up, deal with it.)

THE PLOT: Annie, the long-suffering girlfriend of Duncan, has an unlikely transatlantic romance with once revered, now faded singer-songwriter Tucker Crowe, who also happens to be the subject of Duncan's musical obsession. 

AFTER: Today's "Love Tip" is that you don't have to like all the same things that your spouse or life partner does - but, as Patton Oswalt pointed out, you do have to HATE some of the same things for it to work out.  So whatever your hobby or pastime is, if it's comic books or Legos or painting or stamp collecting, then if your partner isn't really into it, it's OK. In fact it's really OK, because that means you can get some time for yourself once in a while, just go and work on your hobby or your collection and let them pursue their own interests.  Do NOT, repeat, DO NOT keep talking about your hobby or pastime with them so much that they realize how obsessed you are with that thing - because that just highlights that it's a thing you care very much about that the two of you do not both like. Eventually, that's one more thing that's driving the two of you apart, rather than bringing you closer together.  After you paint or build Lego Death Star or write your blog or make your artisanal hot sauce, then go do something together with your partner that you both like - this way everyone is happy, and THAT THING is not coming between you. 

Duncan is a guy who just doesn't get this - in addition to being a film studies professor, he's obsessed with the music of rocker Tucker Crowe, who has not been seen in public for decades.  He records YouTube videos about Tucker's music, he connects with other fans all over the globe via chat rooms and message boards, and of course he's keen to review any unearthed music, which happens when someone from a record company sends him a stripped-down, unplugged version of Crowe's seminal album "Juliet", titled "Juliet, Naked".  So, if you were hoping for some kind of soft-core version of a Shakespeare story here, you're going to be disappointed.  Also, why would you want to see that?

Annie, Duncan's long-term girlfriend, gets the mail that day, and for some reason, she listens to the disc first, which Duncan sees as a giant betrayal when he gets home.  He's got a point, the package WAS addressed to him, and Tucker Crowe is kind of his thing, you know? I can see why he's upset, if my wife watched a new "Star Wars" movie or TV series before I did, I don't know if I could handle that. This is why we still have a few shows we watch TOGETHER when they first air, like "The Masked Singer", "Top Chef" and "Hell's Kitchen". (She's given up on "Chopped" and "Survivor" but I still watch those on my own time.). Anyway, Duncan loses his mind and yells at Annie - he's brought back around after listening to "Juliet, Naked" because it's so damn beautiful, apparently, but the damage is done. 

Annie posts a negative review on Duncan's web-site, to balance his positive one, and I feel like this is also a very passive-aggressive relationship no-no.  If my wife and I disagreed about a movie, like if she loved "The Menu" and I hated it, that's OK, but I would hope she wouldn't jump on my blog and tear my review to shreds - because it's all about respecting the other person's opinion, and if that fails, then allowing them to be "wrong" when you know you're "right".  Wait, that's not really the same thing, but maybe the end result is the same. 

Annie and Tucker connect, share their stories and their hopes and dreams and later on, when Tucker is about to become a grandfather for the first time, he makes plans to visit his daughter in London - so he and Annie make plans to get together.  Well, the only thing worse for Duncan than seeing his ex dating her star crush would be for him to see her dating HIS star crush.  So you can imagine what he's going to do when he finds out about it, he's going to lose his damn mind. 

Annie does kind of get more than she bargained for, much like Maggie in last night's film.  What is it about dating characters played by Ethan Hawke?  Maggie got saddled with co-parenting duties for two extra kids that weren't even hers, and here Annie finds out that Tucker's got not one but THREE ex-wives and at least four kids, most of whom have never met each other. This kind of feels like it could ring true, like how many kids does Mick Jagger have, and how many times has Paul McCartney been married?  Does this all just come with the territory when you date a famous rock star?  Is this comforting somehow, knowing that fame doesn't prevent people from having as many failed relationships and personal problems as regular people do? 

That's my take-away, anyway. Perhaps it's more notable that celebrities have second chances, as well as third and fourth ones, but don't we all? 

Also starring Rose Byrne (last seen in "Irresistible"), Chris O'Dowd (last seen in "The Starling"), Azhy Robertson (last seen in "Marriage Story"), Lily Brazier, Ayoola Smart, Lily Newmark (last seen in "Solo: A Star Wars Story"), Denise Gough (last seen in "Colette"), Eleanor Matsuura (last seen in "Lost in London"), Megan Dodds (last seen in "Ever After: A Cinderella Story"), Alex Clatworthy (last seen in "Darkest Hour"), Phil Davis (last seen in "Hampstead"), Ko Iwagami, Enzo Cilenti (last seen in "The Rum Diary"), Florence Keith-Roach (last seen in "Philomena"), Fehinti Balogun (last seen in "The Electrical Life of Louis Wain"), Thomas Gray, Brodie Petrie, Cal Petrie, Nina Sosanya (last seen in "Red Joan"), Matt King (last seen in "Dolittle"), Georgina Bevan, Johanna Thea, the voice of Emma Paetz with a cameo from Jimmy O. Yang (last heard in "Minions: The Rise of Gru"), 

RATING: 6 out of 10 empty cardboard boxes

Maggie's Plan

Year 15, Day 59 - 2/28/23 - Movie #4,360

BEFORE: OK, last day in February, time to check the format stats, and tomorrow I'll post the links that will get me through March. This is NOT the end of the romance chain, as expected I'm going into overtime, halfway into March as per usual.  Gonna cross off 13 more romance-based films before switching topics. 

My February: 

12 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Licorice Pizza, Person to Person, Hello I Must Be Going, Welcome to the Rileys, Yes God Yes, Prelude to a Kiss, Gloria Bell, The Night We Never Met, Sweet November, Touched With Fire, Another Kind of Wedding, Maggie's Plan

4 Movies watched on cable (not saved): Last Night, Swimfan, For Love or Money, My Best Friend's Girl

6 watched on Netflix: Ibiza: Love Drunk, Colette, Love Wedding Repeat, The Half of It, The Last Summer, Sierra Burgess Is a Loser

2 watched on Amazon Prime: Life Partners, The Year of Spectacular Men
3 watched on Hulu: Spencer, Alone Together, Unplugging

1 watched on a random site: The Object of My Affection

There you go, a perfect 28 - here's hoping I can keep the chain alive until December once again, that would make five in a row, which would get me - well, nothing but a sense of well-being. 

Wallace Shawn carries over from "Another Kind of Wedding". 

THE PLOT: Maggie wants to have a baby, raising it on her own, but when she gets romantically involved with John, a married man, things get complicated and the balance of her plans may collapse. 

AFTER: Because I roll over my unwatched romances to the next season, it turns out that most of my February films were still pre-pandemic ones, with the exceptions being "Licorice Pizza", "Spencer", "Alone Together" and "Unplugging", I guess that's all just par for the course, though. If I'm going to prioritize clearing off some of the older films, like "Prelude to a Kiss", "For Love or Money" and "The Night We Never Met", it's bound to happen. Today's film comes from the pre-pandemic year of 2015, which meant that people were still all working in person, traveling to important conferences, and shopping for pickles at the Union Square farmer's market.  Just an observation over the way things used to be, and could be again someday, but for some reason we're just not all fully back to normal yet. I was reminded of this by those anti-vaccine protestors the other night, who were chanting things about the tracking microchip in the COVID vaccine.  Wasn't this completely disproved, like two years ago?  Even FOX News isn't keeping silly theories like this alive any more - anyway, the government is already tracking you through your PHONE, so why would they need to implant a microchip in your arm? JK. Maybe. 

Maggie has all kinds of plans to "fix" people, it's just her way of helping out.  She also has a plan to have a child, but she doesn't want to put the child through all the pains of having divorced parents, so the solution is simple - have a baby via sperm donor, and relieve that fellow of all obligations of raising that child.  There's maybe a flaw or two in the plan, because how is she going to raise her baby AND keep her job at the New School - say what you will about two-parent households, but it's probably easier to split the parenting duties between two people.  Sure, the relationship could still fail, any relationship can, but it might at least hold for the first few years of childhood, which might be the toughest.  Anyway, she's selected her college friend as the donor, he majored in mathematics but he works crafting artisanal pickles - maybe it's not a bad gig, all you can do with a math major, I think, is teach math. 

But the plan gets ruined when she finds out that John - a fellow teacher she met when their paychecks got mixed up because they have similar last names - expresses his love for her, after they've spent a few months getting to know each other, and she gave him notes on his probably autobiographical novel. John's married with two kids, but has fallen out of love with his European, very dominating wife. She's got tenure at Columbia, so that's provided for their family while he teaches a few classes and works on his book.  

Right after John and Maggie get together, the film flashes forward a couple years, Maggie had the baby and she and John are now married, and they've fallen back into their regular patterns, John is letting his new wife support the family while he works on another novel (or is it the SAME novel?) and Maggie's still trying to fix other people, while second-guessing her choices.  Yep, you guessed it, now THEY'VE fallen out of love, at least to some degree, and so Maggie comes up with a scheme to get John back together with his first wife.  It's sneaky, noble and self-defeating all at the same time, so really, that tells you all you need to know about Maggie, I think. 

Also, Maggie and John are co-parenting not just their own baby, but his two children with his ex, Georgette.  So now instead of raising ONE daughter by herself, which was the original plan, Maggie's got a hand in taking care of THREE children, so naturally there's no time for herself.  (The two older children do live with Georgette, however she's often traveling, so during those times they stay with Maggie and John.). 

And so there is valid motivation for Maggie to team up with her rival, Georgette, who has somewhat changed her ways after the divorce from John.  The two women make a new plan, to get John invited to speak at a conference Georgette is also attending, and pretend that it's some kind of schedule mix-up or lack of communication.  Those happen all the time between divorced co-parents, right?  A snow-storm and a power outage then happen, which strands the former couple and they end up having more time to re-connect.  Everything looks like it's going great, they'll be fine as long as John doesn't learn that his trip was a set-up...

No major complaints today, the characters are well-developed here and the story feels like it could be possible, assuming that "ficto-critical anthropology" is a real thing - I wouldn't know.  But the point, and today's "Love Tip" is that life is often not linear, and love is not always neat and tidy, as Maggie's friend Tony says, "Love is messy. It's illogical, it's wasteful, and it's messy."

I had this film on my list because it was on at least one of the streaming services at some point - but I missed it, it scrolled off.  When I saw that it could serve as a valuable link in my chain this time around, I kept an eye out for it, and it ran about a month ago on PBS, of all places.  The NYC PBS station, WNET channel 13, often runs movies on Saturday nights, and I've gotten in the habit of checking out their programming each week.  They run a classic film, a short film and an "indie" film most Saturdays in a line-up they call "Reel 13", and this turned out to be very helpful, and FREE. I don't know if the "Reel 13" line-up gets played on other PBS stations or if it's just a NYC thing - but if you can, check it out because they do make some great programming choices.  My only complaint is that the films are introduced by a Columbia professor who teaches film studies, and he's got a bad habit of saying a bit TOO much when he introduces the film.  Dude, please save the spoilers for AFTER the movie.

Also starring Greta Gerwig (last seen in "20th Century Women"), Ethan Hawke (last seen in "Glass Onion"), Julianne Moore (last seen in "Gloria Bell"), Bill Hader (last heard in "The Addams Family 2"), Maya Rudolph (last seen in "Licorice Pizza"), Travis Fimmel (last seen in "Finding Steve McQueen"), Ida Rohatyn, Alex Morf (last seen in "The Many Saints of Newark"), Jackson Frazer (last seen in "Foxcatcher"), Mina Sundwall, Fredi Walker-Browne, Monte Greene, Brendan Titley, Stephen Lin, Angela Trento, Sue Jean Kim. 

RATING: 6 out of 10 "eurhythmics" classes

Another Kind of Wedding

Year 15, Day 58 - 2/27/23 - Movie #4,359

BEFORE: Wow, so much happened last night, and I'm not sure I can even talk about it here.  I'm occasionally under restrictions when there are certain events at the theater, and it's often requested that I not post details on social media of things that happen there.  BUT I just checked, this information appeared in press releases on Friday, that a coalition of non-vaccinated actors was scheduled to gather at the NYC viewing party of the SAG Awards in NYC to protest the film industry's resistance to lifting the vaccination mandates for film productions, which do not grant exemptions for religious or medical reasons.  So let's just say that I was working at this event, and there was a contingency of actors outside leading a "peaceful" protest, as if that's not an oxymoron.  

I'll say no more details about what went down, BUT afterwards I still had to get home, and the subway line I live on in Brooklyn was shut down - it took a car ride and two subways for me to get to work yesterday, and it was even tougher to get home. Three different trains to get home, and even then I had to walk about 20 minutes from the train, in freezing weather, at 1:00 am.  And THEN I had to stay up and watch this movie, so I wasn't exactly in a peaceful state of mind. 

Luke Kirby carries over from "Touched With Fire". 

THE PLOT: A fractured family is forced by the eldest son's wedding to confront what tore them apart.

AFTER: Look, I've seen a lot of "crazy wedding" movies, including this year's "Love Wedding Repeat" and last year's "Love, Weddings & Other Disasters".  It would be boring, sure, if somebody made a movie about a wedding where everything goes perfect and according to plan, so instead they tend to swing completely the other way, where nearly everything goes wrong. But then the result is often SO crazy, how are we supposed to enjoy that?  It's a form of schadenfreude if we're all supposed to take comfort in the pain of someone else's wedding disasters, because thank GOD that isn't us, I guess. 

But it's so manic that I spent the first half of the film just figuring out who everybody is and how they're all related, it seems maybe they could have clarified all that much sooner and then the story would have been clearer, but then I guess maybe the whole film would only have been about 37 minutes long.  Eventually I figured it out, I think - there's a love triangle at the basis of the story because there are two brothers, Matthew and Kurt (are they brothers? put a pin in this, I'll come back to it...) and Matthew, the DJ, is getting married to Louisa, who used to date Kurt, the actor.  Yeah, so there's some tension. The other sibling is their sister Carrie, who comes to the wedding with her husband (boyfriend?) Misha.  But they don't really develop Carrie as an important character, the only thing she does in the whole movie is make out with some other guy while she's in town for the wedding, umm, I think. 

The parents of the groom are two women, Barbara and Tammy, played by Kathleen Turner and Frances Fisher.  They're no longer together as a couple, but apparently they raised three kids together, or did they?  There are many flashbacks to two years ago or four years ago - so many flashbacks that it's often very confusing to tell when they end, because there's no title card that lets us know we're back in the present day.  But the fact that the kids have two mommies, while it's very progressive, is what makes the issue of their children very confusing.  Do the kids have the same biological mother, or different ones?  Who are their fathers, were the women married to different men and then they got together after divorces?  So, this is why I'm not sure if Matthew and Kurt are really brothers or step-brothers or if they share any parents at all, because the whole timeline has not been revealed.  If the women became a couple later in life then the kids might not be blood-related at all, and this does have a bearing on the story.  

Barbara brings a date to the wedding, but it's an older man.  So is she dating him or is he just a good friend?  Is she trying to make Tammy jealous, or trying to win her back?  There's a fair amount of tension between the two women because of whatever happened two years ago or four years ago, but as the film progresses it looks like they may find some common ground again, at least as co-parents.  

However, questions still remain - who is this mysterious Roy character that seems interested in Barbara, but settles for making out with her daughter instead?  For that matter, who is this hot Italian woman, Mareva, is she a member of the family or just somebody staying at the same hotel?  Barbara's date, Albert, seems very interested in her, but like everything else in this film, it's not very well explained how she fits into the bigger picture.  

I just read a few extra reviews - outside of IMDB - because it feels like maybe I missed something.  No, I think I picked up on all that there was, other reviewers seem just as confused as I was about the WHY of it all.  It's just a comic wedding story with a central love triangle and two lesbian parents.  Sure, that's another kind of wedding, but it's just not a very interesting one.  Still, today's "Love Tip" therefore, is - sometimes you have to watch your brother marry your ex-girlfriend, and that sucks, sure, but don't make it worse by disrupting their wedding with your horrible white-guy rap.

Also starring Kathleen Turner (last seen in "The Kid Stays in the Picture"), Kevin Zegers (last seen in "Aftermath"), Jessica Paré (last seen in "Brooklyn"), Frances Fisher (last seen in "The Lincoln Lawyer"), Jacob Tierney, Jessica Parker Kennedy (last seen in "In Time"), Wallace Shawn (last heard in "The Addams Family 2"), David La Haye (last seen in "The Red Violin"), Cristina Rosato (last seen in "Little Italy"), Albert Kwan, Kalinka Petrie, Arthur Holden, Johnny Griffin, Meaghan Rath, Greta Papageorgiu, Pat Kiely.

RATING: 3 out of 10 whole-grain bagels (Montreal is apparently famous for them...)

Touched With Fire

Year 15, Day 57 - 2/26/23 - Movie #4,358

BEFORE: Just time for a quick post, I'm off to work at the SAG Awards tonight - OK, it's a simulcast of the SAG Awards, being held in a Manhattan theater, but it's a chance for the SAG actors on the East Coast to gather together and watch the broadcast together.  So there's a chance of spotting some celebs in person today, could be a fun event to work. March should be a busier month for me, I've got some 12-hour or longer shifts coming up when film festival season starts, so there's a chance to make some extra money, but then I also heard rumors that the theater will be closed again this summer to finish the roof work they started last summer.  So one way or another, I've got to start looking for another job this summer, if only to keep me busy and out of trouble for a couple of months. 

Bruce Altman carries over from "The Object of My Affection". 

THE PLOT: Two bipolar patients meet in a psychiatric hospital and begin a romance that brings out all of the beauty and horror of their condition. 

AFTER: Hindsight is always 20/20 - I'm looking back on the schedule now and thinking, Katie Holmes was in "Alone Together", why didn't I put this film next to THAT one?  And Griffin Dunne was also in "Last Night", why didn't I connect to that?  For that matter, Michael Cera was in "Gloria Bell" and "Person to Person" - but I remember trying out a chain with those two films adjacent, and it just didn't work.  I can't follow every connection, because I'm limited to one per night, and there really are more connections than there are slots, at least some of the time. And some connections just can't happen because then there would be some films I want to get to that would be stranded, not connected to anything, so I kind of have to focus on some of the lesser connections just to get those films watched.  

I tried a few dozen paths through my romance films, and I have to tell myself that I probably landed on the best one, or at least the one that's going to clear a lot of the lingering films away, also one that's focused on clearing my DVR, although maybe it will never be clear, I can still work toward that as a goal - and the chain that ends in a good place and will help me link to something for St. Patrick's Day.  That's all important, more important than putting the two Katie Holmes films together, I think. Once I start second-guessing my progress, that way madness lies. 

I don't mean madness in a clinical way, which happens to be the topic of the film today.  This depicts two people with bipolar disorder who meet in a hospital therapy group, and they're also poets, one a published poet and the other a performing "improvisational" poet (aka a white rapper). Ideally there would be some kind of point made here about the dual nature of artists, or something that all artists might emotionally share in common, but I'm not quite sure what the point is.  A lot of comparisons are made to Van Gogh, as if to suggest that the two things, madness and artistry, went hand-in-hand for him, therefore by extension they might be joined together for a great number of people, but I'm not sure if this is accurate either.  

The problem here seems to be that film is a visual medium - and how can a filmmaker best express, visually, the highs and lows of this condition?  During the low periods the characters are just lying in bed, staring out into space, almost catatonic, and that's not very visual, it doesn't really tell us much about what they're going through, does it?  It's the opposite of activity, how do you depict that?  And then during their creative, manic periods, what do they do?  Here it's a lot of running - running away from the hospital, running away from people, and then they go camping.  Ugh, I hate camping - I'd almost rather watch the lead characters in bed, staring into space than to see them around a campfire with smores on a stick.  Sure, they go hiking, they go swimming in a river, it's...nice, but that's not visually interesting either.  There are also shots of them running past giant Van Gogh paintings, it's probably the most interesting part of the film, but that only goes so far, too.  

It's kind of like a 100-minute version of a pharmaceutical commercial, where you have people talking about their symptoms, and then we see those people doing the outdoor activities that they couldn't do before because they had plaque psoriasis or extreme constipation or diabetes, and now that they're taking the medication, they can go windsurfing or play cornhole or drive along the Pacific Coast.  The one thing that the lead characters do here that you probably WON'T see in a pharmaceutical ad is they throw their medication away into a fountain in the park.  Yeah, Big Pharma doesn't want you to do that. 

There's a sun/moon thing going on here symbolically, since Marco prefers to be called "Luna" and Carla had an issue with staring directly into the sun. I get it, the woman is the sun and the man is the moon, or he's the "Man in the Moon".  The woman gives off light, and the moon reflects it - and we learn some very wrong things about astronomy when a mental patient says that you can't see both of these objects at the same time - which is totally wrong.  You can see the moon during the day, if you know where to look, because the moon revolves around the Earth, not the sun, and it's not always on the opposite side of the Earth as the sun is.  Very often both objects are visible during the day, it's just EASIER to see the moon at night.  Perhaps it's best not to learn astronomy from people in a mental hospital. 

Marco also believes that he's not an earthling, he sees himself more like "The Little Prince", and Carla wants to find out what the "trigger" was that caused her condition, but don't hold your breath because if she doesn't get an answer about this, then neither do we.  These two celestial objects do occupy the sky at the same time, but since they're in different orbits I guess they're fated to drift apart?  Actually that was very unclear, too, what happens at the end of the film - I don't think they end up together, but because of the inconsistent editing and lack of a linear structure I'm not really sure.  The director appears in a cameo as one of the patients, and he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, too - I wonder if he was too close to the subject matter to properly explain the plot points in a coherent fashion.  Don't assume that we can all figure out what's going on, at some point everything needs to be made clear. 

"Roomance" has been an ongoing theme here for the last few days - people who share space also spend time together, and that can lead to some form of relationship, that's clear.  Characters shared apartments in "The Night We Never Met" and "The Object of My Affection" before getting involved with each other, this also happened in "Sweet November", though reluctantly at first, and now two people living in the same mental hospital got together, at least for a short time.  From a screenwriting standpoint, this all feels a bit like putting the cart before the horse, some kind of shortcut, because in the real world most people usually date for a time before they share living space.  Let's see if this pops up again in any of the 15 romance films left in the chain.

Also starring Katie Holmes (last seen in "Alone Together"), Luke Kirby (last seen in "Shattered Glass"), Christine Lahti (last seen in "Miss Firecracker"), Griffin Dunne (last seen in "Last Night"), Alex Manette (last seen in "You Were Never Really Here"), Edward Gelbinovich, Daniel Gerroll (last seen in "Still Alice"), Genevieve Adams, Rob Leo Roy (last seen in "No Reservations"), Maryann Urbano (last seen in "Happythankyoumoreplease"), Patrick Byas, Roca, Jennifer Falu, Paul Dallio, Ted Sod, Catherine Combs (last seen in "13 Going on 30"), Annie Golden (last seen in "Prelude to a Kiss"), Russell G. Jones, Chaske Spencer (last seen in "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2"), Kay Jamison, Wayne Wilcox (last seen in "Rent"), Erick Abbate (last heard in "My Life as a Zucchini"). 

RATING: 4 out of 10 hecklers at the poetry slam.