The Mother

Year 15, Day 224 - 8/12/23 - Movie #4,519

BEFORE: Edie Falco carries over from "Outside In". This is another "middle film", out of three movies with Edie Falco in them, but I choose to not drop this one, because the other two films I'm thinking of dropping look a lot worse than this one.  But who knows, I could be mistaken.

This is also the latest in a collection of films that features attractive actresses playing assassins or secret agents, which is a thing that screenwriters seem to think is real, only I'm guessing that it probably only exists in the movies.  I'd like to see some stats on how many assassins actually look like Maggie Q or Jennifer Lopez - I'm guessing that would make them stand out, when the most important thing for a secret assassin is probably to blend in.  "Hey, Charlie, any rogue secret assassins in the vicinity?"  "Nope, chief, just some woman who looks like J. Lo, so we're all clear for now..."  Anyway, I'm keeping track of the movies that use this as a trope because I'll want to list them at the end of the year, and any work I do now just saves me time then.  

THE PLOT: While fleeing from dangerous assailants, an assassin comes out of hiding to protect the daughter she left earlier in life. 

AFTER: In case you're likely to miss out on the symbolism here, they really dumb it down for you - the assassin played by Jennifer Lopez hides out in Alaska, which is where everybody seems to go when they don't want to be found.  If you're looking for somebody, it's probably the last place you'd look, so I wonder why more people looking for people don't just start there.  But I get it, the state is really freakin' big, so even if you KNEW the person you were looking for is somewhere in Alaska, you could probably spend the rest of your life trying to find them - but then it's so cold and there's so much snow you'd probably give up after a time.  That's all going to change thanks to global warming, I guess - more people who have been off the radar for years are going to be found once it warms up there and it's easier to look for them.

Anyway, in Alaska she could have a part-time job shooting wolves to control the population, but she doesn't want to do that.  Funny, that she's fine with shooting people but not wolves, but OK, she's an animal lover and wolves aren't evil, they're just doing what wolves do.  So near her lives a mother wolf and some wolf cubs (pups?) and the mother wolf would do just about anything to protect them, even put herself in danger to kill whatever's threatening them.  So this is the movie's grand symbolism about her unnamed character, and you'd have to be blind and dumb not to notice it, they really hit you over the head with it. She'd sacrifice herself to keep her daughter safe, and she'll kill anybody who wants to harm her daughter, this wolf-mother.  

At the start of the film, she's being interrogated by the FBI, she's a former sniper from Afghanistan who got mixed up with both a British army captain and a Cuban arms dealer, and was romantically involved with one or both of them, and I'm sure that wasn't awkward at all.  When the FBI wants to know which one was her baby's daddy, she only replies, "she's mine", which doesn't really answer the question, unless she had a third partner.  (Probably the only relationship history more complicated than this character's is J. Lo's in real life...)

Anyway, the British potential father, Lovell, attacks during her interrogation and kills almost all of the FBI agents, and stabs the pregnant mother.  This leads to a premature birth and The Mother being informed that because so many agents died, she's lost all of her parental rights, her daughter will be placed with a foster family, and she needs to disappear.  So, it's off to Alaska to work for a former army colleague, but first she gets one of the few surviving agents to send her a picture of her daughter every year on her birthday, and to call her if her daughter is ever in danger. 

Twelve years goes by, quite quickly with the aid of movie editing, but eventually she gets the call, and a plane ticket back to the lower 48.  A photo of the daughter was found in the possession of the Cuban arms dealer's men, which means he may know where she lives. The Mother sees her daughter in person for the first time, but it's through the lens of a sniper rifle, as she hides in a parking garage.  Sure enough, the Cubans come for Zoe, and The Mother can't possibly snipe them all, so it's on to Havana to rescue her.  But she can't return her to her foster family just yet, because they need to hide her in - where else - Alaska.  But this leads to both some bonding time between mother and daughter, and also a lot of survival training.  

Good luck getting one of today's woke teens to eat wild deer meat - she's probably a total vegetarian, and asking her to shoot one is completely out of the question.  Yeah, this may take some time, because kids today are so soft they have no idea how to hunt.  This seems about right, but they also don't understand that none of their food is cruelty-free, The Mother even enlightens her that wars have been fought over cashew production, so you can't escape where your food comes from or the violence involved in producing it.

They do try to send Zoe back to her foster parents, but it just doesn't seem to work - the first time she gets intercepted by that British captain, who might be Zoe's father (?) and the second time, the captain tracks them down in Alaska, and Zoe is SUPPOSED to escape, but she thinks she got enough survival training to come back and be helpful in the fight, only she didn't.  So she runs right back into the "hostage zone", proving that she essentially learned nothing over the past two months. Well, at least this sets up some incentive for the big boss battle. 

I didn't mind J. Lo as an assassin so much, she at least seemed knowledgable about shooting skills and survival skills - but maybe that was because her character was light-years smarter than her daughter, who doesn't even seem to understand that meat comes from killing animals. This actress just wasn't very convincing at all, she seems like the girl you hire when Kaitlyn Dever isn't available.  Just saying. 

Also starring Jennifer Lopez (last seen in "Monster-in-Law"), Lucy Paez, Omari Hardwick (last seen in "Sorry to Bother You"), Joseph Fiennes (last seen in "Hercules"), Gael Garcia Bernal (last seen in "The Limits of Control"), Paul Raci, Jesse Garcia (last seen in "The Starling"), Yvonne Senat Jones, Michael Karl Richards (last seen in "Overboard" (2018)), Link Baker, Todd Matthews, Mayumi Yoshida, Ryan Cowie, Olivia Lucas, Jay Cardinal Villeneuve (last seen in "The Revenant"), Mehdi Regragui, Noah Crawford, Fahim Fazli (last seen in "12 Strong"), Saif Mohsen (last seen in "Brightburn"), Damon Zolfaghari.

RATING: 6 out of 10 explodable snowmobiles

Outside In

Year 15, Day 223 - 8/11/23 - Movie #4,518

BEFORE: Kaitlin Dever carries over from "Dear Evan Hansen", but I have another PROGRAMMING NOTE: This was going to be the slot for a film called "Men, Women & Children", which I have now removed from the line-up, because my chain has TOO MANY movies in it, three in fact.  I have to choose three that can be removed from this year, and the easiest way to do that and keep the chain intact is to remove the "middle film" from several chains of three films with the same actor/actress.  So since this film "Men, Women & Children" seems to be about the affect of social media on relationships, and it links to several other films that might appear in the February romance chain next year, I'm tabling it until then, and I'll try to work it into the next romance chain. Kaitlyn Dever is also in "Ticket to Paradise", which could be something I watch then, plus there are several other potential connections, so it may be needed next year.

It's too bad, because I took the time to burn that film to DVD, and obviously "Dear Evan Hansen" was sort of about the effects of social media, so that could have been a nice tie-in.  But, THREE films have to go, and now that I've tabled that one, I only have to pick two more, and I think I know which two.  Also, I think now Ms. Dever won't make the year-end countdown, which requires three appearances, but that's life. 

THE PLOT: An ex-con struggling to adjust to life in his small town forms an intense bond with his former high school teacher. 

AFTER: Dropping a film from my chain here not only moves every film up one slot, but that also makes it possible for me to watch a film about global terrorism on 9/11 - that's the sort of thing that sometimes makes me feel like I'm on a good track, like I might know what I'm doing if I hit certain benchmarks during the year. Whatever. 

This is a mumble-corey little relationship-y film that I probably could have justified watching in a February chain, only I didn't really know it was so relationship-y, and plus it doesn't really connect to too many other films like that, except of course for "Men, Women & Children", but I need things to connect on both ends to be part of that chain.  Anyway I need this one to help get me to the very heavily sci-fi chain of four films that are being featured here next week.  So yeah, I admit that tonight's film was programmed to serve as connective tissue, but I find a lot of good films that way.  Also bad ones, but the linking takes me where it takes me - and it's gotten me to the end of the year four years running, soon to be five, so I have to believe in it. 

It can be a bit hard to imagine what serving twenty years in prison might feel like - unless you've done that, of course.  What would it feel like to go back home, after all that time in isolation?  What would you do, what would you eat, would you feel suddenly exuberantly free or would you still feel burdened by the time you lost?  The film kind of gets this right, because Chris was a teenager when he got arrested, and now 20 years later, he's in some state of arrested development, like he gets out of prison and doesn't know what a smartphone is, and he still enjoys riding his BMX bike and doing stunts at the park, like a teenager would.  But now he has to get a job, stay clean and learn how to be an adult in the world, for the first time.

We're led to believe here that Chris served his 20 years but was innocent of the crime, or at least the murder charge part of it.  It seems maybe more like he was an accessory to a crime, but he just didn't flip on the other people involved, like the guy who pulled the trigger.  Whether his sentence was unjust or not is something you might have to determine for yourself.

But the key thing is that his high-school teacher believed he was innocent, and championed his cause and pled his case and her efforts eventually led to his sentence being overturned, or reduced or something.  He's out because she did her research and filed the right motions, and also throughout his sentence she visited him more than anyone else, and they corresponded with each other and spoke on the phone, and you can probably guess that over time he developed feelings for her.  Are they genuine or just a by-product of her being his main contact with the outside world?  And what is going to happen when he spends time with Carol after his release.

Well, it's awkward at best.  Chris wants Carol to leave her husband and start a new relationship with him, or one that builds on the friendship they developed during his sentence.  Carol's not prepared to do that, but just the possibility of that alone casts doubt on her marriage, as she hasn't been physically intimate with her husband Tom in a very long time.  She also has a teenage daughter, Hildy, and she's concerned how that would look to her daughter, if she suddenly broke up with Tom and/or had an affair with Chris. 

The situation gets more complicated when Chris starts hanging out with Hildy, it doesn't seem like he wants a romantic relationship with Carol's daughter, but Carol's daughter might be growing attracted to him.  Sure, what could possibly go wrong there?  Also, Tom doesn't want his daughter hanging out with an ex-con, and he's starting to think that Carol's spending too much time with Chris, also.  Maybe he knows without really knowing, or maybe he just wants things to go back to the way they were before his wife became a legal crusader for wrongly imprisoned people.  Either way, it doesn't seem like Chris is going to give up on pursuing Carol, even though she's married and even though he has other romantic options.  

This all seems very, well, possible - it could happen this way.  And once you introduce doubt into a marriage or someone learns that they have other options, sometimes then you just can't go back to the way things were before, and the only way is to move forward into uncertainty.  That kind of works, but will things work out here?  If it were a standard Hollywood romance film, I'd say of course, but since it's more of an independent complicated relationship scenario, honestly it seemed 50-50 at best.  Like, I get it, Chris just can't turn off his feelings for Carol, but he also fails to recognize that pursuing her has the great potential to throw her whole life into upheaval.  I guess that also rings true, somebody who spent 20 years in prison might get out and simply not want to waste any time waiting for somebody to become available.

Even when Chris gets a job and things settle down a bit, the two potential lovers find themselves at odds - former inmate Chris just wants a simple life, where he works a job, comes home, has dinner and watches TV, but Carol, having led that life already, now wants more out of life, and ironically it was working on Chris' release that made her realize this.  Can they still work things out in the end, being two very different people?  This remains a bit unclear, but hey, sometimes in life these things can be a bit unclear. 

My boss happens to know someone who served time for murder, the difference in that situation is that he was guilty, he confessed and turned himself in.  He's come by the studio a couple of times, and yes, this does tend to be uncomfortable if people know his past, but I guess if they don't, then it doesn't much matter.  But certainly this is a thing that sticks with him, like it's on his permanent record and it never goes away - this guy changed his name and his line of work, but there's only so much he can do about it.  It's kind of an open question then, how much that man deserves a chance to have a job and a (semi-)normal life after serving his time. 

Also starring Edie Falco (last seen in "The Land of Steady Habits"), Jay Duplass (last seen in "The Oath"), Ben Schwartz (last heard in "DC League of Super-Pets"), Pamela Reed (last seen in "Proof of Life"), Alycia Delmore, Matt Malloy (last seen in "Sierra Burgess Is a Loser"), Louis Hobson (last seen in "Lucky Them"), Aaron Blakely, Stephen Grenley, Charles Leggett, Meagan Kimberly Smith, Aaron Washington (last seen in "Laggies"), Eryn Rea, Claudine Mboligikpelani Nako, Jason Smith, Saige Hawthorne, Scott Hall. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 court-mandated drug tests

Dear Evan Hansen

Year 15, Day 222 - 8/10/23 - Movie #4,517

BEFORE: OK, without a doubt, for sure, this just HAS to be the last film that played at the AMC Village in the summer of 2021 while I worked there.  I realize that the theater had 7 screens, which meant a LOT of me bouncing around from theater to theater as I was sweeping up - but come on, how many films came out that summer?  And how do I remember them all?  And why does my brain keep flashing back to that summer?  The hours were long, the work was strenuous, I must have emptied every garbage can in that building seventy dozen times and used, well, an infinity number of plastic trash bags, and fed countless NYC pigeons with all of the popcorn that ended up on the sidewalk. Sure, I made some friends there, but I think almost all of them have moved on, even the theater manager.  If I had just stuck it out there for another 5 years, maybe I could have been a manager too - but I just didn't see myself doing that. 

I went back there twice this year, to see "The Flash" and "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse", on discount Tuesdays, and only recognized a couple people - everyone else, I guess I'll meet you all again somewhere on down the road.  So let me take one quick look back at the summer of 2021 - "The Suicide Squad", "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings", "Free Guy", "Black Widow", "Jungle Cruise", "Cruella", "In the Heights", "Stillwater", "Candyman", "Space Jam: A New Legacy", "Escape Room: Tournament of Champions", "Respect", "The Forever Purge", "The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard", "A Quiet Place Part II", "Luca", "The Sparks Brothers", "Old", "Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins", "The Green Knight" and of course, "F9: The Fast Saga".  These were the movies we got excited about, until we realized we were going to have to sweep up popcorn during the end credits, so we'd have to listen to their annoying music during the credits and we'd probably see whatever post-credits surprises awaited, essentially spoiling the endings for us. 

But man, that was a big summer for movies - probably because theaters were closed for most of 2020, so Hollywood sat on some of their big blockbuster movies until theaters could re-open, and then BOOM, they all hit at once.  Now we're looking at another dry spell coming up, with the writers and actors strikes still going on, so I'm guessing the studios released everything they had during 2022 and 2023, and then maybe next summer there won't be anything to watch, and more theaters are going to close.

Nik Dodani carries over from "Escape Room: Tournament of Champions" - I know he only appeared in the flashback scenes, but that counts for my purposes. 

THE PLOT: Adaptation of the Tony Award-winning musical about Evan Hansen, a high-school senior with social anxiety disorder, and his journey of self-discovery and acceptance after a classmate's suicide. 

AFTER: Yeah, this seems like a very divisive film - it looks like there are two separate camps - people who love this film (and the play it's based on) really really REALLY connect with it, to the point of obsession, then there's the other group of people who scratch their heads and don't quite "get it", so you can put me in the second group, I think.  Sure, it's got something to say for people with Social Anxiety Disorder, but that didn't really exist when I was in high school, we just identified as "freaks" or "geeks" or thought of others as "band nerds" or "that weird kid who hangs out in the library".  Every single high-schooler has rough days, and sure, there were days I didn't want to go, but I kept at it and I came out the other side.  It's only four years, so suck it up and move on, don't take the easy way out and consider suicide as an option, because it's not a very good solution.  

Here Evan Hansen gets kind of bullied by Connor Murphy, and for once, a character takes kind of the right move to deal with a bully.  You can't fight back, because you'll lose and also get in trouble yourself, you can't ignore them, because that only pisses them off, but you CAN endure their ribbing, kind of pseudo-befriend them, and try to outsmart them at the same time.  That's kind of what happens here, Evan realizes that Connor is a troubled kid who is lashing out, he must have his own troubles and is looking for a way to get his anger out.  Both Evan and Connor are dealing with absent fathers, which has been a common theme here at the Movie Year for the past week or so.  Evan's father lives in Colorado, and Connor's father died years ago, but he has a stepfather now.  As we've seen so often, all of the blame can be traced back to adult white men, who either leave their families or have the nerve to die, thus also leaving their families.  This is why everyone was so screwed up in "The People We Hate at the Wedding", because of the absent fathers. 

Evan's therapist suggests that he writes letters to himself, for encouragement and to help him sort out his issues - and for some reason he prints this letter in the school computer's lab (this doesn't make sense, you don't need to print out a letter TO YOURSELF, you just read it, right?) and then by another contrivance, Connor gets to the printer first and sees the letter, figures out that Evan has a crush on his sister, Zoe, and then loses it.  Geez, and he had JUST signed Evan's cast, too, which seemed to be a positive (?) step forward in their budding non-friendship.

Three days later, Connor's parents meet with Evan at the school, and give him his letter back, but they think that it's Connor's suicide note.  Connor took the easy (?) way out, because of all his other problems which we can't even really get into because they're so vague.  But the parents are delighted to find out their son had a friend, and they want to know all about how much time Evan spent with their son, and what they did together, so Evan not only maintains the mistaken impression that Connor wrote the letter, he builds up a whole story about spending time with Connor, going to an apple orchard and climbing trees, helping him turn his attitude around and getting off drugs.  Evan then enlists the help of his "family friend" and classmate Jared to back-date fake e-mails to support his story of communicating with Connor, and the parents are eager to believe that their son had other e-mail accounts they didn't know about, because they want very badly to believe their son was a good kid who was working on himself.

Evan suddenly finds himself with a second pseudo-family that accepts him and wants to spend time with him (while his own mother is a nurse who works long hours and he barely ever sees her.). Also, he's popular at school as the kid who befriended the troubled kid and tried to help him, even though the whole story is a fabrication, a lie.  Gee, you don't suppose that at some point people are going to realize that the timeline of Evan's broken arm doesn't really work, and that means everything's going to unravel at some point?  Maybe I've read too much about this story over the past few years, because I saw the turns coming from a mile away.  

But before that, some good things do happen, Evan's speech at Connor's memorial gets recorded and posted and it goes viral, which encourages many other people who are troubled to reach out and get help, or to share their stories about people who got help, and this seems like a very positive thing for a lot of people, except that Evan's story is a house of cards and it's bound to come crashing down at some point.  But in the meantime the other teens raise money to keep the orchard open in Connor's memory and create some kind of foundation to help troubled kids in some vague manner.  Alana reveals to Evan that's she's also got Social Anxiety Disorder, but she fights it by over-achieving, joining every club in school and now running the Connor Project. So I guess those are your two options, teens, you can sit in your room on the floor, rocking back and forth or you can get out there and work like crazy to battle your anxiety. Your choice. 

Alana is the smart one, she suspects that maybe Evan and Connor were never really friends to begin with, so Evan has to show her the letter and once again, he doesn't disclose that it is NOT Connor's suicide note, so now it's a lie on top of a lie.  And she says that she won't share it with anyone, except then she totally does that to get the funding for the Connor Project over its goal.  And then there's a terrible backlash from the internet, because that's what the internet does.  Like people start wondering why Connor wrote a suicide note to his friend and not his family, which means they must be horrible people, which of course isn't true, they tried their best to reach Connor and heal him, but randos on the internet can't understand that, so along with the absent fathers, the people on social media are the real villains here.  And that liar, Evan Hansen.

And Alana, for sharing that suicide note when she said that she wouldn't. 

So I guess that's the lesson, stay off the internet.  Just take your phone or computer and smash it into pieces.  Delete Twitter and Instagram and TikTok, and even Facebook, because NOTHING good is going to come from your contact with others on social media.  Everything on Instagram is fake or staged, anyway, from what I've seen, to the point where nothing is real any more, not even in an ironically funny way.  Just shut the whole damn thing down, our teens will be better off for it.  The problems seen in "Dear Evan Hansen" supposedly occur because people are reluctant to "reach out", but maybe this is backwards, because if you ask me, the problems are caused by the fact that everybody is "reaching out", all of social media is people "reaching out", and we had fewer problems back when nobody had this technology that allowed it. 

Still, there were some massive problems here, that resulted from turning a four-hour Broadway musical into a 2 1/2 hour movie.  Nine songs from the stage play had to be cut, and right there, that's sure to piss off fans of the show.  They also cast the same actor who originated and developed the lead role on stage, which makes sense, except that the actor is 47 now and looks way too old to be a high-school student.  (JK, he was 27.). But then if they recast the role, the fans of the show probably would have freaked out about THAT.  So really, there was no way to win here except to move forward with Ben Platt and let the chips fall where they may. 

And everybody here goes through so much, just to determine that "Honesty is the best policy" - well, that seems simple enough, why couldn't Evan have just told the truth at the beginning, and then he wouldn't have had to learn that lesson the hard way?  And then I wouldn't have had to waste two and a half hours of MY life just to learn something that I already knew.  Just saying. 

I'm not even going to get into the weird "sing-speaking" that takes place during the musical numbers, because this is a common enough way to adapt a musical stage-play into a film ("Les Miserables", "Cats") but still, it's very weird.  I saw this technique used in "Annette" earlier this year, and there it was super-weird.  Maybe it's only sort of weird here, but it's still awkward at best. 

PROGRAMMING NOTE: Despite my best efforts, I was unable to delay this film on the schedule until September, which is when I usually try to do a "back-to-school" thing.  It's August, damn it, and everyone's still on break for at least another three weeks.  Oh well, it's time to start your shopping for school supplies, anyway, if you want to be ready.  I've got two more weeks in my staycation myself before the college I work at re-opens.  But I have a feeling that time's going to just fly right by - I've been on break for 8 weeks, enough already.  Anyway, I'll put this one on a list of this year's films set in high school or junior high, some from February and some from June, and we'll sort this all out together at the end of the year, OK? 

Also starring Ben Platt (last seen in "The People We Hate at the Wedding"), Julianne Moore (last seen in "Maggie's Plan"), Kaitlyn Dever (last seen in "Cinema Verite"), Amy Adams (last seen in "Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day"), Danny Pino (last heard in "Vivo"), Amandla Stenberg (last heard in "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse"), Colton Ryan, DeMarius Copes, Liz Kate, Zoey Luna, Isaac Powell, Marvin Leon, Hadiya Eshe, Julia Chen Myers, Gerald Caesar, Avery Bederman (last seen in "Flatliners" (2017)), Swift Rice, Tommy Kane (last seen in "Richard Jewell"), Aimee Garcia, Mariana Alvarez

RATING: 4 out of 10 scholarship essay contests

Escape Room: Tournament of Champions

Year 15, Day 221 - 8/9/23 - Movie #4,516

BEFORE: Come on, this one's a no-brainer - any time I get a chance to watch a film AND its sequel back-to-back, I'm going to take it.  There was a voice actor who appeared in the first four "The Purge" movies (but not the fifth for some reason) and I took advantage of that.  EIGHT actors carry over from "Escape Room", some in flashback scenes, obviously.  But I'll just focus on Nik Dodani, who played "Danny, the Escape Room expert", here and the others are listed below.  This kind of thing just makes my process that much easier. 

Now I"m wondering if I can find a path that connects franchises like "Final DestinatIon" and the "Saw" films, because maybe one October I can program those films in.  Not this year, my dance card for October is already full. But there's always next year and the year after that, if I can keep it going. 

THE PLOT: Six people unwillingly find themselves locked in another series of escape rooms, slowly uncovering what they have in common to survive.  After joining forces, they soon discover they've all played the game before. 

AFTER: After all the flashbacks are done (they practically repeat the plot of the WHOLE first movie at the start of this sequel), and then play the last five minutes again, in which Zoey and Ben decide to travel to NYC and search for the secret headquarters of Minos ("Your Leader in Custom-Designed Deadly Escape Room Experiences"...) because OF COURSE every company hides their HQ's latitude and longitude coordinates in their logo, right?  

But then some screenwriter must have realized, wait, isn't Zoey afraid to fly on a plane, because her mother died in that plane crash after they backpacked across Vietnam, and Zoey was stuck in a broken fuselage under her mother's lifeless body for a WEEK before she got rescued?  Well, we've sure written ourselves into a corner, now, haven't we?  How can we possibly get her and Ben to NYC if she won't get on a plane?  Wait, some people drive from Chicago to New York, don't they?  Never mind, problem solved. 

If you watched the first film closely, you might have noticed some Minos operatives testing out an escape room that WAS a plane, or at least looked and felt like a plane.  So it's possible that they were going to use this on Zoey, and her phobia accidentally allowed her to outsmart them.  Nice. It's nice to see fear work in somebody's favor for once, because I think this is why we have phobias - the fear of heights, the fear of sharks, the fear of clowns, these are REAL dangers, and avoiding them can keep you alive.  (Prove me wrong - John Wayne Gacy. Right?)

So a plane can be an escape room, and when our heroes get to New York, they learn that a subway car can be an escape room, too.  Or a bank, or a city street.  And Zoey's therapist said that her issue is that she sees escape rooms everywhere - but that's only because they ARE everywhere, just how much money and power does this Minos Corporation have?  They somehow managed to arrange things so that four OTHER Escape Room champions/survivors would be on the SAME subway car at the SAME time.  And of course, it's the "Q" train, as in Q for "question"?  And that question is, "Would you like to play a game?"  Sorry, I think that one is from "Wargames". 

Of course, these things are seemingly impossible - so is getting one subway car to de-couple from the train and drive itself to the end of the line.  So is electrifying the whole car so lightning bolts are spraying everywhere, and that whole set-up with the tokens and the hand-bars and a lot of other mechanics in this film - but why let reality get in the way of telling the story?  For me, this counts as a NITPICK POINT though: They should have known that wasn't a real subway car because there was a recorded announcement about not leaving any items on the train, and reporting any found items to subway personnel.  And the recording was concise, clear and they could understand every word.  That, on a NYC subway car, is not just unlikely, it's flat-out impossible.

From there, the new team has to make their way through a bank set-up with a deadly laser security system, unlock a safe and make their way across a booby-trapped tile floor.  Then there's a picture-postcard like beach set-up (Coney Island?) with a miniature lighthouse, a telescope and a beach-house with a suspicious refrigerator.  Again there's a room that simply MUST be inside, but has all the appearance of being outside, some kind of VR mixed with forced perspective scenery must be at work, or just plain old movie magic.  Then there's a complicated NYC street scene, complete with a taxi cab, a phone booth (there hasn't been one of those in NYC for years, though) and stores that are, of course, never open when you need them to be. (Yep, that's NYC.)

Finally, there's a child's bedroom and (no spoilers here) this does relate to some stuff from the first film, and gives a possible hint to where this storyline could go next.  The Minos Corporation is so impressed with how Zoey plays the game that they want her to design more escape rooms for them.  In fact, they insist on it, and they'll kill everyone she cares about unless she agrees.  

I think with this little plot twist, I kind of cracked the code on what's going on here.  This second film in the franchise is a metaphor for, well, franchise films made in Hollywood.  When you think about it, a movie set is really just a giant form of an Escape Room - the director, cast and crew spend countless hours, days, even WEEKS in the same studio room, which is, much like an escape room, 100% completely fake.  And the cast and crew have to work together to complete the film so they can then what?  LEAVE the studio.  And when a director makes a movie that's a big hit and does well at the box office, what does the studio do?  They make him (or her) make a sequel.  So it's back into the locked room with the same people from before, maybe a few new ones, and once again, the goal is to finish the film, put the right pieces together so they all can leave and get back to their lives.  

If you make a good film, what does that get you?  Just the right to make another one. So these "winners" of the escape rooms, they get to move on to the Tournament of Champions?  And where does this all end?  That's up to the public, really, they vote with their wallets and whatever they go to see more of, Hollywood's going to make more of, it's a vicious little cycle.  So I no longer wonder why so many actors try to transition to directing and producing, because in the long run, it's better to be the one designing the "escape rooms" than to be the people who are stuck in them for weeks at a time.  Or they could just give up show business, but that's crazy talk, right?  Zoey, you should totally take that job at Minos - what better way to change the system then from within?  JK. 

Of course, I've spent 30 years now working in independent film production - so as Zoey's therapist said, if all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.  Maybe that's why these escape rooms seem to me to be a metaphor for moviemaking.  This is another film that played at the AMC in the summer of 2021, when I was working there - so I had seen a few scenes like the beach room, but of course they didn't make any sense to me until I saw them in the context of the whole film.  But according to Wikipedia, there are really two different edits of this film, a longer version reveals who the puzzle-master is and a bit about his back-story. I sure didn't see that, so I must have recorded the original version off of cable.  But if they ever make a third film, it's now a bit confusing with regards to where the plot should go next. '

Really, the second film feels like a big step backwards, and the first one made so much profit that come on, they should have really had the money to go for it here.  But there's not even much of a back-story for the new characters playing the game, and they seemed to hire the absolute cheapest actresses they could find, with no credits and very little experience or acting ability.  One actress was impossible for me to understand, and that's why I usually prefer to watch movies on streaming or cable with the subtitles on.  Jeez, it's important for an actress to be believable, but it's even more important for her to be, you know, understood.  Like say your lines clearly, how hard is that?  And if she can't do that, can't she be replaced?

Also starring Taylor Russell, Logan Miller, Deborah Ann Woll, Jamie-Lee Money, (all FOUR carrying over from "Escape Room"), Thomas Cocquerel (last seen in "Billionaire Boys Club"), Holland Roden, Indya Moore, Carlito Olivero, Matt Esof, Lucy Newman-Williams (last seen in "Everest"), Scott Coker (last seen in "Tom & Jerry"), Renee Harbek, Evan Hengst, Anton David Jeftha, Corin Silva.

with archive footage of Tyler Labine, Jay Ellis, Yorick van Wageningen (all THREE carrying over from "Escape Room")

RATING: 4 out of 10 conveniently timed news reports

Escape Room (2019)

Year 15, Day 220 - 8/8/23 - Movie #4,515

BEFORE: Just two weeks and two days left in my staycation - I'm trying to stay busy but in some ways, I've run out of things to do at home - I'm eager to rejoin the workforce and start putting in the hours again at an institute of higher learning.  They know me there, I've got keys to the building, and I've spent almost two years building up something there.  I keep applying for jobs while I'm stuck at home, but this would present a problem if I got accepted somewhere, that would mean I'd have to burn my life down at two jobs just to start something new somewhere else.  

I had a stress dream last night where I took a job in a restaurant and I got there early, before the place even opened up, which makes no sense because I'm not really a morning person (but I know I have to be there in two weeks at like 6:30 am, so I see where this came from).  In the dream the cook didn't show up so they asked me to step in (a contestant on "Chopped" said this last night, so I also see where THIS comes from...) but the problem was I didn't know any of their recipes and I couldn't understand what the food items were, or how to put them in the pan, so I was suddenly paralyzed and unable to do anything.  Then the cook showed up and i was kind of dismissed back to whatever my original job was.  I guess the lesson is to just stay in my box, don't make waves or try to be something I'm not, it's only going to lead to trouble. 

Nik Dodani carries over from "Strange World". I think this maybe should count as a horror film, but I tried to link it to my October chain, and I just couldn't get that to work.  But putting this film (and its sequel) here did seem to work out fine, they're just extending the distance between "The People We Hate at the Wedding" and "Dear Evan Hansen". 

THE PLOT: Six strangers find themselves in a maze of deadly mystery rooms and must use their wits to survive. 

AFTER: The pastime of escape rooms really caught on in the 2010's - I know this because you never saw the characters on "Seinfeld" go to one, that would have been a situation loaded with comic potential.  Why it took until 2019 for somebody to make a sort of horror film based on it is another question - you basically sign a contract that allows a company to kidnap you for a set amount of time, and hold you captive until you solve a few puzzles to get out.  And here's the weird part - you pay THEM for the chance to solve their puzzles.  Weird, right?  Like, I can understand professional crossword solvers or competitive jigsaw puzzlers, because at least there's a chance for them to make money, but why should I pay to solve puzzles?  Well, I do have a subscription to one monthly crossword and puzzle magazine, but that's where I draw the line, I've never done this escape room thing.  

Perhaps it's just not for the faint of heart - some of us get enough stress as it is just by going to work and answering phones or e-mails or whatever it is that gets done in our offices, and honestly, isn't that stressful enough?  Why do some people feel the need to go skiing or surfing or swimming in a shark-infested ocean is also beyond my comprehension - just getting up each day and making it to the next is stressful as it is!  I had to get a second job just to take my mind off of how stressful the first one is, and to be able to maybe go somewhere nice on a weekend every few months.  Like after a very stressful Comic-Con, I need a week somewhere in BBQ Country or maybe in Vegas just to relax.  Why the hell would I spend my spare time trying to get out of a locked room?  

But as you may imagine, this film depicts an EXTREME set of escape rooms. Like, deadly ones.  And this in no way reflects what actually goes on in the escape room industry, so that sound you hear is people who run escape room experiences all over this country rising up with one voice, screaming at the movie theater screen, saying, "No, no, NO!  That's not how escape rooms work, damn it!"  We get it guys, you respect the safety of your escape room guests at all times, because if anything bad were to really happen in any escape room in the U.S., that would mean the whole industry would be shut down, or it would get so much bad press that social media would cancel the pastime faster than they shut down circuses.  (Hey, remember circuses?  Maybe one or two of them didn't treat a lion or elephant well, and the whole shebang got shut down.  Now we're all stuck with Cirque du Soleil, thanks a lot.)

This movie shows an extreme example of a bad-acting escape room, one that turns the practice into a deadly game with only one winner among 6 people.  At least the last person alive gets $10,000 - but remember that $10K doesn't buy what it once did, so these could be 6 very desperate people.  Actually, these particular six people were chosen for a very specific reason, which gets revealed about 2/3 of the way through the film.  Now, each one assumed that their friend or boss or college professor bought them the escape room experience because they either need to assert themselves (Zoey) or they did a good job at work (Jason) or the boss wants them to learn social skills (Ben) or they just need to relax (Mike, Amanda).  Then there's the super-nerd who's like REALLY into them (Danny).  

So once they solve the mystery box puzzle and show up and sign the liability waivers, what could POSSIBLY go wrong?  Well, a lot if the theme of the room is "The Hunger Games" and they don't even know their lives are on the line.  Maybe the fact that the waiting room turns into a giant broiler over should have been a tip-off.  And then the next room looks and feels like a cabin in the Canadian Rockies, like how is that even possible?  (In early 2020 I went to a beer dinner held in fake ski cabins in a Manhattan hotel, but really, we were never fooled.  There's only so much you can do, after all.)

Then there's the notable "upside-down" room, and every so often a piece of the floor falls out, revealing a 20-story drop - which is only weird because they all entered a Chicago building that was 6 stories tall at most, so what the FREAK is going on here?  And how many rooms before there's a way out, other than falling to one's death?  And who can even concentrate on solving puzzles when those speakers are blasting Petula Clark's song "Downtown" at full volume?  I mean, that's some Guantanamo Bay level of torture right there.  You might as well bring on the strobe lights and the electric shocks at that point, because if you keep playing that music, they'll all lose the will to live anyway.  

The rooms are also designed to remind THESE six people of past traumas in their lives, which is insane because an Escape Room company wouldn't have the research budget to investigate all of their clients and custom-design the rooms to trigger their PTSD, would they?  No, there's that sound again, it's the people who run real escape rooms getting bent out of shape and yelling at the screen.  I expect to see a bunch of negative reviews on IMDB from the people who own escape room companies, complaining that this isn't how things work, the one escape room is designed for everyone to use, no way would any company build puzzles designed to trigger just six particular clients...come on, guys, it's a movie, it's fiction.  You don't hear people complaining about movies like "Jungle Cruise" or "Haunted Mansion", saying that they're not faithful enough to the Disney park rides, do you?  

Apparently there are a bunch of wealthy people watching the action via all the not-so-hidden cameras, and they're betting on who's going to survive.  Really, are the reality game shows like "Survivor" and "Big Brother" that much different?  I know that "Squid Game" was... I want to say "fictional", but it's just a small jump from "Survivor" to "Squid Game" and then, before you know it, we're televising gladiator competitions as a form of snuff films.  So, it could happen, especially if the writers and SAG-AFTRA strike goes on for another six months.  During the last big strike they invented shows like "Cops" and "America's Funniest Home Videos" and "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" so maybe this time we'll get "America's Funniest Public Executions" and "Extreme Snuff Films". 

"Escape Room" the movie cost only $9 million to make, and then grossed over $155 million overall - even when you factor in marketing costs, that's a huge success. So, naturally, they made a sequel, which played at the AMC Theater where I worked in the summer of 2021.  I never got to see it there, I was already planning MY escape from that job, so I'll make up for that tomorrow.

EDIT: It turns out there WAS a case of an escape room being deadly - there was a fire in an escape room in Poland, and five girls died, which affected the release date of this film.  But the deaths were accidental, not intentional as seen in the film.  Still, best to be careful about these things, I still have no plans to ever play one. 

EDIT: It turns out that there WERE three previous films made on this topic, two (perhaps similar) films named "Escape Room" was released in 2017, and another one called "No Escape Room" in 2018.  I recommend "Escape Room" (2019), as it seems to have caught on with the public more than the others did.  Also note that you can't copyright a film's title, so if you ever want to make a documentary about tornado chasers and call it "Gone With the Wind", you have the legal right to do that.  Or I could make a movie about two astronomers competing with each other to make stellar discoveries and call it "Star Wars", why not?  

Also starring Taylor Russell, Logan Miller (last seen in "The Bling Ring"), Jay Ellis (last seen in "Top Gun: Maverick"), Tyler Labine (last seen in "A Good Old Fashioned Orgy"), Deborah Ann Woll (last seen in "Ruby Sparks"), Yorick van Wageningen (last seen in "Papillon" (2017)), Cornelius Geaney Jr., Russell Crous, Bart Fouche (last seen in "Monster Hunter"), Paul Hampshire (ditto), Jessica Sutton, Vere Tindale, Kenneth Fok (last seen in "The Dark Tower"), Inge Beckmann (ditto), Jamie-Lee Money, Jeremy Boado (last seen in "Bloodshot"), Rebecca Riedy, Adam Robitel (last seen in "The Rules of Attraction"), Pete Sepenuk (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation"), Mario Tardon (last seen in "The Promise"), Alfredo Tavares (last seen in "Blithe Spirit") with archive footage of Pat Morita. 

RATING: 6 out of 10 pressure plates

Strange World

Year 15, Day 219 - 8/7/23 - Movie #4,514

BEFORE: Karan Soni carries over from "The People We Hate at the Wedding" and I'm going to get back to Ben Platt in just a couple of days - and you can probably guess what movie I'm heading for.  It's a little too early for a back-to-school film, but the linking takes me where it takes me.  I could try to re-shuffle things around, but at this point I'd rather not, now that a clear path to Christmas has been found. 

I know I used Karan Soni as a link already this year, from "Unicorn Store" to "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse" when I found out that Nic Cage's voice wasn't used in that Spider-sequel.  Hey, there's no rule that says I can only use an actor as a link once in a calendar year.  Should there be? Nah.

Everybody was talking about this movie late last year and then, I don't know, it kind of feels like it just dropped out of sight.  Or maybe it just dropped on Disney Plus, but I'm wondering why it just fizzled out so suddenly.

THE PLOT: The legendary Clades are a family of explorers whose differences threaten to topple their latest and most crucial mission. 

AFTER: Well, I read this movie all wrong - after seeing the trailer for it late last year, I assumed it was about a family that traveled to another planet, but no, it's not that at all.  I guess maybe that's been done to death?  Or if they did that, I'd be sitting here complaining about how it would have taken 50 years to get to the next planet because you can't travel close to the speed of light.  So, thankfully, this isn't that.  Instead it's more like "Journey to the Center of the Earth", where a group of adventurers discovers a subterranean world with all kinds of fantastic creatures.  But also, that's been done before, so it's not really that either, it's kind of its own thing. 

It's very cagey at the start, because the film is set in a fictional country, Avalonia, so we're not sure where that is on Earth, or even if it's on Earth at all.  And also, WHEN does this take place, because it first appears that the people have technology like horse-drawn wagons, so late 1800's, maybe?  And is this society somehow cut off from the rest of the world, like the people seem like Americans, but maybe they're on an island or in some hidden valley in a mountain range or something?  Yeah, that seems a bit closer, because the elder Clade, Jaeger Clade, is determined to cross some mountains and find out what's on the other side, to save his people.

However, on the way out, the younger Clade, Searcher, discovers these weird electric plants, and decides that THIS might be the way to save their people, by harnessing the power of the plants - and this leads the father and son to argue over, well, everything, but mostly how to save their people and whether the son of an explorer should ALSO be an explorer, and not something silly like a farmer.  

It's clear that this is another film pitched at kids that is designed to foster racial harmony and acceptance, with a racially-mixed couple at the hear of the story, also the half-black teen boy is out and proud, and nobody seems to have a problem with it, even his grandfather who's been absent for 30 years.  Wouldn't he be more likely to have an outdated viewpoint toward something?  The fact that his grandson is mixed-race and queer doesn't bother him at all - I mean, it's great and positive but also it doesn't really ring true.  The older people in our society tend to be the ones most set in their ways, and more likely to have old-school prejudices about race and sexual orientation.  So I guess maybe he's cool with it, or perhaps so far in denial that he doesn't even want to talk about it? 

HOWEVER, there's still such a long way to go - I mean, like kudos for fixing homophobia and all that, but this still seems mostly like a patriarchal society, like mostly it's men making all the big decisions - what's up with that?  And why is everybody so hung up on what career each man should have, but nobody seems to care what any women choose to do for a living?  Not really equitable, is it?  Why are there three MALE characters on the poster, and none of the female ones?  Are they by definition less important just because they're women?  Another strange decision - sure, I can get how the marketing department might naturally assume that more boys might want to see a sci-fi film than girls, but then that's even MORE reason why they should try to market the film to those girls, and putting some female representation on the poster could help with that. 

(I mean, the character of Callisto Mal is supposed to be the PRESIDENT of Avalonia, and I didn't even pick up on that.  There is a woman president, and this fact just gets glossed over, barely even mentioned.  Sorry, ladies, you can have your progress but male writers and directors are just NOT going to let you enjoy it.)

Look, it's been a tough week here at the Movie Year for men - starting with "Bruised" last Tuesday, nearly every film has featured an abusive husband or boyfriend, or a father who was so into his job as an astronaut or superhero that he neglected his own children.  Or worse, as seen in "The People We Hate at the Wedding", one of Donna's husbands left her and the other one died, and what effect did that have on her children?  They're all very messed up.  So here we have Jaeger Clade who left his family to go exploring, but not before clashing with his son about what he should do for a living.  Searcher Clade takes the other route, he does NOT want his son Ethan to be in danger, so he tells him to stay and watch the farm, even though he doesn't want to be a farmer.  AND so Searcher falls into the same trap as his father, he demands that his son follow in his footsteps, without taking his son's wishes into consideration.  So, we're right back to "men are real dicks", aren't we?  

But I'm trying to be nice here, because there's a more important message, an environmental one. Our heroes discover that their world doesn't work they way they thought it did at all, that the electrical plants that power their airships and radios and TVs are actually harming the whole ecosystem, to the point where it's destroying it.  Gee, does that sound like any other planet we know?  It's going to take sacrifice on everyone's part to maybe give up some of their electronic devices and vehicles so save their world, but they're willing to do it, even though there's a large probability that it's already too late, because they didn't understand their own dangerous impact on their home.  Yeah, this is a bit of an important metaphor, I just hope our kids can drag themselves away from the video-games long enough to understand it.  But also it's a bit weird hearing this from a movie that Disney wanted people to watch on their phones and computers - unless they DON'T want us to watch it and we should turn our devices off instead?  Nah, that would be weird.

There's still something weird about the way this film was released, however - and since it "only" made $73 million in theaters with a budget of $120 million, this was considered a box office failure.  But since it had a prominent gay character, Disney Corp was afraid that certain countries would censor the movie, so it chose to NOT release the film in those countries.  Well, maybe there's your problem, if your method of fighting censorship is to just concede to it.  Look, I'm not a marketing person, but I know you can't make money in the countries where you DON'T release the film, so maybe the film might have made MORE money if it were released in MORE countries.  Just math. The correct tactic to take is to say to those Middle Eastern and Asian countries, "We're Disney, and we don't like your censorship, so you either show the film intact, or not at all."  Everybody wants to make money by screening a Disney film, right?  But if you don't even give them the chance to change, then they're never going to, and you've accomplished nothing - those are the countries where people NEED to see gay characters the most, and now that's not going to happen.  This is more like fighting all the sexism in college sports by cancelling all of the women's games.  Problem solved?

Maybe it's because I've spent the last three days helping my wife navigate sidequests in "Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom", but man, to me this underworld sure did look like the Depths area underneath the kingdom in this new sequel video-game.  Only with a lot more light - in Zelda you have to throw a brightbloom seed every once in a while so you can see where you're going, but once you activate all the Lightroots (there's one under every shrine in the game) it does seem to get a lot easier.  But the giant mushroom/trees/whatevers sure look similar - I guess the movie came out first, but they must have been designing the video-game for YEARS, because the virtual world is so huge.  Anyway, she finished almost all the side adventures and side quests, with me helping by navigating (just like when we're on vacation) and so tomorrow she'll probably defeat Ganon and start over.  Man, if I played this game I'd probably do nothing BUT the side quests, and also try to cook every damn recipe in the game, and there are a LOT of them.

Also starring the voices of Jake Gyllenhaal (last seen in "Lovely & Amazing"), Dennis Quaid (last seen in "Dinner with Friends"), Jaboukie Young-White (last seen in "Set It Up"), Gabrielle Union (last seen in "Welcome to Collinwood"), Lucy Liu (last seen in "Shazam! Fury of the Gods"), Alan Tudyk (last heard in "Raya and the Last Dragon"), Adelina Anthony, Abraham Benrubi (last seen in "The Call of the Wild"), Jonathan Melo, Nik Dodani (last seen in "Other People"), Francesca Reale (last seen in "Yes, God, Yes"), Emily Kuroda (last seen in "RED"), Reed Buck, Katie Lowes (last seen in "Side Effects"), LaNisa Frederick, Dave Kohut, Alice Kina Diehl,

RATING: 6 out of 10 Reapers

The People We Hate at the Wedding

Year 15, Day 218 - 8/6/23 - Movie #4,513

BEFORE: Yeah, this is another film that I normally would reserve for February, because it's about a wedding, and that means one central relationship, at least, so if there's relationship stuff or love or weddings, sure, naturally that all suggests romance.  BUT if I need to move a film out of the romance chain in order to make my connections in another month, sometimes that just has to be done.  Before the end of this year there are four other movies that I had earmarked for February that are going to have to be re-purposed, to get a chain that will take me to the end of the year - a couple of those I was a little unsure about putting on the February docket in the first place, so this solves that little problem, but also potentially creates another one, namely what happens if I can't fill February (and maybe half of March) with a chain using what's left on the romance list?

Also, how many films on that topic do I need to have on the watchlist at any given time, in order to assemble a chain of 28 to 45 films?  I've got a little over 90, which seems like it would be sufficient, but then again, I never know for sure until I assemble the February chain, usually in November and December when I have big breaks in the schedule.  To be on the safe side, and to balance for taking four films out of that month, I'm also tabling one film from the 2023 chain (it can be dropped, because it's the middle film of a three-movie chain with the same actress) and holding that for February, because it seems to have a lot of connections to other romances, while the four that I'm watching in 2023, not so much.  Anyway, it's a problem for another day in November or December. 

Lizzy Caplan carries over from "Extinction". 

THE PLOT: Family tensions ramp up among siblings in the week leading up to their half-sister's wedding in the UK. 

AFTER: I hate to drop a wedding comedy in the middle of a sci-fi chain, but it's what I have to do to keep the chain alive, it seems.  I just checked, perhaps a bit too late, if there was another movie I could have watched in place of this one that would still link back up with the chain, something to connect "Extinction" to what's coming up, and there's nothing - so the problem seems to be the cast of yesterday's film just hasn't appeared in many other movies that are still on my watchlist, that's nobody's fault, really.  I could add another 25 or 50 movies and see what else happens, but honestly it takes less time to watch "The People We Hate at the Wedding" and cross it off.  I'm at that stage in the year where I don't want to second-guess my plan, but rather just keep reminding myself that I've got a solid path to Christmas, why would I want to mess that up?

So it's another "disaster wedding" film, God knows I've seen a lot of these, it's been a recurring theme ever since "Bridesmaids" scored so big at the box office in - geez, 2011 seems like so long ago.  Since then, I've endured "The Big Wedding", "The Wilde Wedding", "Another Kind of Wedding", "Love Wedding Repeat", "Love, Weddings & Other Disasters", "Destination Wedding", "Jenny's Wedding", "My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2", "Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates", and then the films that came out before "Bridesmaids", like "Bride Wars", "Wedding Crashers", "Margot at the Wedding", "The Wedding Planner", "Muriel's Wedding", "Betsy's Wedding", "The Wedding Date" and "My Best Friend's Wedding".  All of these kind of came from the same place, which is a screenwriter choosing to use something we all recognize, a wedding ceremony and asking themselves, "What could POSSIBLY go wrong?" in an unironic fashion.  No, really, think of something that could go wrong, and we'll work it into the script, we desperately need ideas.

Today's film also resembles those Christmas commercials you see all the time now, which feature interracial couples and/or blended families because the people who work at ad agencies are very shrewd, they know that if they showcase families with different skin colors, they double or triple their chances of the audience connecting with the people in the ads.  Sure, it's great to see multi-racial families because of inclusiveness and it breaks the stereotype of just showing shiny, happy white people all the time, but that's not really why they're doing it, they do it for the same reason that a cameraman will focus on the one black person who attends a Trump rally, they're desperate for mass appeal.  So that's why "The People We Hate at the Wedding" starts with a complicated explanation for how this mostly-white American family ended up with a half-sister who's half-white who lives in the U.K., namely that her father, Donna's first husband, was both black and French, and when he and Donna split, daughter Eloise would spend 6 months every year with him, and 6 months in the U.S. with Donna. 

Donna re-married a man named Bill, and had two more kids, Alice and Bill, who moved from Indianapolis to L.A. and Philly, respectively. Alice is dating her boss, who is also married and has a baby, while Bill has a boyfriend, Dominic, who seems to want to open up their relationship to a third person.  Look, no judgments here but both of these relationships seem troubled, if not outright doomed.  And what does it say about both Alice and Bill that they've settled into these relationships with partners who just aren't putting their needs or feelings at the forefront?  Does this suggest that they've always felt "less than" because they're part of Donna's second, or back-up, family?  Or do they feel like second-class citizens because they're working-class Americans, while their half-sister Eloise got a large trust fund from her father, and their father, Bill, is no longer alive?  Really, there's a lot to unpack here, from a psychological perspective. 

So when Alice and Bill get invitations to their half-sister's wedding in the U.K., neither one intends to go, especially Alice, because Eloise didn't contact her after her break-up and miscarriage, and she's still harboring resentment - however, she made a promise to Eloise when they were teenagers that she would serve as her maid of honor.  Bill feels similarly disconnected from his half-sister, but then gets laid off from his therapist job for a month because he didn't follow protocol, so suddenly he's got no excuse for not attending.  

Alice invites her married boyfriend, who at the last minute says he can't possibly leave his wife alone, but she meets a new boyfriend on the plane, who's charming and kind and funny and really into her, so it couldn't possibly work out, could it?  What she really seems to prefer is the kind of romantic partner who treats her like garbage, what a shame that she doesn't have a brother who's a therapist who could help her with this problem.  Oh, wait...  Bill brings his boyfriend Dominic, who knows a very wealthy gay man in the U.K. who will not only give them a place to stay, but could serve as a third party in a threesome situation - which Bill isn't into at first, but hey, at least he's willing to try this if it will save his relationship.  But then the question becomes, if his boyfriend doesn't want to be faithful, then is the relationship even worth saving?  

Meanwhile, from Eloise's perspective, nothing really seems to go right with her family or with the wedding once her family from the U.S. arrives.  Alice and Bill are both caught up in their own relationships dramas, her half-sister and half-brother are both going through break-ups, and that's taking the focus off of her.  Also, her mother and her father seem to have rekindled their relationship, and that's all very weird, too.  Look, your parents having relationships is always going to feel a bit strange, especially since they're older and you don't want to think of them as sexual beings.  Even if your mother and father have always been together your whole life, it's still just weird to think of them this way.  And getting back together after decades apart is also very weird.

Eventually, everything comes out over dinner, all of the resentment and hurt feelings over the years, some of it's par for the course, and some of it is special resentment that gets caused by seeing your mother marry someone else, or the fact that she gave away all of her dead husband's possessions without checking with her adult kids, or one sibling seems like she's the golden child and gets everything she wants while the others are struggling.  All of these things need to be talked through, they're not going to solve themselves on their own, and that's what really rings true here. But before that, these issues that interrupt the bachelorette party and the wedding turn Eloise into a Bridezilla who breaks down completely when she realizes the candles at the reception aren't white, but off-white.  

I'd point out that this film kind of leans into some of the unflattering stereotypes about gay men, how they can't stay faithful, but at least it also shows that straight people really can't either, so maybe it's fair and balanced in its own way, who's to say?  And everybody's dysfunctional in their own way, everybody could probably benefit from some therapy, right?  Like, across the board - but we all struggle and we persevere and we do the best we can with the relationship cards we've been dealt.  Every relationship also has to come to an end at some point, whether that happens because someone cheats or because someone loses interest or because someone dies, it's bound to happen and we just have to all deal with it as best we can. 

NITPICK POINT: Sure, if someone pays for your hotel room and that includes room service, I can see going a little bit crazy ordering breakfasts.  God knows when we've been on cruises, we certainly took advantage of "second breakfast" when the meal plan was unlimited.  But Alice orders SO much food at the hotel here, that it somehow goes beyond funny, into completely piggish behavior.  There's just no way two people could eat all that food and still stay thin - it's like 30 breakfasts.  And how does this not completely bankrupt her half-sister?  What a disgusting waste of food...both in the fictional world and on the movie set.

Also starring Kristen Bell (last seen in "Idina Menzel: Which Way to the Stage?"), Allison Janney (last seen in "The Object of My Affection"), Ben Platt (last seen in "The Female Brain"), Cynthia Addai-Robinson (last seen in "Colombiana"), Isaach de Bankolé (last seen in "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever"), Karan Soni (last heard in "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse"), Jorma Taccone (ditto), Dustin Milligan (last seen in "A Simple Favor"), Tony Goldwyn (last seen in "Murder Mystery 2"), Andy Daly (last heard in "Butter"), John Macmillan (last seen in "The Dig"), Julian Ovenden, Rufus Jones (last seen in "Stan & Ollie"), D'Arcy Carden (last seen in "Other People"), Brandon Johnston, Lexi Janicek, Milakale Kember, Jaxon Goldenberg, Emma Davies (last seen in "The Current War: Director's Cut"), Judith Amsenga, Jesus Revers Ortiz, Greg Barnett, Randall Park (last seen in "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania"), Pedro Minas, Suzy Kohane, Nerissa Bradley, Alice Brittain, Lawrence Russell, Davina Moon (last seen in "No Time to Die"), Emily Lloyd-Saini, Jemima Rooper (last seen in "The Black Dahlia"), Annie McGrath, Benedict Wolf, Sandra James-Young, Mark Kitto, Jonny Weldon, Lloyd Griffith, Rich Keeble, Mary Roscoe (last seen in "Enola Holmes"), Miriam Englebert, Lesley Ewen (last seen in "Narrow Margin"), Sheila Glass, Mara Huf, Philip Labey, Nathan Wiley (last seen in "The Commuter") and the voice of Adam Godley (last seen in "Nanny McPhee"). 

RATING: 5 out of 10 inflight movies (but "Paddington" was clearly the best choice)