Your Sister's Sister

Year 15, Day 70 - 3/11/23 - Movie #4,371

BEFORE: Rosemarie DeWitt carries over from "Nobody Walks" and now we do have some other contenders for the most appearances this year, a few people who are known for appearing in romances have made it to the year-end list already, like Ethan Hawke, Kate Hudson, Keira Knightley, Andie MacDowell and Lea Thompson all had strong showings in the romance chain (or for some of those actors, it was two romance films and one other film from January - whatever.). None of them, however, have been able to catch up with Dale Dickey, who is still out in front for the year with five appearances.  Can that be enough to win 2023?  I feel like a few people, like Walter Cronkite or Spike Lee have enough appearances scheduled that they could challenge her for the title.  Talk-show hosts, newscasters, and U.S. presidents always have the inside track when it comes to documentaries, and I've got about 20 docs coming up after Easter. 

But just TWO more romances after this one, so by Monday I should be done with that topic, thank GOD.  I'm spending most of my day today at the movie theater, which is hosting the New York International Children's Film Festival - but it's all anime today, which really isn't my thing. 

It's Day 11 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, and today's theme is "Musicals" - I was raised on a steady diet of these as a boy, so I should do well. Here's the line-up:

6:45 am "The Broadway Melody" (1929)

8:30 am "Swing Time" (1936)

10:15 am "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers" (1954)

12:00 pm "Gigi" (1958)

2:00 pm "The Music Man" (1962)

4:45 pm "A Star Is Born" (1954)

8:00 pm "An American in Paris" (1951)

10:00 pm "West Side Story" (1961)

12:45 am "Fiddler on the Roof" (1971)

4:00 am "Cabaret" (1956)

Boom, baby, 9 out of 10 today already seen! (Thanks, Mom!). The only one I haven't seen in "The Broadway Melody". This brings me up to 66 seen out of 124, now I'm back up over half with 53.2%.

THE PLOT: Iris invites her friend Jack to stay at her family's island getaway after his brother's death.  Jack's drunken encounter with Iris' sister Hannah at their remote cabin kicks off a revealing stretch of days. 

AFTER: A few of this week's films were released in the 2010's, like "When in Rome", and "Something Borrowed" and also "Nobody Walks", so we've got a little mini-portrait of what was significant in the romantic relationships of that decade.  Can we draw any conclusions from the trends in those films?  Not really - two of those were very simple comedies about silly things like magical fountains and believing in standing up for yourself and telling the person you love how you feel about them.  A lot of drinking was involved, don't forget that the lead character in "When in Rome" was drinking when she took coins out of that Italian fountain, and the lead character in "Something Borrowed" had been drinking heavily when she slept with her best friend's fiancé.  That trend continues tonight, as Jack was also doing tequila shots when he slept with HIS best friend's sister.  So I don't know, maybe we can draw the conclusion that romantic mishaps tend to come after bouts of heavy drinking?  Yeah, that tracks.  

But this is 2023 now, not 2011, and part of me wants to think, "Well come on, at this point who HASN'T had too much to drink and then slept with their best friend's lesbian sister who's secretly trying to have a baby?"  Right?  Just me?  Based on all the Christmas commercials that ran last year featuring lesbian couples with kids, you have to figure all those babies had to come from somewhere - at least 70% of babies with two mommies probably come from drunken encounters like the one seen here, you just do tequila shots with your sister's best platonic friend, fool around and wait nine months. Easy peasy. 

There are lessons here, but they're the same ones that previous films in the chain have also hammered home - if you have feelings for your best friend, by all means, you have to tell her.  Preferably BEFORE you sleep with her sister, not after.  Also, sharing space together, even for a night or two, is sometimes enough to induce those romantic feelings.  (Even if you both get booked into the same AirBnB, which is very unlikely...). So yeah, this film is kind of a mix of "Something Borrowed" and "Alone Together", if that makes any sense, only with a "Life Partners"-style lesbian twist. Capiche?  But these are really simple love lessons, because obviously you can't accidentally fall for somebody if you're NOT sharing the same house. 

Also, lesbians can't be trusted, but come on, we all knew that one, too, right?  (J.K.).  Across the board, nobody can be trusted when it comes to affairs of the heart, but Hollywood seems to focus on a special mistrust among lesbians, but that's just because the screenwriters don't really know what to DO with them, except to have them mope around after a break-up and then suddenly decide to get pregnant.  Yep, all that somehow constitutes character growth, I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but it does seem to be the fall-back plot in movies.  It doesn't really make sense though - relationship fell apart?  Have a kid, that'll fix things!  

From Jack's perspective, guys are different - when they mess up, they don't just sit around and mope, they do things like go for a long bike ride and camp outside for a week to get their head straight.  Trust me, after a week of camping, I'd agree to just about anything, and sure enough, Jack turns up back at the house and begs for forgiveness from Iris and confesses his love for her all at the same time.  His "I slept with your sister because I can't be with you..." speech is a kind of a master class in apologies, and it kind of calls to mind the rant from "Jerry McGuire".  Really, Iris's response here should really be, "Just shut up. You had me at psychotic criminal."  

It's too bad the film had to delve so far into why the two sisters have different accents - I think it turned out they were only half-sisters, their father had an affair with his secretary so they had different mothers.  Was all this necessary just to explain why one actress has a British accent and the other one doesn't?  Who cares?  

For a film shot in just 12 days and largely improvised, this isn't all that bad.  The cabin seen in the film is somewhere in the San Juan Islands, near Seattle, but still a secret location because the filmmakers promised to never reveal it.  This might count as "mumblecore", I'm still not sure of the exact defining properties of that genre, though. Just be aware that there's no real resolution or decisions made in the end, so the film doesn't really end so much as it STOPS.  And maybe you'll like the point where it stops telling the story, but maybe you won't.  Those are the breaks. And whether this story is all one big contrivance is also kind of up to you - I'm willing to listen to the arguments both for and against. 

Also starring Mark Duplass (last seen in "The One I Love"), Emily Blunt (last seen in "A Quiet Place Part II"), Mike Birbiglia (last seen in "Going the Distance"). 

RATING: 5 out of 10 gluten-free pancakes

Nobody Walks

Year 15, Day 69 - 3/10/23 - Movie #4,370

BEFORE: John Krasinski carries over from "Something Borrowed" and now I'm really getting close to the end of the romance chain - just THREE films left on this topic after tonight, I can't wait. Still using episodes of "Andor" and "The Mandalorian" to break things up so I don't go completely bonkers - I'm really ready to pack up this topic for the next 11 months.  

It's Day 10 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, and today's themes are "Teens on Screen" (before 8 pm) and "Science Fiction" (after 8 pm).  Here's the line-up:

10:00 am "Janie" (1944)

12:00 pm "The Human Comedy" (1943)

2:00 pm "Strike Up the Band" (1940)

4:00 pm "The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer" (1947)

6:00 pm "Rebel Without a Cause" (1955)

8:00 pm "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" (1977)

10:30 pm "2001" (1968)

1:15 am "The Time Machine" (1960)

3:15 am "Destination Moon" (1950)

5:00 am "Forbidden Planet" (1956)

Well, at least today they're speaking my language. I've seen 6 out of these 10: "The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer" (because I did a whole Cary Grant thing), "Rebel Without a Cause" (because I did a whole James Dean thing), and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", "2001", "The Time Machine" and "Forbidden Planet", because that's my jam, I'm a sci-fi geek. So I'm now at 57 seen out of 114, or exactly 50%.

THE PLOT: A family's relaxed dynamic is tested after they take in a young artist so she can complete her art film. 

AFTER: Well, this was a weird little film, from back in 2012, it was nominated for 2 Jury Prizes at Sundance, but that's not how I heard about it.  Come to think of it, I'm not really sure how I did learn about it, it must have been from those monthly e-mails that I get from IMDB telling me what's new on the streaming services at the start of each month.  But it's strange, I didn't get one for March 2023 - I thought maybe that was because February was a short month, and so it would probably arrive a couple days after March 1, because somebody got caught off guard by the short month.  Nope, it's March 10 and I STILL haven't received one for March, so I'm left to conclude that either someone in charge of this is on vacation (or quit their job...) or perhaps it's not a very big month for films debuting on streaming services.  Probably the latter, there's a bit of a dead zone in the streaming world right now.

It's not the movie I was expecting, perhaps, but I'm going to take it, because the world sort of brought it to me, HOW is not important.  What's important is that I take what life brings to me and that I try to make the best of that, whatever it is.  Kind of like lunch today, I saw that the Smashburger on the corner was offering two-for-one fish sandwiches today, it being a Friday during Lent and all, so I walked into the Smashburger and ordered one, therefore TWO fish sandwiches - no fries, no tots, no drink, because that's how they GET you.  And I really wanted to maximize the savings here, if I bought a bunch of extra stuff then they start making their money back, right?  OK, so two fish sandwiches, but I asked if I could get pickles on them instead of sliced tomatoes. (Seriously? Who puts tomatoes on FISH?  Pickles are better, right?)

Five minutes went by, ten minutes went by, and I noticed the kitchen staff were MAKING a lot of burgers and fish sandwiches, but not GIVING anything to the people waiting.  There was activity, sure, a lot of moving food around, sliding it down to the next person, but not a lot was getting DONE.  Then they threw out all the fries and tots that had been sitting around waiting for burgers, they'd all grown cold after waiting for burgers that just weren't coming.  One guy waiting for his lunch lost it and started screaming, because his lunch hour was almost over and he still hadn't gotten any food.  The food preparers seemed to be doing a bunch of repetitive yet useless tasks, clearly they'd been trained to do things a certain way and they didn't feel comfortable rushing things, they were like human robots who could only do certain things in certain sequences - however, the whole point of a restaurant is to get the food to the hungry people, and for whatever reason, it just wasn't happening.  Eventually my order came up in the queue, and two fish sandwiches were wrapped, but I could see as they wrapped them that one had tomatoes on it, which I did NOT want.  I took it anyway, because it was getting so late in the day, and vowed to never return to that restaurant. 

"Nobody Walks" is kind of like that, it's the fish sandwich with tomatoes that you didn't want at first - but I'm so close to the end of the romance chain that I'm going to try to just take the sandwich life has given me and not complain about it.  Not much, anyway, I still HAVE to complain, I just DID complain about it to you, but at some point I'm going to stop.  I ate the fish sandwiches, even the one with tomatoes, and I lived to tell the tale, so life could be a lot worse, I could be starving or I could still be waiting at Smashburger for my lunch.  I could be poor and unable to afford one fish sandwich, let alone two, but I'm not, so clearly things could always be worse than they are.

As the film points out, marriage is complicated.  Here a couple's marriage is rocked when a "free spirit" of a young woman comes to stay with them while the husband, Peter, helps her with the sound design for her film about ants.  Yes, ants.  Should the ants speak English?  Should they talk in the ant language, and if so, what does that sound like?  Should there just be ambient noise throughout the film, or synthesizer music, or what?  All good questions, but none of them really get answered because Peter is attracted to Martine and they, you know, end up doing it.  Well, I guess that should be expected when you invite an attractive young free spirit into your home.

At the same time, Julie, Peter's wife, who is some kind of therapist or shrink, has to deal with a patient who says he's been having sex dreams about her.  To some degree I think this is natural, to have feelings for your therapist, but this guy is very explicit about it, and later in the film when he bumps into Julie at a party he puts the moves on her, and she doesn't stop him, at least, not right away.  This kind of becomes a breach of ethics at some point - Julie didn't nip this in the bud during their sessions, as she should have.  It's still not her fault, the patient's a total creepozoid, but she maybe could have handled her reactions to it in a better way. 

Julie also has her ex-husband, Leroy, over for dinner, and he's some kind of famous or semi-famous musician.  Leroy and Julie have two kids together, so yeah, it's important to maintain a good relationship with the father of your children, even if you're no longer together, I get that, but it's also not cool to have your ex-husband over for dinner and get along so well with him, right in front of your current husband.  This kind of hearkens back to what happened in "Gloria Bell" a few weeks ago, when Gloria ignored her current boyfriend and chose to go through an old photo album with her ex during her son's birthday party.  I'm also thinking back to "Juliet, Naked", which was another movie that featured an aging rock star who has several children but is also no longer married to their mother. So I'm kind of tying a few of this year's running romance themes together with this one. 

At the same time, Julie and Leroy's daughter, Kolt, is pining for attention from Peter's assistant, David, who seems to be a few years older than her, and also getting lessons in conversational Italian from a guy who's a LOT older than her.  And this reminds me of yesterday's film, "Something Borrowed" where each person was in love with one other person who didn't love them back, and that person was in love with another person, in a 5 or 6-person chain.  Here Marcello has a thing for Kolt, who's got a thing for David, who's got a thing for Martine, who's sleeping with Peter, who's married to Julie, who's getting some weird attraction thing from her patient, Billy.  It's just like that old J. Geils Band song that had the lyrics "You love her, but she loves him, and he loves somebody else, you just can't win."  That song was called "Love Stinks".

But, umm, how old was the daughter, Kolt?  The actress was 18 at the time of the film's release, but how old is her character supposed to be here?  It's kind of important. If she's still in high school pining for a college kid, this makes sense, but it also makes the weird flirtation she's having with her Italian teacher very creepy.  And if she's 16 or under, it's extremely creepy, like disgustingly so. 

Also, what's with the title?  Does it literally mean that nobody walks, like everybody in L.A. drives everywhere?  Is it from the song "Walking in L.A." by Missing Persons, which has the line "Nobody walks in L.A."?  Or does it mean that nobody walks away from a relationship without getting hurt?  Based on the plot synopsis on Wikipedia, I think it's the latter. 

One thing that the film really gets right is the voice-over recording session - the actors get frustrated when Martine doesn't really give them any constructive advice on how to speak the dialogue of the ants for the film.  What's really weird is that just four days ago, I was also recording dialogue and sounds for a film, and I was also providing the voice for a bug.  What a weird coincidence.  As a part-time voice actor, I can confirm that this really does happen - the director could give you very little instruction or a lot of instructions that aren't helpful - I don't know why directors can't just give simple commands like "louder" or "softer" or "higher" or "lower", I guess most of the time they don't even know what they want until they hear it, or they don't.  I tried to create the sounds this giant bug would make just based on what he looks like, and that's not an easy thing to do.  But if it were easy, then I suppose anybody could do it. 

Also starring Olivia Thirlby (last seen in "Being Flynn"), Rosemarie DeWitt (last seen in "The Professor"), India Ennenga (last seen in "Charlie Says"), Dylan McDermott (last seen in "King Richard"), Justin Kirk (last seen in "Molly's Game"), Rhys Wakefield (last seen in "The Purge"), Emanuele Secci (last seen in "The Hundred-Foot Journey"), Sam Lerner (last seen in "Envy"), Mason Welch, Jane Levy (last seen in "Frank and Cindy"), Anthony Saludares, Samantha Ressler (last seen in "Home Again"), Emma Dumont (last seen in "Licorice Pizza"), Lucy Engelman, Chet Grissom (also last seen in "King Richard"), Blaise Godbe Lipman, Joshua Polit, Carlos Velazquez.

RATING: 4 out of 10 glow-in-the-dark stars on the walls of a kid's bedroom

Something Borrowed

Year 15, Day 68 - 3/9/23 - Movie #4,369

BEFORE: Ginnifer Goodwin carries over from "Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!" and over at TCM, it's Day 9 of their "31 Days of Oscar" programming, and today's themes are "Spy Stories" (before 8 pm) and "Sports" (after 8 pm).  Here's the line-up:

9:00 am "The Fallen Sparrow" (1943)

10:45 am "Foreign Correspondent" (1940)

1:00 pm "Watch on the Rhine" (1943)

3:00 pm "Ice Station Zebra" (1968)

5:30 pm "North by Northwest" (1959)

8:00 pm "The Pride of the Yankees" (1942)

10:15 pm "Somebody Up There Likes Me" (1956)

12:30 am "This Sporting Life" (1963)

3:00 am "Hoop Dreams" (1994)

6:00 am "The Stratton Story" (1949)

8:00 am "Pat and Mike" (1952)

I think I've only seen four out of these 11: "Foreign Correspondent", "North by Northwest", "Somebody Up There Likes Me" and "Pat and Mike".  I was raised in Red Sox country, so you'll never catch me watching "The Pride of the Yankees".  So not a terrible record today, but not a great one either.  I'm now at 51 seen out of 104, or 49%.  BUT, I'm going to record "Hoop Dreams", because it's been on my "someday/maybe" list for a long time, and I've got a doc block coming up with some sports movies in it, and I think it's going to fit right in-between two films on the list.  It's going to crowd my April a bit, and make it a little more difficult to get to Mother's Day on time, but that movie is on the list of "1,001 Movies to Watch Before You Die" so I'll have to make some room.

THE PLOT: Friendships are tested and secrets come to the surface when terminally single Rachel falls for Dex, her best friend Darcy's fiancé. 

AFTER: Now I kind of get why TCM is only devoting half a day to each topic - because I've been on the romance beat just WAY too long.  Next time I've got to seriously consider trimming the list down to JUST February - 28 or 29 romance films seems a lot more manageable.  If I had changed gears after "Maggie's Plan" I wouldn't be so burnt out right now.  Sure, I'm proud that I finally crossed off "Green Card" and "The Pallbearer" and "Juliet, Naked", but was it really worth it if that meant I had to watch crap like "Monster-in-Law", "When in Rome" and whatever THIS is?

Maybe "Something Borrowed" is an OK film, maybe it's not, but now I'll never know because my perceptions might be out of whack.  It's a movie about people falling in love, but I can't help it, I simply HATE all of these characters, and now I'm not sure if that's a screenwriting or directing problem, or if I am the problem.  Let's assume for just a moment that I'm still OK and this movie sucks - what are the reasons?

For starters, every single person is SO self-centered - and they're all judging themselves based on whether they're in a working relationship or not, which is not healthy.  There are millions of New-York based assholes who are NOT in relationships at the moment, and they're OK with that, or at least they should be.  We all go through phases, different things happen to us and sometimes they're out of our control, and that's OK.  We do the best we can to get by and we either struggle to improve our circumstances or we struggle to feel OK about the things we can't fix, and hopefully it all kind of works out in the end, or we die alone and then it doesn't matter. 

But it's important during it all to be excellent to each other, and not just resort to being self-centered a-holes - but that seems to be the theme here, unfortunately, everyone just ends up being a self-centered a-hole, and that's not OK.  Couldn't we have found a better way to tell this story than just exposing everyone as a self-centered a-hole?  How come everyone, to get what they want or what they feel they deserve, has to hurt somebody else to do that?  Is that the formula, for two people to be happy then some other person needs to be made miserable?  I guess that's what happens when you start messing around with monogamy - for any two people to get together, there will therefore be at least one other person denied happiness.  It's the classic love triangle, it appears to "work" until somebody makes an exclusive decision, and then one person is left out of the situation and therefore unhappy.  

But even though there's a love triangle at the center of this - Rachel's loved Dex since college but once her pushy best friend Darcy had feelings for Dex too, then Rachel bowed out.  And it's only with the approaching wedding that Rachel admits to Dex that she never acted on her feelings back then - and thanks to wedding jitters, Dex is willing to explore the other possibility, because it seems he got steamrolled by pushy Darcy, too, who always gets what she wants and leaves some form of destruction in her wake.  But wait, there's more, because Rachel has a best friend, Ethan, who she's not that attracted to, but he carries a torch for her.

And because these are all NYC a-holes, that means that in addition to having impossibly large city apartments (WITH roofdecks) they also rent a house in the Hamptons for the summer, and that's where the love triangle really gets expanded, because Rachel brings Ethan, and Darcy brings Marcus to set Rachel up with Marcus, and also Claire, to set Claire up with Ethan.  So now there's a chain of SIX people all staying in the same house every weekend - Claire pursues Ethan, who's realliy in love with Rachel, who's in love with Dex, who's getting married to Darcy, and what we find out MUCH too late, Darcy's got a thing for Marcus, so come on, nobody's very happy where they are, everyone wants to be with someone else, and I guess that's what makes the world turn, but it's just so pathetic.  The spirit of William Shakespeare is looking down on this and saying, "NO NO, this isn't what I had in mind AT ALL!"

But hey, if you want to watch almost two hours of people who can't make good decisions and situations that just can't be resolved while people keep digging their holes deeper, go ahead.  Just be warned that it can be extremely frustrating to watch everyone continue to make every romantic situation worse, and not better.  Look, I'm not saying I have all the answers, but if something's bugging you, take action.  If you care about somebody, take a damn step in that direction - and if you get a vibe that they're not the one for you, then take a damn step back.  DO SOMETHING, don't just wallow in your misery or take your frustrations out on the people who you care about, or who care about you for some reason.  

Darcy's clearly the villain here, she acts like a Bridezilla but she's also rude in every other aspect, and she has no boundaries, always prying into everyone's personal business and pointing out their shortcomings - and this is with her FRIENDS, imagine what she's like with people she doesn't like.  Oh, and what's Darcy's job, anyway?  Does she have one?  I realize the film is here to focus on relationships and such, but there's no balance - we don't know what half the characters do for a living, and even when we know they're a lawyer, we never see them at work.  Our perspective gets really skewed if there's no balance, if we only see these characters at night, on dates, going house-hunting, partying their asses off.  This is kind of why we hate them, because real people have to spend half of their time working, and we don't get to see that half here, it's a problem. 

But mostly we just see them making more problems for themselves, and not taking steps to fix them.  It's also way too flashbacky, because it starts in the middle and then has to go back later and show us how Rachel screwed things up with Dex in college by NOT acting when she should have, and letting Darcy steamroll all over her.  But look back on one tiny thing, Rachel shows up for her first law school class with four pens, arranges them neatly on the desk in front of her, then promptly knocks them all on the floor, but is too embarrassed to get up, pick up a pen from the floor, and continue on.  She made the problem much more complicated than it needed to be, and then she couldn't bring herself to solve the problem in a very simple way - just STAND UP, walk around and pick a pen up off the floor!  No?  Too much work?  OK, just sit there then and wait for the man to give you HIS pen and fix YOUR problem, you clueless dolt. 

EVERYTHING in this film is like that, much more complicated than it needed to be, from Darcy forgetting her purse to Rachel drinking too much at her birthday party, to Darcy's phony story about getting accepted to Notre Dame, pretending to have to work on July 4, and so on. There are simple solutions - maybe don't drink so much, maybe don't forget your purse, maybe call your best friend out on her bullshit.  If you can't do these simple things, then I just can't help you.  And once you start telling lies to your best friend because you're sleeping with her fiancé, and then you have to tell MORE lies to support your previous lies, yeah, wow, you're really in deep and it sucks to be you.  But that's probably when this film crossed over the line, from romantic comedy to romantic tragedy.  None of these people deserve to be happy after the fall-out, and it's kind of wrong to portray them as such, maybe?

Whatever else you do, do NOT watch the post-credits scene.  It makes no sense, it's completely out of place and even more misguided than the film, and it implies that there will be a sequel.  But it's been 12 years now, and so far, no sequel.  Thank God.

Also starring Kate Hudson (last seen in "My Best Friend's Girl"), Colin Egglesfield (last seen in "Reprisal"), John Krasinski (last seen in "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness"), Steve Howey (last seen in "Stuber"), Ashley Williams (last seen in "The Con Is On"), Geoff Pierson (last seen in "World's Greatest Dad"), Jill Eikenberry (last seen in "Young Adult"), Jonathan Epstein, Sarah Baldwin, Mark La Mura (last seen in "City by the Sea"), Sandy Dell (last seen in "Desperately Seeking Susan"), Brian McCormack (last seen in "Fair Game"), Peyton List (last seen in "Hubie Halloween") with archive footage of Glenn Close (last seen in "Swan Song"), Michael Douglas (last seen in "Haywire"), Neve Campbell (last seen in "Scream 4"), Matt Dillon (last seen in "A Kiss Before Dying"), Denise Richards (last seen in "Love Actually")

RATING: 4 out of 10 shriveled-up red roses (see, THIS is why my wife told me to not buy her flowers any more....)

Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!

Year 15, Day 67 - 3/8/23 - Movie #4,368

BEFORE: Josh Duhamel carries over from "When in Rome", and over at TCM, it's Day 8 of their "31 Days of Oscar" programming, and today's themes are "Members of the Press" (before 8 pm) and "Crime" (after 8 pm).  Here's the line-up:

8:15 am "Five Star Final" (1932)

10:00 am "The Story of G.I. Joe" (1945)

12:00 pm "Designing Woman" (1957)

2:00 pm "Libeled Lady" (1936)

4:00 pm "Woman of the Year" (1942)

6:00 pm "The Year of Living Dangerously" (1982)

8:00 pm "The French Connection" (1971)

10:00 pm "Bonnie and Clyde" (1967)

12:00 am "Gangs of New York" (2002)

3:00 am "The Public Enemy" (1931)

4:30 am "Shaft" (1971)

6:45 am "Robin and the 7 Hoods" (1964)

Finally, some films I've seen!  I've seen everything after 4 pm except the original "Shaft" movie - I watched all the more recent "Shaft" sequels, though. But that means I've seen 7 out of these 12 films, which brings me up to 47 seen out of 93, which is just over 50%.  BUT, this gives me an idea for a better way to organize the films, not some boring way like organizing them by genre.  Why not have the last word of one film become the first word of the next film, to create little double-features?  Look, right there, you could program "Designing Woman of the Year of Living Dangerously".  What about "A Star is Born Yesterday" or "Life with Father of the Bride of Frankenstein"?  Or "Around the World in 80 Days of Wine and Roses"?  "The Music Man Who Would Be King Lear"?  "Singin' in the Raintree County"?  "The Magnificent Seven Days in May"?  OK, I'll keep working on it. 

THE PLOT: A small-town girl wins a date with a male celebrity through a contest. When the date goes better than expected, a love triangle forms between the girl, the movie star, and the girl's best friend. 

AFTER: It's another film directed by Robert Luketic, who later went on to direct terrible films like "Monster-in-Law" and "The Ugly Truth".  This just can't be a film that can be taken seriously, right?  From the fact that according to many of the credits near the end of the list, a large number of actors played themselves, or lent their name to the characters - I heard that some film production companies do this to prevent other people who have the same name as a movie character from suing the studio for defamation.  Like Jessy Moss and Marshall Goodman, probably close friends with the director, played "Jessy Moss" and "Marshall Goodman" and the studio may have had a contract with them to use their name as their character's name, and pay them a token sum of $1, this prevents anyone else named "Marshall Goodman" from suing.  And if they made up character names, there's a chance that someone out there might share the same name - they probably also had to find a guy named "Tad Hamilton" and sign a contract with him just to be on the safe side.  

But for a lot of these same actors, THIS is their only major screen credit - so I'm forced to conclude that director Robert Luketic was involved in a scheme where he cast people in non-speaking roles ONLY so that they could apply for their SAG cards, and this is what that guy in the movie "Narrowsburg" got in trouble for, this is a violation of union rules, assuming that these actors compensatied Luketic for their roles.  (Look, I don't have any proof that they DIDN'T....). If this is true, then this movie isn't real, it's just part of an elaborate scam to get undeserving people their SAG cards. Seems about right. 

For starters, the plot doesn't really work because nobody runs these "Win a Date with..." contests any more.  These were big in the 1950's and 1960's because the studios couldn't let an movie fans know who the stars were dating, because it would blow their minds and ruin the clean, wholesome images that they wanted the Hollywood stars to project.  Sure, win a date with Rock Hudson or Roddy McDowall, I'm sure you'll have a wonderful time, and they'll respect women and not try to sleep with them (Gee, I wonder why...).  But it's a different time now, and while some stars live their whole dating life out in public (Leo DiCaprio, Taylor Swift) many more of them are much more discreet about it, celebrities may even date regular people who aren't in show biz, and for the most part, nobody cares.  That is, until the #TimesUp and #MeToo scandals came around, and suddenly everybody wanted to know how many women James Franco had dated, and why he's never settled down, and jeez, maybe we should cancel him just to be on the safe side.  

So there's liability issues, that's one problem, and if your star is noted for liking fast cars, booze and loose women, then a few publicity photos of him dating a nice, plain girl from West Virginia is just NOT going to solve your press problems.  If anything, you've already proven that this person can't be trusted or reliable, and now you're not just letting the fox into the henhouse, but you're handing him a deep-fryer on his way in.  So many ways this could spiral out of control, this serial dater is GOING to want to sleep with this nice girl from Hicksville, and his agents did NOTHING to prevent that, they didn't even act as escorts, and it was THEIR idea?  Wouldn't you think they'd micro-manage the "date" to make sure everything was above-board?  

Innocent Rosalee Futch is flown out to Hollywood for her "date" with movie-star Tad Hamilton. They don't really hit it off, because she's so star-struck and she's been warned by her best male (straight) friend, Pete, who's secretly in love with her, to NOT sleep with Tad, no matter what.  She probably would have, too, if Pete hadn't warned her about it.  And then where would we be?  Rosalee would have had her heart broken by a movie star, Tad Hamilton's reputation would be even worse than it already is, but hey, at least Pete could have consoled Rosalee after, that should be worth something, no?  

But instead Rosalee turns Tad down, and goes back to her hotel.  THIS is probably what drove Tad crazy, he found the one woman who didn't want to sleep with him, and that's a serious blow to his ego.  Now he just HAS to fly to West Virginia to try to win her over, it's a challenge, but hey, no risk, no reward.  Before long he's bought a house in rural WV and he's hanging out with Rosalee and her friends, dropping in to the local movie theater that just HAPPENS to be playing one of his films, and getting farming lessons from Pete.  But Tad already knows how to milk a cow and chop wood, because he's an actor, and those are skills he already learned for this movie or that one. Umm, sure, because there's so much cow-milking going on in Hollywood movies.

There's an OK message here, the "Love Tip" for the day - if you've got feelings for someone, you've got to SPEAK UP before they do something silly like win a contest or date a celebrity and leave your little town in their rear-view.  If you don't, you'll just end up running the Piggly Wiggly or moving to Richmond by yourself and getting old and wondering what could have been.  It's fine - again, this isn't Shakespeare, just a dumb old rom-com, but at least it's got a bit of a point to make. 

NITPICK POINT: Now, WHY couldn't Tad's agents fly back with him on that private jet?  Weren't they all going to Hollywood?  There was plenty of room on that plane, just saying.  Why make this a plot point, if it didn't matter? 

Also starring Kate Bosworth (last seen in "The Rules of Attraction"), Topher Grace (last seen in "Take Me Home Tonight"), Ginnifer Goodwin (ditto), Nathan Lane (last seen in "Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me"), Sean Hayes (last seen in "Hit and Run"), Gary Cole (last heard in "The Bob's Burgers Movie"), Kathryn Hahn (last seen in "Glass Onion"), Octavia Spencer (last seen in "The Witches" (2020)), Amy Smart (last seen in "Starsky & Hutch"), Ren Trostle, Wendy Worthington (last seen in "Crazy, Stupid, Love."), Stephen Tobolowsky (last seen in "The Grifters"), Moon Bloodgood (last seen in "Faster"), Mary Jo Smith, Joseph Convery, Deena Dill, Bob Glouberman, Sam Pancake (last seen in "Dumplin'"), Jay Underwood, Patrick O'Brien (last seen in "The Brady Bunch Movie"), Larry Agney, Willow Bay, Todd Eckert, David Wolrod, Jessy Moss, Marshall Goodman, Danny Weissfeld, Caleb Spier, Peter Iovino, Alex Kvassay, Jordana Brewster (last seen in "The Faculty"), Paris Hilton (last seen in "Wonderland"), Bonnie McKee (last seen in "August Rush"). 

RATING: 5 out of 10 cans of Pringles

When in Rome

Year 15, Day 66 - 3/7/23 - Movie #4,367

BEFORE: I spent part of yesterday doing voices for an animated feature, mostly the howls and growls of a giant bug monster.  Don't ever believe me if I say I don't lead an interesting life...

Today, March 7, is "Kid Classics" day over at TCM - followed by "Historical" movies after 8 pm.  Here's the line-up: 

6:00 am "Gulliver's Travels" (1939)

7:30 am "The Green Years" (1946)

9:45 am "David Copperfield" (1935)

12:00 pm "Little Women" (1949)

2:15 pm "The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T" (1953)

4:00 pm "Jungle Book" (1942)

6:00 pm "Tom Sawyer" (1973)

8:00 pm "A Man for All Seasons" (1966)

10:15 pm "Julius Caesar" (1953)

12:30 am "Nicholas and Alexandra" (1971)

3:45 am "Cleopatra" (1934)

5:30 am "Marie Antoinette" (1938)

More bad luck, I've only seen three of these, "A Man for All Seasons", "Julius Caesar", and let's assume I saw "Tom Sawyer" when I was a kid.  That's only 3 out of 12, so I'm only up to 40 seen out of 81, and I've dropped below 50%. 

Will Arnett carries over from "Monster-in-Law", and I know it seems like "Shotgun Wedding", with both Jennifer Lopez and Josh Duhamel would have been a natural fit here, but it was a late arrival to the list, and adding it would have extended my romance chain a bit too long, so I'm holding off on it for next year, maybe - it's tough to know where to draw that line, but I need to save some films with linking possibilities in order to build a proper chain next year, if there is a next year. 

THE PLOT: Beth is a young, ambitious New Yorker who is completely unlucky in love.  However, on a whirlwind trip to Rome, she impulsively steals some coins from a reputed fountain of love and is then aggressively pursued by a band of suitors. 

AFTER: Well, this one's just silly - not stupid silly like yesterday's film. Well, OK, maybe it is quite stupid silly.  This one was on Hulu for the longest time, only I guess it took me a bit too long to program it, because it wasn't there last night when I went to look for it.  AND it's not on any other streaming service we subscribe to at the moment, so what a pain, I had to rent it from iTunes.  I got lucky with "Green Card" and found it for free on YouTube with Greek subtitles, but no luck tonight, I had to pay extra.  I did a quick look to see if there was another film that might link to tomorrow's movie and keep me on track, but I didn't find anything.  I've come too far to scrap the whole plan now, with six films left in the romance chain, and I've got five of those on DVD or DVR, and the sixth one is on Tubi.  I can't wait to get off this topic!

This film created a whole mythology around the process of throwing coins into a fountain - specifically that one in Rome where people throw coins in and wish for someone to love. (The Trevi fountain?). Beth is in Rome for her sister's wedding and after connecting and then striking out with the best man (she sees him kissing another woman) she decides for some reason to take coins OUT of the fountain.  It's a bit of a stretch, she decides there's no such thing as love so she's going to "save" four people from their wishes by removing their coins.  Umm, yeah, this just isn't how fountains work.  And in doing this, she accidentally triggers some weird old magic where the four people who threw those coins in fall in love with her, even though they've never met her, even if they don't know what's happening.  

NITPICK POINT: People come to Rome from all over the world, and sure, perhaps they all throw coins in fountains based on local legends.  But what are the odds that the five coins (OK, four coins and a poker chip) that she chooses were all thrown in there by people from New York?  And that she would encounter all of those people when she returned back home?  People in NYC tend to stick to just a few neighborhoods, but not Beth - she's all over town, in Central Park, at the Guggenheim, and JUST the right cafés to encounter the men who tossed those coins into the fountain.  Umm, yeah, sure.  And what would have happened if a woman had thrown in one of those coins?  Or someone who lived in, say, Seattle?  It feels like a lot of comedic short-cuts here to bring about a certain result, and I'm not sure this whole trip was worth the effort. 

I'm sorry, I'm making all this much more complicated than it needs to be, I wish I could just switch off my brain and try to enjoy the ride, but I don't think I have that in me.  I just want every film to WORK and if the story is all clunky or far-fetched, or in this case, BOTH, I'm going to point all that out.  Beth assumes that the poker chip from the fountain belongs to Nick, who she's starting to have genuine feelings for, but now she's convinced that he's also under some kind of spell, and when she returns the coins to the fountain, the love and attention from Nick's going to go away, when she really just wants the attention from the other four weirdos to stop.

Did you spot it?  The ridiculously simple solution to the problem?  It's RIGHT THERE.  Even if these five dudes could be controlled by a magic fountain-based love spell, and Beth's problem is that five men are hopelessly enchantedly in love with her, but she only likes one of them, here's the quick fix.  She could just give back the four coins to the four men she doesn't care for and NOT give back the poker chip to Nick.  Problem solved.  But then she would always feel guilty for manipulating him and she'd always doubt whether Nick's feelings for her were real, or part of the spell.  Jes-US, take the win already!  Now this one's on her, she's making the situation much more complicated than it needs to be, just marry Nick and ride that train to the end of the line and get over yourself.  

I can't help but think this is all some giant metaphor for something, only I'm not sure what it is or how it's supposed to work.  Is the magic coin some symbol for early love, which interests us and keeps us busy and can't possibly last in that state for long BUT any kind of long-lasting relationship has to go through that initial freshman stage, and you hope that it develops and turns into something greater and longer-lasting.  "Nature's first green is gold, her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf's a flower, but only so an hour."  That's from the Robert Frost poem "Nothing Gold Can Stay", I remember it from high school English class. There's some truth to that when applied to relationships.  

Anyway, I've already made too much of this - the four losing suitors are dismissed when Beth returns their coins, in a manner similar to Dorothy saying farewell to her companions at the end of "The Wizard of Oz".  I can't help but wonder if the real point here wasn't to get THESE four actors together on-screen and into a tiny Italian car for comic effect.  Jon Heder did well as a weird street magician (think David Blaine or Criss Angel) and Danny DeVito perfectly cast as the Sausage King of NY, Will Arnett was a bit over-the-top as the too-Italian caricature artist and then of course there's a HUGE inside joke because the narcissistic male model Gale is played by Dax Shepard, who's married to Kristen Bell in real life.  

All the way through, what this movie suffers from is a need to over-explain everything - it feels like 90% of the dialogue is exposition, right from the start.  I mean, of course you have to introduce the characters and explain how they're all connected to each other, but this process continues for the whole film, it JUST. DOESN'T. STOP.  They over-explain the restaurant that serves food in the dark, they over-explain the process of booking art for a museum show, they over-explain the fact that Nick got hit by lightning in the middle of a football game, and what that means.  Just please, for one minute, stop explaining everything!  If you think the process of undoing a love spell caused by taking coins out of a fountain is complicated, really, the film's just getting warmed up at that point.  The removal of British troops from Dunkirk seems relatively simple by comparison.  

Also starring Kristen Bell (last seen in "Hit and Run"), Josh Duhamel (last seen in "Fire With Fire"), Alexis Dziena (last seen in "Fool's Gold"), Peggy Lipton (last seen in "Quincy"), Luca Calvani (last seen in "The Man from "U.N.C.L.E."), Jon Heder (last seen in "Just Like Heaven"), Danny DeVito (last seen in "The Sparks Brothers"), Dax Shepard (also last seen in "Hit and Run"), Anjelica Huston (last seen in "The French Dispatch"), Kate Micucci (last seen in "I Used to Go Here"), Don Johnson (last seen in "A Good Old Fashioned Orgy"), Lee Pace (last seen in "Driven"), Bobby Moynihan (last seen in "Killing Gunther"), Kristen Schaal (last heard in "The Bob's Burgers Movie"), Alexa Havins (last seen in "Professor Marston & the Wonder Women"), Francesco de Vito (last seen in "The Young Messiah"), Keir O'Donnell (last seen in "The Runaways"), Judith Malina, Brian Golub, Natalie Joy Johnson, Eugene Cordero (last seen in "The High Note"), Charlie Sanders, Eric Zuckerman, Geoffrey Cantor (last seen in "Man on a Ledge"), with cameos from Shaquille O'Neal (last seen in "Hustle"), Lawrence Taylor (last seen in "Shaft" (2000)), Efren Ramirez (last heard in "Lightyear"), Ghostface Killah (last seen in "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story").

RATING: 4 out of 10 sets of night-vision goggles

Monster-in-Law

Year 15, Day 65 - 3/6/23 - Movie #4,366

BEFORE: Today, March 6, is "Hollywood on Hollywood" day over at TCM - followed by "Pre-Code" movies after 8 pm.  Here's the line-up: 

6:00 am "What Price Hollywood" (1932)

7:30 am "A Star is Born" (1937)

9:30 am "The Oscar" (1966)

11:45 am "Inside Daisy Clover" (1965)

2:00 pm "The Star" (1953)

3:45 pm "The Bad and the Beautiful" (1952)

6:00 pm "Singin' in the Rain" (1952)

8:00 pm "The Divorcee" (1930)

9:30 pm "The Sin of Madelon Claudet" (1931)

11:00 pm "She Done Him Wrong" (1933)

12:15 am "Gold Diggers of 1933" (1933)

2:15 am "A Free Soul" (1931)

4:00 am "Anna Christie" (1930)

Ugh, I'm doing terrible today, I've only seen "Inside Daisy Clover" and "Singin' in the Rain" out of this bunch - I've seen three versions of "A Star Is Born" but not the original one.  So now I'm at 37 out of 69, or 53.6%.  I always start out so strong and then my numbers drop.

Under a week until the new Oscar ceremony to name the Best Picture of 2022 - I've got like zero chance of seeing any more of the nominees - that's how backed up I am on movies, but in the two weeks after the ceremony, I'm hoping to get to "Black Panther 2" and Guillermo del Toro's "Pinocchio".  

Michael Vartan carries over from "The Pallbearer".  

THE PLOT: Charlotte's love life is reduced to an endless string of disastrous blind dates, until she meets the perfect man, Kevin. Unfortunately, his merciless mother will do anything to destroy their relationship. 

AFTER: You can see the reasoning for casting Michael Vartan here - imagine you're a casting director working on a movie with two very big female stars in it, I mean like BIG personalities, big egos, and the film is all about their characters squaring off against each other.  You need an actor to play the son/boyfriend who's not going to get in their way or try to outshine them - you need like a total blank, like the equivalent of vanilla.  He'll do the job, but you'll barely notice him during the film, and you'll forget him about five minutes after the film was over.  Then for the rest of your life, whenever you think about the movie, you might say, "Wait, WHO was the actor in this movie?" and all you'll remember will be J. Lo and J. Fo. I've already forgotten what the guy even looks like and I JUST watched the film a few hours ago. 

The female stars both do well here, I guess - but I can't believe this film was released 18 years ago, Jennifer Lopez probably broke up with Ben Affleck shortly before filming this, and after a few more public relationships (Marc Anthony, Alex Rodriguez), now they're back together.  They got married in July 2022, 20 years after the first proposal.  I guess what comes around goes around, or alternatively if you love someone, set them free, and umm, I forget how that one ends, but in this case they sometimes come back?  Look, I got nothing against Bennifer or the sequel, whatever works for those crazy kids.  And Jane Fonda's still making movies, too, I'll have to check out "80 for Brady" when it hits streaming, I'm just not sure if it should count as a romance film. 

The real criminal here is the director, Robert Luketic, who thought that comedy should be mined from the contentious relationship between a bride and her future mother-in-law.  Really, making fun of mothers-in-law is even too old to be considered "classic", it's cheap laughs AT BEST, and this is not comedy at its best.  It's like making a comedy out of grandmothers who cook or molesting uncles, it's just grabbing what's at hand, like comedy leftovers for dinner.  I know this same director made "Legally Blonde", and that's fine, but this is bottom-of-the-barrel stuff, by rights the system should have prevented him from making another film after this one, but the system failed, because he later directed "The Ugly Truth", an alleged comedy filled with sexism and remember that vibrating panties gag?  Yeecchh.  And then he made "Killers", a comedy about a secret assassin, which just plain forgot to be funny.  Somebody stop this guy before he films again!  

We should live in enlightened times, there should be no reason for a mother-in-law to hate hate HATE her son's intended bride, whether it's because she's Latina or because she's not rich, or because she doesn't have a steady job, NONE of that is OK.  Whatever happened to just being happy about whoever your son wants to marry?  Why can't she just be happy because her son is happy?  Oh, sure, you can say she's upset because she recently lost her broadcasting job, but then you're just making excuses for her.  Nothing else going on in her life, NOTHING justifies her being a total bitch to her son's girlfriend.  But the film keeps making up more and more excuses for her - she's old, she's an alcoholic, she's spoiled.  No, no, NO, none of those are valid and none of them excuse her terrible behavior.  

It feels like they made one movie, where Fonda's character, Viola, was even worse - like she genuinely tried to poison Charlie with peanuts, and then they tested that with an audience and people said, "Oh, no, we hate this character because she tried to murder her daughter-in-law" so they had to go back and re-shoot the scene so she only ACCIDENTALLY puts nuts in her food.  Or to be more clear, she does it, then she gets talked out of doing it, then she regrets it, then the food accidentally gets delivered to the table.  So she did it, but she didn't MEAN to do it, or she regretted it, but that doesn't negate it.  If Ted Bundy regretted all his murders would we have let him off the hook?  No way.  This is a film chock full of bad ideas for bad behavior, and then it was made worse by somebody trying to soften the blows once they realized how bad the actions were. 

Some of the other bad behavior on display here - Viola fakes an anxiety attack, Viola hires a waiter to pose as her doctor/therapist, Viola pretends to take medication which is really only vitamins, and Viola has the nerve to wear white at someone else's wedding.  NONE of this is OK, and worse, it's never really explained, either, it's just taken for granted that mothers-in-law are going to be terrible to their daughters-in-law, and nope, that's not OK either.  Viola sets out to drive Charlie crazy while her son is away at a medical conference, but all of her bad-roommate behavior is so ridiculous it's barely even worth mentioning - just a bunch of time filler stuff, really. But if someone else wears white to your wedding, I think you have the right to throw them out. 

And both Will Arnett and Adam Scott are TOTALLY wasted here, like the director didn't know what to do with them but put them in the "not-gay groom's best friend" and "gay bride's best friend" roles. That's enough, right? NOPE.

Finally, something redeeming at the end, when Viola's own mother-in-law crashes the wedding, and Viola gets a taste of her own medicine.  Yes, bullying is a cycle, and the people who get bullied are more likely to bully others, this much rings true.  But the cycle CAN be broken, it just takes a little effort, some therapy from someone who isn't really a waiter, and maybe some drugs that aren't just vitamin C tablets.  

Also starring Jennifer Lopez (last seen in "Shall We Dance?"), Jane Fonda (last seen in "The Kid Stays in the Picture"), Wanda Sykes (last seen in "Friendsgiving"), Adam Scott (last seen in "A.C.O.D."), Monet Mazur (last seen in "Just Married"), Annie Parisse (last seen in "One for the Money"), Will Arnett (last seen in "Muppets Haunted Mansion"), Elaine Stritch (last seen in "Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me"), Stephen Dunham (last seen in "Savages"), Wayne Nickel, Jenny Wade (last seen in "Rumor Has It..."), Stephanie Turner, Tomiko Fraser (last seen in "Head Over Heels"), Bruce Gray (last seen in "Crimson Peak"), Zach McLarty (last seen in "Anything Else"), with cameos from Mark Moses (last seen in "After the Sunset"), Harriet Sansom Harris (last seen in "Licorice Pizza"), Jimmy-Jean-Louis (last seen in "The Gray Man"). 

RATING: 3 out of 10 literal slaps in the face.

The Pallbearer

Year 15, Day 64 - 3/5/23 - Movie #4,365

BEFORE: Well, I spent my last day of freedom (for a while, anyway) out on Long Island, we headed out so my wife could buy cigarettes and then we did some shopping and had lunch in one of the area's many fine diners.  BUT, before lunch I ducked into the Native American smoke shop that my wife frequents and saw they sell pot now, which is suddenly legal somehow.  I've heard various things, however, about certain shops just pretending to sell pot, like the touristy ones near Times Square don't OFFICIALLY sell pot, just pot-flavored lollipops and pot-scented vapes and stuff like that.  So mostly it's a rip-off to get more money from clueless tourists.

BUT, I figured I could trust this smoke shop to sell the real deal - she buys cigarettes there and they're real tobacco, just cheaper than the name brands.  So I splurged on a chocolate bar that contains cannabinoids, whatever that means, and I figured I'd give it a whirl - I haven't had any type of marijuana in over 30 years, back in the NYU days. Though I never really felt stoned back then, so it's possible that my clueless dorm-mates had just fallen for the classic "oregano switcheroo" scam run by the dealers in Washington Square Park.  But this was a real, pot-infused candy bar I was holding in my hands yesterday, so I kind of felt like a stoner Charlie Bucket - I asked the clerk for some advice, because I was about to be taking my first recreational drugs in three decades.  She said to just take a little bit, until I knew what affect it would have on me, because I guess weed is more potent than it used to be back in the late 1980's. 

So I got back home, and this thing was segmented just like a regular Hershey bar, into little rectangles.  I figured I'd take eat half of a rectangle and wait for the fun to begin - then I did the math, the whole bar contained 600 mg of cannabinoids, and one little rectangle was 1/12 of the bar, so 50 mg.  I'd eaten half of that, or 25 mg, before finding out online that as a newbie I should start out with 5 mg or 10 mg.  Now I panicked, I'd clearly taken too much to start, but after a half-hour I felt nothing.  After an hour, same thing.  So I ate the rest of that little rectangle, and again nothing.  Then I flashed back to college, when the pot didn't seem to affect me - so I figure I've either got some kind of superhuman tolerance, or I fell for a scam myself yesterday and paid $40 for a regular Hershey bar.  I had to work early on Sunday, so I couldn't experiment with more of the chocolate bar, I'll have to wait for next weekend to eat maybe two squares to see if the drugs kick in, or if I got hosed. I switched over to drinking beer just to feel SOMETHING, and also so I'd be sleepy enough to get to bed early and up and out by 7:45 am on Sunday.  

Toni Collette carries over from "Dinner with Friends".  And I've been SO busy with work and chasing down pot-infused chocolate bars that I've neglected posting the annual "31 Days of Oscar" line-ups from Turner Classic Movies - this is one of my favorite things to do, to keep track of how many I've seen, and now here we are, five days into March, and I just couldn't be bothered.  Should I go BACK and add all these line-ups to my posts, or just forge on ahead from here?  Or should I abstain and just forget about it this time around?  I don't think I can do that...

Today, March 5, is "Romance" day over at TCM - huh, that's funny,  it's been "Romance" day here at the Movie Year for 33 days straight now.  Stop copying me, TCM!  Here's the line-up:

6:15 am "Brief Encounter"  (1945)

8:00 am "Now, Voyager" (1942)

10:15 am "An Affair to Remember" (1957)

12:30 pm "Doctor Zhivago" (1965)

4:00 pm "Gone with the Wind" (1939)

8:00 pm "Casablanca" (1942)

10:00 pm "The Way We Were" (1973)

12:15 am "Lost in Translation" (2003)

2:15 am "Marty" (1955)

4:00 am "Camille" (1937)

Most of the day will be over by the time I post this, so I realize this schedule isn't going to do you much good, this is really for my own record-keeping.  I've seen all of these EXCEPT for "Brief Encounter" and "Camille", so I'm off to a great start, 8 seen out of 10, or 80%.  But now I have to go back and look at the line-ups for March 1 to March 4 - so it won't stay at 80%.  My running total for the first 5 days of March is really 35 out of 56, or 62.5%.  Hey, if you want to waste four hours of broadcast time on a Sunday by running "Gone with the Wind" for the 873rd time, by all means, go ahead.  But I watched it years ago so I would NEVER have to watch it again.

THE PLOT: A young man's life is thrown for a loop when he is asked to be a pallbearer for the funeral of a classmate he doesn't remember and his old high school crush temporarily returns to town. 

AFTER: This was the first feature directed by Matt Reeves, who would go on to direct "Cloverfield", two "Planet of the Apes" movies and eventually the most recent "Batman" film, the one with Robert Pattinson, which is already being retconned away by James Gunn's plan for the future DC Movie Universe - even though there's a sequel coming up, it's going to be part of something called "DC Legends", meaning it takes place in a different part of the multiverse.  The Star Wars books that were set after "Return of the Jedi" with Han and Leia staying together and raising three kids, now those didn't happen, but they're still being published as "Star Wars Legends". 

This is a romance in that people do date and perhaps have feelings for each other, but ultimately this one belongs in the "It's complicated" section, because there are SO many cases of mistaken identity and SO many times when people just can't seem to get on the same page.  Whether this then feels "real" to you or even close to real then sort of depends on your own experiences.  Perhaps as a younger man or woman you experienced a time when everything was confusing, nothing was certain and even if you liked somebody, you weren't sure how to act or what to say or even if the whole process was worth the effort in the grand scheme of things. Yeah, I feel you.  

Tom gets contacted by Mrs. Abernathy about the death of his classmate, Bill Abernathy - only Tom doesn't remember Bill at all, and the yearbook's no help because apparently Bill was absent on Class Picture Day.  (WHY is this only ONE day at every school? Sure, I realize that there are a lot of schools and only so many companies that work in this arena, but still, if somebody missed class picture day on Monday, cameras still work on Tuesday and Wednesday and explain to me why somebody can't have their picture taken later on...it's just laziness, right?). Bil also left his car in his will to his "best friend, Tom" only funny story, that was a totally different Tom, I guess estate lawyers aren't big on last names?  

So Tom gets roped in to being a pallbearer at Bill's wedding, also he gets roped in to delivering the eulogy, and then later on he gets roped in to cheering up Mrs. Abernathy, in a sexual way.  Which is weird because that's not usually part of the grieving process for people's mothers, for them to sleep with their dead son's best friend.  But whatever works, I guess.  Something tells me that Tom has some kind of problem with saying "No" to people, he's kind of a doormat.  But how do you give a eulogy for someone that you don't even remember?  It's a lot like writing a book report if you didn't read the book - so Tom fakes it, and it does NOT go well. 

Julie DeMarco doesn't remember Bill either, and I think she dated him - hey, maybe Bill was just a forgettable kind of guy.  But this bothers everyone that they can't remember Bill, because it's a reminder that someday we're all going to die, and then at some point after that, nobody will remember us because we never did much that was worth remembering, or even if we did, those people who remember those things will also die someday, and that will be that.  You're only truly dead when there's nobody still alive who remembers you. 

Tom remembers Julie, only Julie doesn't remember Tom - or she thinks he's someone else, I'm not sure.  But these are the two characters we want to see get on the same page, the only things standing in the way are Tom's insecurity and awkwardness and the fact that he's still sleeping with Bill's mother.  (What could POSSIBLY go wrong?) The question remains, however: is this film referencing "The Graduate" or is just another film with a love triangle involving a college-age man and an older woman?  And then for good measure, there's a love quadrangle added into the mix when Scott and Cynthia come along on a double date with Tom and Julie, only Scott connects with Julie and throws everything into question.  

Also starring David Schwimmer (last seen in "The Laundromat"), Gwyneth Paltrow (last seen in "Mortdecai"), Michael Rapaport (last seen in "Higher Learning"), Carol Kane (last seen in "Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond"), Michael Vartan (last seen in "Colombiana"), Bitty Schram (last seen in "The Night We Never Met"), Jean De Baer (last seen in "A Perfect Murder"), Elizabeth Franz (last seen in "Sabrina"), Mark Margolis (last seen in "Tales from the Darkside: The Movie"), Barbara Hershey (last seen in "Breakfast of Champions"), Edoardo Ballerini (last seen in "I Shot Andy Warhol"), Matthew Faber (last seen in "Bob Roberts"), Robin Morse (last seen in "For Keeps?"), Tony Machine, Robert Katims (last seen in "Mulholland Drive"), David Vadim (last seen in "The Last Thing He Wanted"), Joseph D'Onofrio, Todd Schrenk, Joel Y. Zion, with cameos from Greg Grunberg (last seen in "Connie and Carla"), Zak Orth (last seen in "Down to You"), Kevin Corrigan (last seen in "Walking and Talking")

RATING: 5 out of 10 vinyl records (hey, it's 1996 - plus they may come back in style one day)