The Wonder

Year 15, Day 77 - 3/18/23 - Movie #4,378

BEFORE: Ciaran Hinds carries over from "Belfast", and this creates an Irish two-fer for St. Patrick's Day weekend. I had corned beef & cabbage on Friday for lunch but since I had an early morning shift, I wasn't able to drink any beer on Friday night.  OK, so tonight then after 14 hours at the theater, I'll just have to drink twice as much...

This is another film that played at the theater where I work, it was part of the Tuesday night film appreciation class for adults, and I worked the screening but I didn't get to watch the film. It's nice that's it's available on Netflix, it's also set in Ireland and it slips right into my chain.  

It's Day 18 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, and today's theme - all-day - is "Westerns" - which seems fitting since "Belfast" featured footage from "High Noon" and "The Man who Shot Liberty Valance". Here's today's line-up:

6:00 am "Viva Villa" (1934)

8:00 am "The Westerner" (1940)

10:00 am "Cimarron" (1931)

12:15 pm "Stagecoach" (1939)

2:15 pm "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" (1949)

4:15 pm "Giant" (1956)

8:00 pm "Hud" (1963)

10:00 pm "How the West Was Won" (1962)

1:00 am "The Naked Spur" (1953)

2:45 am "Cat Ballou" (1965)

4:30 am "The Big Sky" (1952)

I keep meaning to watch "Cimarron" because it was a Best Picture winner, but so far I haven't been able to - same goes for "How the West Was Won", it seems like a fine film that I never have time to watch.  So I've only seen "Giant" and "Cat Ballou", that gives me only 2 out of 11 today, and brings me to 91 seen out of 203, so down to 44.8%.  Oh, well.

THE PLOT: The story follows a young Irish girl who stops eating but remains miraculously alive and well. An English nurse is brought to her tiny village to observe her. 

AFTER: I just HATE the way this one starts and ends, it opens on a soundstage where the model of a house has been built, with obvious piping around it for cameras to be attached to, it's a tip-off that what we're about to watch is a movie that was (at least partially) filmed on a stage, which calls to mind films like "Dogville", where the staging is an obvious part of the performance, and I just don't approve of this, it takes me out of the fantasy world, or at least acknowledges that the world we're about to see doesn't really exist, a lot of it is just movie magic.  But why do this at all?  Why not just open on an Irish bog and let us believe in the story just a tiny bit more?  Very soon the camera goes into another set, which represents the boat that's taking the lead character from England to Ireland, and from then on everything LOOKS real enough, so my suggestion would just be to cut out the first couple of minutes where the fake set looks like a fake set, and just start the film on the fake set that looks like a real boat, like normal films would do.  Then at the end the film goes back to the set before the credits roll. 

Look, I get it, it's very meta, or maybe Shakespearean - everything is just shadows, the stuff that dreams are made from, and nothing is real except what we are told is real, only it isn't, so we're back to nothing is real.  And the whole film is kind of about what is reality, like could a teen girl really go for months without food, could that be real, or is it just another artifice, like everything that we tend to see on the screen is?  I get it, but I don't have to like it - it's overly "arty" and too self-reflexive at the same time - even as a style, I don't approve of it, because it yanks me out of the fantasy world, it interferes with my suspension of disbelief.  

Nothing is real, and there's nothing to get hung about, unless you're the person sent to either prove or disprove this medical, possibly holy miracle.  The local council calls for the pairing of a nun and a nurse to investigate the girl, together they'll be watching her around the clock to see if she's somehow secretly ingesting food or otherwise pulling some kind of fast one.  Wait, no otherwise, that's really the only possible explanation for how this girl is able to not eat and also not die.  Bear in mind this is set back in the time shortly after the Great Famine in Ireland (which ran from 1845 to 1852, I'm told) which was caused by a potato blight and about 1 million Irish people died from starvation, and another 1 million moved out of the country.  A secondary cause of the famine was the over-reliance of the Irish people on the potato crop - so the lesson to be learned is "Grow and eat a lot of different foods, just in case."

This girl, Anna, became famous for her fasting - and the condition is known as anorexia miribilis, or "holy anorexia", which is slightly different from anorexia nervosa, which is a loss of appetite resulting from the fear of becoming overweight.  The "Holy anorexia" is connected to religious fasting, it's not "I'm afraid to eat" but more like "I don't need to eat, because I believe in God". Which doesn't sound like a logical sentence, not at all.  But the nurse, Elizabeth or "Lib", is not a religious believer, so she looks for other possible reasons to account for the girl not eating, and she notices that the girl's family is responsible for taking care of her during her fasting periods.  Also, Anna claims that she subsists on "manna from heaven", which also is a suspicious statement - I remember that in the Bible the Jews wandering in the desert also survived on manna, and one commonly held belief is that "manna" in that case was a euphemism for bird droppings.  

So Lib separates Anna from her family, and then the girl starts starving for real, and her body begins shutting down.  So this would suggest that Lib had essentially cracked the case, most likely one of the family members was slipping her food somehow.  But the council would not listen to reason, and suggested that the girl continue to be watched, even if this resulted in her death. Yeah, it sure sounds like the council had her best interests at heart, because they all wanted to believe in the miracle so badly.  Yeah, there's more to the story, the reasons for things being the way they are, but no spoilers here. You can watch the film and try to put the clues together yourself, let me know how you did. 

Meanwhile, Lib is still grieving the death of her own child, and takes laudanum (derived from opium) to help her sleep.  Lib pleads with the family to take some action, even if it's to return to whatever devious action they were doing to feed their daughter on the down low, but the family instead can only look forward to their lives once Anna has completed her penance and passed on. What a supportive bunch.  Lib has to devise an ingenious way to convince Anna to keep on living, but also satisfy the family and community that apparently wants her to die, on some level. 

I appreciate the takedown of religion here, but the fact of the matter is that it IS possible for some people to survive without food - technically.  The story behind the development of brewing certain European beers is that monks who were fasting could survive longer without food by drinking strong beers, because beer is essentially bread in liquid form, if you think about it.  Then these monks created the lambic styles of beer, which often had fruit added to them - still a liquid, but getting much closer to nutritious food once citrus fruits got added to the beers - why, they were practically healthy at that point!  So there you go, religiously safe by a whisker, the monks could technically not break their fast if their "food" was in the liquid form of beer.  This sounds more like the reasoning came from a lawyer, not a priest - but if you drink the right beers, I've heard you can survive without (solid) food for a long time.  I'm going to have a few beers myself tonight, after my very long (14 hour) shift at the movie theater, so I'll let you know how that goes. 

Also starring Florence Pugh (last seen in "Black Widow"), Kila Lord Cassidy, Tom Burke (last seen in "Mank"), Niamh Algar, Elaine Cassidy (last seen in "The Others"), Caolan Byrne, Toby Jones (last seen in "Zoo"), Dermot Crowley (last seen in "The Death of Stalin"), Brian F. O'Byrne (last seen in "No Reservations"), David Wilmot (last seen in "King Arthur" (2004)), Ruth Bradley (last seen in "The Informer"), Josie Walker (also carrying over from "Belfast"), Graeme Coughlan. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 visiting pilgrims

Belfast

Year 15, Day 76 - 3/17/23 - Movie #4,377

BEFORE: Judi Dench carries over from "Blithe Spirit", and realized too late that I could have just taken a couple days off and come STRAIGHT here from "Endings, Beginnings", with Jamie Dornan carrying over.  That is, if I hadn't typed up his name as "Jamie Donovan" on my cast list sheet - I'm paying the price for my typo, because it turns out I didn't NEED to watch "Villains" and "The Bling Ring" and I could have saved "Blithe Spirit" for October, because, well, it IS a ghost story and I could have linked to "The Sea Beast" with the voice of Dan Stevens in it.  Now if it turns out I can't make my proper connections this October, and "Blithe Spirit" could have helped me do that, I'm going to be very pissed off.

But hey, Happy St. Patrick's Day, I did get here to a movie about Ireland, JUST in time.  And tomorrow's film will be another Irish film, it's a holiday two-fer.  It was about 13 months ago - February 19 of last year, that I worked a screening of "Belfast" during the previous Oscar season, and Kenneth Branagh was on hand to do a Q&A session after the film.  I got to stand out in the lobby next to him, and I got to cue him to take the stage while the credits rolled.  (OK, so I cued his handler, who cued him, same thing...). And I got to take a candid photo of the back of his head while he stood in the theater lobby during the movie.  I didn't watch the movie then, and that turned out well, because I saved it for today's holiday, I figured that would be very appropriate. 

It's Day 17 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, and today's themes are "Medical Movies" (before 8 pm) and "Romantic Comedies" (8 pm and after). Here's the line-up: 

6:30 am "Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet" (1940)

8:15 am "The Hasty Heart" (1950)

10:00 am "The Citadel" (1938)

12:00 pm "The Story of Louis Pasteur" (1936)

1:30 pm "Sister Kenny" (1946)

3:30 pm "Not as a Stranger" (1955)

6:00 pm "Johnny Belinda" (1948)

8:00 pm "It Happened One Night" (1934)

10:00 pm "Pillow Talk" (1959)

12:00 am "The Philadelphia Story" (1940)

2:00 am "The Lady Eve" (1941)

4:00 am "The Goodbye Girl" (1977)

"Medical Movies" is a terrible theme, I think, because I haven't seen any of them.  If these files were any good, I probably would have seen at least one of them.  My record is better on the romantic comedies, I've seen all of them except "The Lady Eve". That gives me only 4 out of 12 today, and brings me to 89 seen out of 192, so down to 46%.

THE PLOT: A young boy and his working-class family experience the tumultuous late 1960s. 

AFTER: Well, I'm going to go out on a limb here and, BEFORE checking, say that this story is largely autobiographical, based on the life of young Kenneth Branagh.  The young blond boy is so prominent in the film, the story is largely told from his point of view, and I'm guessing that little "Buddy" grew up to be the director of this very film.  Yes, Branagh, has a sole screenwriting credit, fine, but let me check his bio.  "Born in Belfast December 10, 1960" - yes, that would make him 9 years old in 1969, that checks out.  His father was a plumber and carpenter, and he's got two siblings, an older brother and a younger sister (born in 1970, therefore not appearing in this film).  "When he was nine, his family escaped The Troubles by moving to Reading, Berkshire, England" - and at the close of this film, the family that's central to this story (with no last name mentioned in the film) does move to England.  

There you have it, another case cracked - there were just so many details here about the various family members, I felt it sort of HAD to be based on somebody's real life.  And a lot of extended family members depicted without really any explanation about how they were all related - the director didn't see fit to explain this, because he already knew, so it was either a bit too obvious to him only, or he didn't feel this all needed to be mapped out.  And then there are so many scenes of Buddy watching Western movies on his TV, or the family going to the movies to see "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang", it makes sense that the child who loved watching movies as a kid would grow up to become an actor and film director.  (This kind of puts "Belfast" in the same category as "The Fabelmans", which is about Spielberg's young family life, and explains his budding interest in making movies.  But screw Spielberg, he's already got the acclaim and the awards and now he made a movie about HIMSELF?  What a narcissist.  Do I want to watch two hours of Spielberg explaining where he came from?  NO thanks.  He revealed in a recent interview that he never officially got hired at Universal, he just took the studio tour, hid in a bathroom and then found an empty office when the tour left without him. He totally cheated.)

"The Troubles" are a euphemism for religious conflict in Ireland in 1969 - Protestants vs. Catholics.  Guys, come on, it's a big island, can't you guys just split it in half and share it?  Wait, that's what they did?  OK, so what's the trouble, then?  The Catholics get regular Ireland and the Protestants get Northern Ireland.  Wait, are Protestants and Anglicans the same thing?  Look, I'm originally from Boston, where the words "Irish" and "Catholic" are nearly always together, they're one and the same.  I don't know Irish Protestants, I only know Irish as Catholics, maybe I'm behind the times or something.  Belfast is the capital of Northern Ireland, and that's part of the U.K., so they're...Protestant?  The other terms like "nationalist" and "unionist" don't mean much to me, either, so I'm out of the loop on this one.  "The Troubles" started back in 1969, as seen in the film, but I grew up in the 1980's, so I remember Ireland back then as a dangerous place, with the IRA and Sinn Fein and car bombs and all that. (This was before an "Irish car bomb" was a drink where you drop a shot glass of whiskey in your Guinness.) 

I just read the whole article on Wikipedia about "The Troubles" in 1969, and I still don't understand it. It's got something to do with civil rights, and the Catholics in Northern Ireland protesting their treatment as a minority, and then those protests getting suppressed.  Again, guys, come on, you're ALL IRISH - you've got different religions, but more in common with each other than you think.  And I think somehow this is all Henry VIII's fault, for breaking up with the Catholic Church way back when.  But the other problems that the Catholics encountered were job discrimination, housing discrimination, and gerrymandering, while people were calling for police reforms because of bias and brutality.  Wait, wait, this is all sounding so familiar somehow, if you just replace "Catholic" with "black" and "Protestant" with "white" it sounds so very much like modern-day America.  I guess in the U.S.A. we've got our own version of "The Troubles", and as we can see, it ends with a line drawn somewhere geographically and all the people who think one way moving north of that line, and all the people who think the other way moving south of that line.  

While the riots and fighting take place in the streets of Belfast, the families hunkered down in their houses and waited for things to be over - or if they were Catholic, they were more likely to pack up their things and move away.  Buddy's father works on construction projects in England, and can't afford to fly back every weekend, so he comes back whenever he can.  Buddy's got a crush on a female classmate, but she's a Catholic and he also is afraid to talk to her.  But he gets some advice from his grandparents, Granny and Pop.  Buddy also gets caught up in a "gang" when his female cousin uses him to help steal chocolates from a candy store, but this leads to the police coming to his house to question him about the Turkish Delight he grabbed. (Again, the details are so specific, you have to figure this all happened to Kenneth Branagh when he was a boy.)

Meanwhile barricades are going up in the streets to separate the nationalists from the unionists, and again I couldn't really keep track of who was who, because they all just seemed Irish.  The head of the Protestant gang keeps trying to recruit Buddy's father for "the cause", but he's never around and he doesn't much like the idea of anyone threatening his family in order to gain his support.  Pa dreams of moving his whole family to Sydney or Vancouver, but Ma keeps nixing the idea because she's lived her whole life in Belfast - but the relationship is getting strained by so much time apart, and realizing that the family is in danger if they don't move away.  Pa gets offered a bigger apartment if he can move his whole family to England, but it's harder to convince the kids that their life will be better if they move.  

The film opens with beautiful color footage of Belfast, and then turns to black and white when the time-frame moves to depict the events of 1969.  I get that the sudden removal of color symbolizes the traveling back to the past, but I don't really associate 1969, a very colorful year in history, with black-and-white footage.  I mean, we've had color movies since the 1930's, sure there were black-and-white films made in the 1950's and 60's, but by then MOST movies were in color, there was color television, colorful fashions, etc.  When I see a film in black and white, it calls to mind the 1930's or 1940's for me, not the hip, swinging Sixties.  I don't know, maybe Kenneth Branagh remembers his childhood in black and white?  But then splashes of color appear in the later parts of the movie, like when the family goes to see a movie together, and the movie is in color while the rest of the world is colorless?  Again, it's a bit of an odd choice.

Anyway, this film was nominated for SEVEN Academy Awards - at last year's ceremony, obviously, not the recent one.  That's how far behind I still am on movies, despite my best efforts to catch up.  It only won ONE Oscar, for Best Original Screenplay (take that, Spielberg, you hack...) and Branagh became the first person to be nominated in seven different categories - similar to how Guillermo Del Toro is now the only person to win Oscars for Best Director, Best Picture and Best Animated Feature.  

Still, too many Van Morrison songs here.  I'm not a fan. 

Also starring Jude Hill, Caitriona Balfe (last seen in "Ford v Ferrari"), Jamie Dornan (last seen in "Endings, Beginnings"), Ciaran Hinds (last seen in "Margot at the Wedding"), Lewis McAskie, Colin Morgan (last seen in "The Huntsman: Winter's War"), Lara McDonnell (last seen in "Artemis Fowl"), Gerard Horan (ditto), Conor MacNeill (ditto), Olive Tennant, Josie Walker, Turlough Convery (last seen in "The Current War: Director's Cut"), Vanessa Ifediora, Drew Dillon, Victor Alli (last seen in "Death on the Nile"), Rachel Feeney (ditto), John Sessions (last seen in "Filth"), Sid Sagar (ditto), Freya Yates, Nessa Eriksson, Charlie Barnard, Frankie Hastings, Malread Tyers, Caolan McCarthy, Ian Dunnet Jnr, Michael Maloney (last seen in "The Young Victoria"), Chris McCurry, Elly Condron, Olivia Flanagan, Samuel Menhinick, Leonard Buckley, Estelle Cousins, Scott Gutteridge, Kit Rakusen, Oliver Savell, Orla McDonagh, Serrana Su-Ling Bliss, Ross O'Donnellan, Mark Hadfield (last seen in "Tristram Shandy")

with archive footage of Raquel Welch (last seen in "The Kid Stays in the Picture"), John Wayne (ditto), Jimmy Stewart (last seen in "Jerry Lewis: The Man Behind the Clown"), Lee Marvin (last seen in "Becoming Mike Nichols"), Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly (last seen in "Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project"), Dick van Dyke (last seen in "Lucy and Desi"), Sally Ann Howes, Adrian Hall, Heather Ripley and the voice of William Shatner (last seen in "Betty White: First Lady of Television"). 

RATING: 6 out of 10 matchbox cars

Blithe Spirit (2020)

Year 15, Day 75 - 3/16/23 - Movie #4,376

BEFORE: Leslie Mann carries over from "The Bling Ring", and I hope this film is good, because it turns out to be a bit unnecessary - I messed up, because it turns out that even though I've done some exemplary linking work this week, I didn't have to do it.  Because I misspelled an actor's name on my cast lists, I didn't realize that I could have gone STRAIGHT from my final romance film to my St. Patrick's Day film.  I rely mainly on the search function of OpenOffice to find the links, but if I got somebody's name wrong, then the search function doesn't really work well, does it?  I didn't NEED to watch "The Bling Ring" after all, I could have saved myself the trouble - oh well, what's done is done, I try not to look back at my mistakes because otherwise I might realize that I needed "Villains" or today's film to make a valuable connection later down the road, and then finding out I wasted them would be too depressing. 

It's Day 16 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, and today's themes are "Stage to Screen" (before 8 pm) and "Epics" (8 pm and after). Here's the line-up: 

5:45 am "Our Town" (1940)

7:15 am "Pygmalion" (1939)

9:00 am "Hamlet" (1948)

11:45 am "Cyrano de Bergerac" (1950)

1:45 pm "Separate Tables" (1958)

3:30 pm "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1951)

5:45 pm "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" (1966)

8:00 pm "Spartacus" (1960)

11:30 pm "Ben-Hur" (1959)

3:30 am "Quo Vadis" (1951)

Five out of 10 today, which I think counts as a "push". "Hamlet", "A Streetcar Named Desire", "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf", "Spartacus" and "Ben-Hur". This brings me to 85 seen out of 180, so still at 47%.

THE PLOT: A spiritualist medium holds a seance for a writer suffering from writer's block but accidentally summons the spirit of his deceased first wife, which leads to an increasingly complex love triangle with his current wife of five years. 

AFTER: I kept a promise today - to a band named Pomplamoose, that really saved my butt in December.  I usually make a mix CD of seasonal holiday songs - well, it used to be a CD that I mailed out with my Christmas cards to more and more friends and family members each year, but it got to be too expensive, buying the CDs and the labels and the postage - so last year I went all digital and put a CD's worth of songs on to my Dropbox account, now I just mail out the link each year with my cards, and it's much cheaper.  

Anyway, I was clueless what to put into the mix last year, I had a bunch of stray songs in the "alternative" category left over from previous years, but it just wasn't coming together, I had the mixmaster's version of "writer's block", but sometimes it just takes one or two great songs to inspire a mix, and while searching Amazon I remembered this crazy band from YouTube that did mash-ups and covers, and I wondered if they had any Christmas songs.  Well, in fact that's how the band started, they covered some Christmas carols that got used in car commercials a few years back, and they took off from there.  I put three of their four Christmas songs into the mix and kind of built it all up around them, a couple of Sia songs, something from Sister Hazel, Guster, two songs from Train's killer album "Christmas in Tahoe", 1 from Weezer, 1 from Indigo Girls, 1 from Los Straightjackets, a rare track from the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, and BOOM, I had a mix I could listen to again and again.  

So I told myself when I got a little spare money, I'd go back and buy some of Pomplamoose's albums on Amazon - all their weird covers and mash-ups, like they mix "Sweet Dreams" by Eurhythmics with "Seven Nation Army" by White Stripes, and that really works - I probably dropped $40 today on digital music, which I almost never do these days, because most modern music just plain sucks. (Come on, you know it does.). Sure, their stuff is available on YouTube any time, and if I looked hard enough I could probably find some MP3s somebody posted on the net for free, but I wanted this band to see a little spike in their digital music sales and wonder where it came from (you're welcome...).  There's probably another $15 or $20 I could send their way when my credit card bill month restarts in a couple weeks. 

"Blithe Spirit" is a film that starts kind of in that same place - with a writer who can't write.  And yes, I tend to find this very annoying in a movie, because it's just used so many times as a jumping-off point.  There's nothing less exciting, cinematically, than watching a writer staring at a blank page in a typewriter, no matter how angst-ridden he's acting.  And Dan Stevens as the writer REALLY overdoes it here, he gets all curled up in a fetal position and at one point even throws the typewriter out the window.  Sure, that'll help.  But since this is based on a play that was written by Noel Coward, it leads me to wonder if the playwright himself suffered from writer's block.  Now I have to look up the 1941 play to see if this is a key plot point. 

Hmm, it's not really clear.  But in the play the medium is a guest at the author's dinner party, and that makes a bit more sense than the movie, in which the author hires the medium to help with his writer's block.  Umm, how is a seance going to help with THAT problem?  Unless it's a play about ghosts that he's writing, but honestly that's a bit unclear, too.  And of course we know now that mediums are, across the board, a group of charlatans and fraudsters - yes, even that one that lives on Long Island - but back then, in the 1930's, people did NOT know that, it seems.  Noel Coward sure didn't know that, because he wrote this medium character who knows herself to be a fakey fakester, but she accidentally has the power to contact Charles' dead first wife, Elvira.  NOTE: "Elvira" here has the British pronunciation, with a long "E" sound, not the same as the famous horror movie hostess, Mistress of the Dark, who pronounces her name El-VIGH-ra, with the long "I" sound.

Anyway, Elvira shows up and only Charles can see her, and her presence is both beneficial - she gives him help with the plot points of the screenplay, she's a better writer than her husband, just like "Colette" - and also harmful, because she wants to disrupt Charles' marriage to Ruth, and if she can't do that, then she'll kill Charles so she can have him to herself in the afterlife.  Yes, because as we all know, life is a game and you only win it if you're not lonely in the world beyond.  Well, who's to say that the residents of heaven and hell aren't just as petty and greedy as they were when they were alive?  

Look, I'd love to say we're all more enlightened now as a society than we were back in the 1930's, you'd think we might have all collectively grown up since then, and we now longer believe in the all-powerful sky-father who loves us and wants us to live forever, unless we made mistakes and didn't beg appropriately enough for forgiveness, in which case we'll spend eternity in pain and suffering - but so many of us still haven't, and it's really become bothersome that the people in power still suffer from this delusion, and it affects legislation and the quality of our daily lives.  Seriously, can we just all grow up and stop believing in angels and ghosts and Bigfoots?  You live while you're alive and then you die one day, and that's it, no more, nothing after.  But no, fifty years later there were still romance movies being made like "Ghost" and "Just Like Heaven" and countless films about ghosts and demons, and even though I watch them all, I wonder why so many people don't have the same power to separate fact from fiction. 

There's inconsistency across the board here, vis-a-vis the spirit world and what happens when someone crosses back over as a ghost.  How come Elvira can't slap Charles in the face - her hand passes right through - but she CAN play the piano or pick up a lipstick or a straight razor?  Is she tangible or not?  Elvira is also somehow able to sabotage the brakes on Charles' car, which is bad news for the next person who drives the car, and no spoilers here, but it's not Charles. It kind of feels like the scriptwriter just kept using death as a convenient wrap-up for some of the characters - I guess when you no longer know what to do with them, you can just kill them off.  It doesn't seem like Noel Coward knew how to wrap up the storyline either - in the original play, after all the ghosts are properly exorcised, the medium recommends that he move away, as soon as possible. So the play ends when the central character tiptoes off and the curtain falls, and apparently Coward used this as an ending in more than one play.

The original play also did something with the maid character, in a twist she was revealed to be the one with actual psychic powers, and the medium remained a charlatan.  This plot point did not carry over to this film adaptation, so that's now another character that the screenwriter just didn't know what to do with - how ironic when that's the same situation that the writer within the story encounters. 

I was also confused by whether the setting shifted from London to Los Angeles near the end, once Charles finishes the screenplay and the movie is being filmed, he's confronted by gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, who I believe was based in London.  OK, NITPICK POINT: maybe they're shooting the film at Pinewood Studios in the U.K., but it seems unlikely that in the 1930's a newspaper columnist would fly to London just to do one on-set interview.  Just saying. 

Also starring Dan Stevens (last seen in "Colossal"), Isla Fisher (last seen in "Scooby-Doo"), Judi Dench (last seen in "Six Minutes to Midnight"), Emilia Fox (last seen in "Cashback"), Julian Rhind-Tutt (last seen in "Bridget Jones's Baby"), Adil Ray, Michele Dotrice, Aimee-Ffion Edwards, Dave Johns, Simon Kunz (last seen in "City of Ember"), Peter A. Rogers, Colin Stinton (last seen in "The Current War: Director's Cut"), Stella Stocker (last seen in "The Batman"), Jaymes Sygrove (last seen in "Dumbo" (2019), Georgina Rich, Callie Cooke, Delroy Atkinson (last seen in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales"), James Fleet (last seen in "Operation Mincemeat"), Issy van Randwyck (last seen in "The Danish Girl"), Tam Williams (last seen in "Spectre"), Alan MacLean, Kateryna Globa. 

RATING: 4 out of 10 gramophone records

The Bling Ring

Year 15, Day 74 - 3/15/23 - Movie #4,375

BEFORE: Maika Monroe carries over from "Villains", to play the probably-notable character of "Beach Girl" in today's film. 

It's Day 15 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, and today's themes are "Politics" (before 8 pm) and "Animal Stories" (8 pm and after). Here's the line-up: 

7:30 am "The Gorgeous Hussy" (1936)

9:15 am "Sunrise at Campobello" (1950)

11:45 am "Z" (1969)

2:00 pm "Seven Days in May" (1964)

4:00 pm "The Candidate" (1972)

6:00 pm "All the King's Men" (1949)

8:00 pm "The Black Stallion" (1979)

10:15 pm "Born Free" (1965)

12:00 am "Lassie Come Home" (1943)

1:45 am "National Velvet" (1944)

4:00 am "Sounder" (1972)

I can only claim four of these - "The Candidate", "All the King's Men", "The Black Stallion" and "Born Free".  I was probably just a young boy when I was made to watch "Born Free", that's the one with the lion, right?  I was also shown "Bless the Beasts and the Children" around the same time, and that film messed me up, to the point where I probably forgot watching "Born Free". 

Another 4 seen out of 11 brings me to 80 seen out of 170, so I'm down to 47%.

THE PLOT: A group of fame-obsessed teenagers use the internet to track celebrities' whereabouts in order to rob their homes. 

AFTER: Well, you're about to see some real next-level linking from me this week - the challenge was to get from the end of my romance film to something Irish in just four moves, and I'm all over that.  Who watches two Maika Monroe films in a row?  For that matter, who (besides me) has ever watched four Wolfgang Novogratz films in a row?  Simply no one. 

That's what led to me to watch "The Bling Ring" tonight - a film that, quite frankly, I could have gone on with my life JUST FINE without watching this film.  Ugh, there's just nothing HERE, even though it's based on real incidents, there was a group of entitled teens who got caught breaking into celebrities' houses and stealing their stuff.  But WHO the hell CARES??

Before I get into what's good about the film, let me tackle what's wrong with it - there's no narrative arc here.  Two teens break into Paris Hilton's house and steal some stuff.  Then they come back with more friends the next time they can confirm Paris is out of town, and steal more stuff.  Then they all go to another celebrity's house and steal some stuff, then another one, another one, and then (eventually) they get caught, because as you might figure, eventually they rob the house of a celebrity who had an alarm or a bunch of security cameras set up. But just think about that, these teens broke into maybe DOZENS of houses before they tripped an alarm or got caught on camera. And they just don't seem to be that smart, otherwise they would have checked for alarms or cameras. 

SO, the takeaway here is that MOST celebrities don't have security systems or alarms, AND most of them also leave at least one door or window unlocked at all times.  Not the front door, of course, but almost always the patio door by the pool, because who can be bothered to always be locking THAT, and then unlocking it EVERY TIME they need to walk out to the pool?  God, what a chore - better to just leave that door unlocked all the time, for when you need it.  I'm not saying you should break into any celebrity's house, but from this information, you can do what you want. 

These are also awful characters, I hate them.  All of them, if this is the most constructive thing they can do with their time, stealing clothes, purses and wads of cash from the closets and secret hiding places of celebrities.  No narrative arc also means there's no redemption for these characters, the film ends when they get sent to jail, so I will continue to hate them, the film gave me NO reason not to. 

Making a movie about these criminals and not giving them any redemption therefore comes just a bit to close to justifying and glorifying their actions.  We live in a world of publicity and social media, and there was simply no reason to make these criminals any more famous than they already were, almost making them into cult heroes if you don't show them being penalized for their wrongdoings.  So that's a lot of big mistakes from a story standpoint.  Who directed this?  Sofia Coppola?  Yeah, that seems about right.  I've never really gotten a sense that this nepo baby had any knack for telling a coherent story, and yes, I'm including "Lost in Translation" in that statement, which was little more than a mood piece, not a coherent narrative. Daddy's company has backed all of her films, just saying. 

Now, as for what's good about the film - yeah, I'm struggling to come up with anything.  Maybe I can point out that celebrities are a little too well-off, a bit too full of themselves, and some perhaps needed to be taken down a peg, but that's a real stretch. Even if they made their fortunes via reality TV, they still deserved to have safe homes and not have their stuff stolen - they should be allowed to make bad investments and blow all their money on drugs if they want to. 

Also starring Katie Chang, Israel Broussard, Emma Watson (last seen in "The Circle"), Claire Julien, Taissa Farmiga (last seen in "The Mule"), Georgia Rock, Leslie Mann (last heard in "The Croods: A New Age"), Carlos Miranda (last seen in "Warrior"), Gavin Rossdale (last seen in "The Game of Their Lives"), Stacy Edwards (last seen in "The Bachelor"), G. Mac Brown (last seen in "The Harder They Fall"), Marc Coppola (last heard in "A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III"), Janet Song (last seen in "Lady Bird"), Annie Fitzgerald, Doug DeBeech, Erin Daniels, Patricia Lentz, Logan Miller (last seen in "Love, Simon"), Halston Sage (last seen in "The Last Summer"), Brenda Koo (last seen in "War Dogs"), Rachelle Carson-Begley (last seen in "Human Capital"), Peter Bigler, Nina Siemaszko (last seen in "The Artist"), Yolanda Lloyd Delgado, 

with cameos from Paris Hilton (last seen in "Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!"), Kirsten Dunst (last seen in "Elizabethtown"), Michael Yo, and archive footage of Lauren Conrad, Megan Fox (last seen in "Zeroville"), Lindsay Lohan (last seen in "Bobby"), Heidi Montag, Audrina Patridge, Spencer Pratt.

RATING: 3 out of 10 walk-in shoe closets

Villains

Year 15, Day 73 - 3/14/23 - Movie #4,374

BEFORE: Kyra Sedgwick carries over from "Endings, Beginnings", which was the ending of the romance chain and the beginning of...well, something else. ANYTHING else, please - can I get to an Irish film in four days?  Of course - can I get to an Easter film in 27 steps?  Sure thing!  Can I get to a bunch of documentaries and then three films for Mother's Day?  Here's hoping...  But to do this, I have to use a film that was on my "horror" list to make a link here - I'm honestly not sure if this is a horror film, just going by the description on IMDB, which isn't always that accurate. True horror films belong in October, of course, unless I need them to make a critical connection at some other time, then allowances need to be mader. 

It's Day 14 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, and today's themes are "Swashbucklers" (before 8 pm) and "Foreign" (8 pm and after). Here's the line-up: 

6:00 am "The Flame and the Arrow" (1960)

7:30 am "The Adventures of Don Juan" (1948)

9:30 am "The Prisoner of Zenda" (1937)

11:15 am "The Spanish Main" (1945)

1:15 pm "The Sea Hawk" (1940)

3:30 pm "Captain Blood" (1935)

5:45 pm "The Three Musketeers" (1948)

8:00 pm "La Strada" (1956)

10:00 pm "Day for Night" (1973)

12:15 am "Cries and Whispers" (1972)

2:00 am "All About My Mother" (1999)

4:00 am "Three Colors: Red" (1994)

6:00 am "Rashomon" (1950)

Shoot, I've only seen three of these - "The Sea Hawk", "Captain Blood" and "Cries and Whispers", because I've done chains for Errol Flynn and Ingmar Bergman.  I've got "The Prisoner of Zenda" and "All About My Mother" on my watchlist, but that means they haven't been, you know, watched just yet. Another 3 seen out of 13 brings me to 76 seen out of 159, so I'm down to 48%.

THE PLOT: After a pair of amateur criminals breaks into a suburban home, they stumble upon a dark secret that two sadistic homeowners will do anything to keep from getting out. 

AFTER: Well, I think I made the right call, it's not a HORROR horror film, like there's no vampires or demons or werewolves in it, but there are horrific things that take place when a couple that robs a gas station finds that their getaway car has run out of gas (Oh, if ONLY they had just been in a place that sold gas...) and they decide to break into the nearest house to steal either another car or siphon some gas.  

After breaking in, they get a little comfortable, however, and help themselves to some food - it's the middle of the day, the homeowners are probably at work or shopping or something.  Exploring the basement looking for a gas can and a hose, they find something unexpected, and it makes them wonder what kind of people live in this house. They soon find out when the couple comes home and have to deal with the strangers who broke in. 

Well, I guess there are bad people and worse people, and really, it's the quiet ones you have to watch out for, right?  The ones who appear normal, live in a quiet, secluded house upstate but who then really knows what kind of psychos they really are?  When we go driving through rural Long Island or Pennsylvania, we often see rundown houses or perhaps dilapidated sheds behind sketchy houses and we call them "murder shacks".  A couple of small-time thieves are really no match for two psychos masquerading as a normal couple, when the wife carries around a doll as if it's a real baby, and they seem a little too eager to tie trespassers up in the basement while they figure out what to do with them.  

The mind boggles, really, but you know whatever it is they have planned, it can't be good. Are they cannibals?  Just serial killers?  Or worse, are they into kinky sex stuff?  To their credit, the thieves try their best to do the "right thing", whatever that means at this point - when they probably should just be concerned with getting free.  

Maybe this is the 41 romance films I just watched talking, but this sure felt like a refreshing change of pace.  There was no formula here, just a set-up that created a situation that could have ended any number of horrible ways.  I'm OK with how it all shook down, I suppose it easily could have been a lot worse.  I think my horror chain will still be OK in October without this one, though it does connect to films like "R.I.P.D. 2" and "Blair Witch 2" via Jeffrey Donovan, and "Barbarian" via Bill Skarsgard, I think I'll be fine - there are other connections to be made. 

This film premiered four years ago at the SXSW Festival, which takes place, well, just about this time every year. One of my bosses just got back from attending that festival, and he talked about some of the very edgy films he saw there - yeah, that tracks, it's kind of a weird festival that sort of delights in showcasing non-standard, even bizarre festival fare.  This year there's a film that played there called "Bottoms" which is about sort of a lesbian fight club set in a high school, from the director of "Shiva Baby".  They also screened "John Wick 4", "Dungeons & Dragons" this year, and last year, it's the festival where "Everything Everywhere All at Once" premiered. 

Also starring Bill Skarsgard (last seen in "Eternals"), Maika Monroe (last seen in "I'm Not Here"), Blake Baumgartner, Jeffrey Donovan (last seen in "Lucy in the Sky"), Noah Robbins (last seen in "Miss Sloane"), Nikolas Kontomanolis, Danny Johnson.

RATING: 6 out of 10 sea shells sold by the sea shore

Endings, Beginnings

Year 15, Day 72 - 3/13/23 - Movie #4,373

BEFORE: Wow, how about that Oscar ceremony last night? I'll admit I started it late, because my wife and I just HAD to stay current on "Tournament of Champions IV" on Food Network. Priorities. So then I had to stay off of social media while I caught up with the Oscars - but my trick was that I fast-forwarded over most of the acceptance speeches, the second half of all the songs, and any time the presenters tried to starsplain "Sound Editing" or "Production Design" to me.  Watched the whole thing in about an hour and a half - just jokes, award, next award, more jokes, award, and so on.  The ONE film I had seen that was nominated for Best Picture won, so that's a real time-saver for me, I won't have to catch up later, not on that. (I still have to see "CODA", though...)   Don't worry, I'll have plenty of films to put on my list, like "The Whale" and "All Quiet on the Western Front" and "Triangle of Sadness" in addition to the ones that are already ON my list, like "Elvis" and "Pinocchio" and "The Banshees of Inisherin". I'll get caught up, someday. 

It's Day 13 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, and today's themes are "Tearjerkers" (before 8 pm) and "Heists and Capers" (8 pm and after). Here's the line-up: 

6:15 am "Love Affair" (1939)

8:00 am "Little Women" (1933)

10:00 am "Penny Serenade" (1941)

12:15 pm "Random Harvest" (1943)

2:30 pm "One Way Passage" (1932)

4:00 pm "Waterloo Bridge" (1940)

6:00 pm "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" (1964)

8:00 pm "The Sting" (1973)

10:15 pm "The Asphalt Jungle" (1950)

12:15 am "Dog Day Afternoon" (1975)

2:30 am "The Lavender Hill Mob" (1952)

4:00 am "Hot Millions" (1968)

Well, sure, I'm likely to do better on "Heist" films than "Tearjerkers", but I'm still hitting for only 4 out of 12 today... I've seen "Penny Serenade", "The Sting", "Dog Day Afternoon" and "The Lavender Hill Mob".  This brings me only up to 73 seen out of 146, so I'm right back at 50%.

Shailene Woodley carries over from "The Fault in Our Stars" 

THE PLOT: A 30-something woman navigating through love and heartbreak over the course of one year.  During that time, she will unlock the secrets to her life in a sudden turn of events and in the most surprising of places. 

AFTER: It's finally here, the last romance/relationship film for this year's chain - sure, another one may pop up here and there, especially if I need one to get me out of a tight linking corner, but this is Film #41 of the planned 41-film chain!  I think last year's chain was a little longer, it went on for five or six more days than this. But I had no St. Patrick's Day film last year, and this year I've got TWO, so I have to stop now to be able to link to them by Friday.  Still 41 films is a LOT and I think next year I need to make the romance chain even shorter, maybe try to contain it within February - 28 or 29 films would be ideal.  I can't even think about that right now, who knows if the fragments of chainlets I have left over could even be combined into a month-long chain?  I'll have to just keep adding to it and try to make some sense out of it in November or December, as always. 

But when I put THIS chain together, I figured that a film with a title like this one had to go at either the ENDING of the chain or the BEGINNING of the chain - with the knowledge that I could flip the chain around if needed.  But working backwards from "Licorice Pizza" got me to the starting point I wanted for the year, so that logically put "Endings, Beginnings" on the other end, and thankfully I was able to work out a way to get from HERE to something Irish-oriented in just four steps.  Sorry, it's not going to be "The Banshees of Inisherin" though. 

Look, I kind of eased into things with "Licorice Pizza" way back on February 1, and now I'm going out with a great big "MEH!"  There's just nothing special here, nothing that wowed me, nothing to make this film unique, it's just a simple love triangle, a woman dating two men who just happen to be close friends.  Umm, at first.  Once they start competing with each other for the affections of Daphne, that life-long friendship goes RIGHT out the window.  But so what, I've seen a dozen love triangles this year already, not to mention a quadrangle and a hex-angle (?) in "Something Borrowed", that's like six love triangles in one movie!  Was it excessive? Sure, but now a love triangle seems quite simple by comparison.  

Daphne is suffering from a break-up with her boss/boyfriend, when she decides to take some time off from men, checking in with her therapist and mother and friends about this.  She decides it's also a good time to stop drinking, because I guess for her it's all connected, dating and drinking and then fooling around for a while, then breaking up due to self-sabotage of some sort.  OK, sounds like a solid plan, abstention from men and alcohol - and it lasts for a few days, because at the next party she goes to, she meets Jack AND Frank, and has positive, meaningful conversations with them both.  And since she's not dating anyone right now, what's the harm in talking to a couple of guys at a party?  Yeah, you can see where this is going, both men find her sobriety and her not-dating-anyone very refreshing, and before long she's dating one and texting the other, only to find out later they're like besties.  Whoopsie. 

Well, at least she KNOWS she's got a problem, and self-awareness is half the battle toward correcting the negative behavior and... she's just going to date both of them, isn't she?  Yep. And before long, even after being honest with both men, Jack is throwing his friend under the bus by talking about how "unreliable" and "violent" Frank can be.  Umm, yeah, by selling him as a "bad. boy" to Daphne, that's not going to work, now she only wants Frank MORE, remember, she's the one famous for her bad decisions and poor judgment!  You also get the feeling that Frank now sees Daphne as "unattainable" because she's dating his best friend, so now HE only wants HER more as well.  This is a psychotic recipe for disaster, right?  

At some point Jack needs to go on a business trip, and he leaves Frank in charge of his dog.  But wait, Jack said Frank's very unreliable, so why would he trust him to feed and walk his dog?  He's right, though, because Frank brings the dog over to Daphne's house and leaves him there, even though she's got a "NO PETS" clause in her lease. Come on, that's just Frank being Frank, and Daphne can't resist him, even when he's a total a-hole.  Hey, that's kind of her thing, dating a-holes, so really, Frank's a perfect fit for her.  

There's more here, but not a lot.  I don't even remember half the characters listed as even BEING in the film, so it looks like another one of those "Narrowburg" acting school - green card scam deals.  For most of the cast, this is their first and only appearance in a film, so they're all either friends of the directors or D-level extras trying to break in to the business. An average plot with unknown actors tends to make for a very forgettable movie in the end. I just read one reviewer point out how dark the movie is - not depressing, just poorly lit.  Maybe that's why I don't remember many of the actors, because I just couldn't see them. 

Daphne herself is the most wishy-washy lead character I've ever seen, she can't decide on a job or a life-plan, so what are the chances that she's going to be able to choose between two men that she thinks she loves?  Zero, that's what.  She's going to just continue being a doormat and not making any kind of decision, and leave all that up to other people.  You can easily predict where that's going to end, Frank will split because he's unreliable (though he'll be gracious enough to pretend he's "bowing out") and then Jack will leave too, because his girlfriend slept with his best friend, and then Daphne will be alone again, right back where she started.  If only she'd stuck to her plan to abstain from dating men, none of this would have happened, it was so easily preventable.  Undecisive people also have a tendency (I assume) to end up in thrupples, and that might have been a better solution to the problem of dating two friends than what ended up happening here, but these characters probably couldn't have gotten over their own egos to allow that to happen. 

My final "Love Tip" for the season is this, therefore - in the end, what's just as important as WHO you choose to be your life partner is the fact that you're being decisive enough to make a choice.  Some people just let the choice get made for them, and then later they feel like they're not in charge of their own lives. 

Also starring Jamie Dornan (last seen in Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar"), Sebastian Stan (last seen in "The Devil All the Time"), Matthew Gray Gubler (last seen in "Horse Girl"), Lindsay Sloane (last seen in "A Good Old Fashioned Orgy"), Shamier Anderson (last seen in "Destroyer"), Sherry Cola (last heard in "Turning Red"), Wendie Malick (last seen in "Waiting..."), Kyra Sedgwick (last seen in "Gamer"), Janice LeAnn Brown, James Trussart, Ben Esler, Jonathan Freeman (last seen in "Manson Family Vacation"), Kai Lennox (last seen in "Equals"), Kelly Albanese, Seth McSwain, Presciliana Esparolini, Lucius Baybak, Julian Works (last seen in "Beautiful Boy"), Penny O'Brien, Yasmine Diaz, Rashawn Nadine Scott, Mary Faber (last heard in "The Addams Family 2"), Courtney Reed, Noureen DeWulf (last seen in "When We First Met"), Kanoa Goo (last seen in "Other People"), Pia Shah, Allyson Reilly, Noelle Bonhomme, Garrett Coffey, Diane Kelber, Anais Lilit. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 missed opportunities to make some kind of decision

The Fault in Our Stars

Year 15, Day 71 - 3/12/23 - Movie #4,372

BEFORE: Mike Birbiglia carries over from "Your Sister's Sister" and I couldn't work in the film "Humpday", which is another mumblecore film with Mark Duplass in it - but that would lead to something of a dead end for me, I couldn't get from there to my St. Patrick's Day films, which leads to my Easter film, so I've got to strand another film here, but maybe I can work it in later.  

It's Day 12 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, and today's theme is "War" - I've seen a few classic war films in my time, so this is not a deal breaker.  Here's the line-up: 

7:15 am "Beyond the Line of Duty" (1942)

8:00 am "Air Force" (1943)

10:15 am "Battleground" (1949)

12:15 pm "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" (1944)

2:45 pm "The Dirty Dozen" (1967)

5:30 pm "Twelve O'Clock High" (1949)

8:00 pm "The Longest Day" (1962)

11:15 pm "From Here to Eternity" (1953)

1:30 am "All Quiet on the Western Front" (1930)

4:00 am "49th Parallel" (1941)

Hmm, I guess I've only seen 3 out of 10 today... I could have sworn I saw "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" but maybe I'm thinking about "Destination Tokyo".  Same goes for "The Longest Day", but maybe I'm confusing that with "A Bridge Too Far" or something.  There are still big gaps in my classic film knowledge, and John Wayne films is one of them, I can't really stand that actor. So, I've only seen "The Dirty Dozen", "From Here to Eternity" and "All Quiet on the Western Front".  There's a new remake of that last one, which I guess I'll need to watch at some point because it's nominated for Best Picture this season.  Maybe it's very hard to link to since it's got mostly German actors, and I can let myself off the hook.  But this brings me up to 69 seen out of 134, still over half seen with 51.4%.

Speaking of the Oscars, the ceremony is TONIGHT and I'm just not ready - seriously, I was thinking yesterday about how to watch it next Sunday before I realized it's on tonight.  I've been working a lot of shifts, OK?  But I knew that my romance chain was going to run long, and I wouldn't be able to watch any more of the nominated films than I already have, there's just no time between romance films and Irish films - I'm barely going to make the connection as it is. 

OK, so what have I seen that's nominated?  "Everything Everywhere All at Once", also Ana de Armas in "Blonde", Angela Bassett in "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever" (review not posted yet), and "Turning Red" in the animated feature race and some films up for make-up and technical awards like "The Batman", "Glass Onion" which is up for Best Screenplay, and I saw ONE of the films up for Best Animated Short, which was "An Ostrich Told Me the World Was Fake And I Think I Believe It". OK, so those are the films I'm rooting for tonight. I didn't get to "Elvis" or "Top Gun: Maverick" or "The Banshees of Inisherin" yet, but I'm tracking them all. 

I wish I could throw a big Oscar party and serve fun food like "Everything Everywhere" bagels or "All Quiet on the Western Omelets" but I don't have the time or the energy - or that many close friends to invite, if I'm being honest. 

THE PLOT: Two teenage cancer patients begin a life-affirming journey to visit a reclusive author in Amsterdam. 

AFTER: Well, I guess this one's a reminder that you have to take the bad with the good in life.  You can't fall in love without (eventually) wondering how long it's going to last.  And by extension, you can't be alive without (eventually) wondering how that's going to last, too.  It's a bummer, sure, but there are two ways of dealing with it, as exemplified by the attitudes of the main characters at different times - the first method is to ignore it and just try to live in the moment, take things as they come and then at least if you meet an untimely end, then people will say that you had a great attitude and nothing bothered you.  The other way is to think big, to consider that in a hundred years nobody alive is still going to be alive, and in a thousand years the planet's probably will be so broken that nothing can survive on it, and in a million years the sun's going to expand and swallow the Earth anyway, so really, there's nothing you can do.  Either you choose not to worry about it, or you lean so far into the depressing stuff that you come to the conclusion that nothing matters. 

I mean no matter what happens, single or paired up, healthy or sick, rich or poor, you've got to get up each day and do your routine and figure out a way forward.  That seems to be the message of the film, but I never read the book that it's based on, so I can't really confirm.  Hazel is a cancer survivor who's been sick since she was a small child, her thyroid cancer has spread to her lungs, and then she falls for a guy who goes to the same support group, Augustus is a former jock who lost a leg to bone cancer but then it went into remission.  He's there to support his friend Isaac, who lost an eye to cancer and will eventually be blind.  So it's not exactly the happiest place to start a story, but hey, at least it's realistic I suppose. 

Hazel and Gus start hanging out and they exchange books, so Gus reads Hazel's favorite book, which is a novel about a girl with cancer that comes to a very abrupt end.  The author is a recluse who moved to Amsterdam, but Gus e-mails him on Hazel's behalf because she has so many questions about what happens after the book's story ends.  But the author says he can't answer questions over e-mail, he can only talk about the book in person, so if they're ever in Amsterdam...

But Hazel used her "last wish" years ago, when she was 13 she did the whole "Make-A-Wish" thing and went to a theme park, so she figures she doesn't deserve a trip to Amsterdam. But Gus never used his, so he plans a trip for them to go and meet this famous author.  I suppose cancer patients would be aware of different organizations that would help fund trips for sick teens - but it's a bit of a strange thing to use this as a device to advance the plot, it feels almost out of place, like a cheap way out.  He seems like an able-bodied teen, why not raise the funds himself through Kickstarter or GoFundMe or something?  Or get a job?  Just asking. 

Eventually Hazel's doctors agree to let her go on the trip, as long as she doesn't do anything too strenuous (like visiting the Anne Frank House, which has a ton of stairs and no elevator?  This does happen, but why?  There would be no shame in admitting she doesn't have the strength to complete this part of the tour...).  Hazel and Gus then make history by being the first Americans to make out in the Anne Frank Museum - I'm not sure that's something they should be proud of. 

But the visit with the author turns out to be a bust - so never meet your heroes, I guess.  It's revealed that the trip was planned by the author's assistant, he would prefer to never meet his fans, because they all want to ask annoying questions about the book, and I'm sure it's always the same ones he always hears and is sick of answering.  Look what happened to J.K. Rowling - she got tired of answering questions about her characters' sexual preferences, and it touched off a whole controversy.  But Hazel persists, and asks the author the same silly questions that everyone asks, and surprise, the author chooses not to answer, largely because the characters are NOT REAL and they don't exist outside the story.  Look, would you ask George Lucas what happens to his characters in-between the "Star Wars" movies?  He made the movies he wanted to make and he's not responsible for keeping us all up to date on what happens after that - that's why he sold his company to Disney for a billion dollars, so that other people could write those stories and he could stop meeting with fans and answering their stupid fan-fiction questions. 

The author here didn't have to be such an a-hole, but I'm kind of on his side, because he doesn't work for his fans, he doesn't OWE them anything beyond what he already wrote in the book years ago.  He can end the story wherever he chooses, and then people are free to either buy his book and support his art, or not.  It's called the free market.  I'll admit I was off-base in predicting what would happen with the author - my money was on Gus lying about the whole thing, and then having to admit to Hazel that he never really got an e-mail invitation to come to Amsterdam - this of course would then end with them bumping into the author in a café or something and him being really cool about it.  So I was wrong - but the movie's plot is probably better than the one I predicted.  

The rest of the movie concerns Gus' cancer coming back, and him asking Hazel to write a eulogy for him and then him holding a mock "pre-funeral".  So yeah, there's not really a happy ending here, so I guess if you need one, you've come to the wrong place.  Is it wrong to find this film refreshing because it doesn't end in a happy place?  See also: "Sweet November".  Well, I've just about covered it all this romance season, from love triangles and love hexagons to weddings and funerals, I've got just one more film to go, the end is definitely in sight.  First I'm going to go and speed through the Oscars on my DVR, then I'm going to watch the last film in this 41-film chain. 

Also starring Shailene Woodley (last seen in "The Mauritanian"), Ansel Elgort (last seen in "Carrie" (2013)), Nat Wolff (last heard in "Leap!"), Laura Dern (last seen in "Jurassic World Dominion"), Sam Trammell (last seen in "Autumn in New York"), Willem Dafoe (last seen in "Spider-Man: No Way Home"), Lotte Verbeek, Ana Dela Cruz, Randy Kovitz (last seen in "Concussion"), David Whalen (last seen in "Southpaw"), Milica Govich, Emily Peachey, Emily Bach, Bethany Leo, Alexis Hodges, Jean Brassard (last seen in "The Wizard of Lies"), Carly Otte, Jordan Drexel, PJ Rosotto, Lily Kenna, and the voice of Carole Weyers with archive footage of Sigourney Weaver (last seen in "You Again"). 

RATING: 6 out of 10 thought experiments