Paddleton

Year 15, Day 238 - 8/26/23 - Movie #4,528

BEFORE: I've got to hustle now to get to the end of August and then I can block out the September schedule - no more breaks for a while, not for work or for road trips, it's time to buckle down and get through Labor Day weekend and the Sept. 11 anniversary, then I'll count the slots needed to get to October 1, and there should be some skip days there. Believe it or not, since I've got my path to Christmas movies worked out, it's time to start thinking about next year's romance chain and documentary chain - I've already done some preliminary work on February, and then yesterday I dug deep into researching the full cast lists of some of the docs on my list, and I've strung a chain of 13 together - with a little more work I can probably get that up to a chain of 20 or 25.  Just looking at the subjects of those docs from the entertainment world, like Little Richard, David Bowie, Wham!, Rock Hudson and Keith Haring, I'm thinking that June would be an ideal month to watch the chain next year, I could add Billie Jean King and Elton John and do a whole pride theme - but we'll see, the linking may have other ideas about when I can place this chain.  

Christine Woods carries over from "I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore". 

THE PLOT: An unlikely friendship between two misfit neighbors becomes an unexpectedly emotional journey when the younger man is diagnosed with terminal cancer. 

AFTER: So I'm back on the Duplass Brothers to end the week - that's three films this week that they had a hand in making, either by directing or producing or starring in.  I didn't have room for "Humpday", though, I'll have to table that one for now.  BUT, I got to several films this week that have been on my list for YEARS, and that's a good feeling.  Tonight's film was released on Netflix in 2019, and it's still there, but it's been on my list that whole time, taking up a slot.  Maybe I need a better system for prioritizing the older films, because the longer a film stays on my list, the greater the chance it will scroll off of the streaming services and become unavailable - there's a Thanksgiving movie that I passed on so many times that if I want to watch it this year, I'll have to resort to an illegal site, and I don't like doing that.  I'll do it, but. I won't like it - plus it's so much easier to watch films on the TV than the computer, and I can sit in a much comfier chair.  

For some reason I equated this film with "The Do-Deca-Pentathlon", because both films feature two adult men who have invented their own form of sport, but really, that's where the similarities end. (And both films came from the Duplass Brothers - so I'm surprised that the two men in this film aren't brothers, I thought maybe I'd figured out their story formula, but apparently not.). But primarily this film is about a man with a terminal illness, and he asks his best friend to help him end his life before the cancer takes him.  I'm not sure how I feel about that, I mean I was raised to believe that suicide is a sin, but also recently I've seen how much trouble my mother has moving her own body around, and it's a wake-up call that the last few months of anyone's life have the potential to be really difficult, and so that raises a lot of ethcial questions about what right anyone has to decide how and when they want to go out.  I've had two cats put down over the years, so yeah, I get it, but obviously as a society we've decided that there's a big difference between terminating a pet and a human, and then when you allow people the right to end their own lives, the line sure does get a bit fuzzy.  

This is also about the anxiety that the healthy people might feel when they know their friends or family are sick, which sure, that's a common enough thing.  And so the healthy friend, Andy, uses humor to deal with the pain, and also he's written an inspirational "half-time speech" that could be used in an imaginary football movie, but really this is probably just another technique he's created to deal with the fact that his best friend is dying.  Andy and Michael take a six-hour road trip to the nearest pharmacy that will sell them the suicide pills, along with the anti-anxiety and anti-nausea pills that are meant to be taken at the same time.  Andy tries to pay for the medication and also the hotel they stay in on the trip, but his bank puts a freeze on the card because he's in another state, and so Michael foots the bill.  I guess if someone knows they're dying, they might be a little more liberal in spending their life savings, that tracks.  

(I had an incident a few years back where my best friend from grade school asked me to buy him a replica of Batman's utility belt while I was at San Diego Comic-Con, then ship it to him in Hawaii.  I tried to put the $80 cost of the belt on my bank card, but my bank refused the charge because it was over a certain amount, and was being made in California - when I called the bank, they said the charge was outside of my normal spending habits.  My response to that was to tell them that if they really knew me, and took a look at my routine, they'd know that buying a high-priced frivolous item at Comic-Con in San Diego was EXACTLY within my normal spending habits, but I guess over the years I've mostly used my credit card for that, and not the debit card. So I just used the AmEx, problem solved, but I kind of took offense at the bank judging me for my purchase.)

Andy and Michael get mistaken for a gay couple while at the hotel, because of their close friendship, and well, you know, two dudes sharing the same room and all that.  They're together but they're not "together" because this isn't that kind of movie, not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's just platonic.  Brotherly, which of course I now expect from the Duplass Brothers, and they share a love of pizza and beer and kung fu movies, especially "Death Punch", the film-within-the-film.  The hotel owner catches them in the jacuzzi after hours, which of course reinforces her belief they're gay, but she joins them and learns otherwise - also she's a widow and believes that the spirit of her dead husband is everywhere around them, because he devoted so much time in life to co-running the hotel.  I don't claim to know if there's a life beyond this one, I mean I was raised to believe that, but I've seen no real evidence to support it - but if our spirit just ends up hanging around our old jobs for eternity, I'm not so sure that's a good thing.

Of course I found this storyline thought-provoking, but I can't really say I found it entertaining, mostly it's a big bummer, and of course death is a part of life and naturally it should be portrayed in movies as such, however I come to movies mainly to have a good time and not be bogged down in this sort of thing.  Eventually we all lose some of the people we love, and that sucks, and it of course always comes too soon and often unexpectedly.  But death is also tough on those that get left behind, because not only do they have to deal with the loss of a friend or a partner or a co-movie-watcher, they also may be the one who has to clear out all that person's stuff, and really, that's often a huge task that involves adding insult to injury.  Sure, it may be therapeutic but it's also a hell of a lot of work.  I think I'll probably get the short end of the stick when I have to clean out my parents' house, it could take weeks because they left so much stuff there. Not looking forward to it, unless I can get some kind of tax break for donating a grand piano somewhere. 

I wish the movie had shown me more about the rules of the Paddleton game, which I think is based on racquetball or squash, only what's the oil drum for?  Really, this is why I came to this movie, and I did not get what I was expecting, not at all.  Maybe that's my fault and not the movie's, but it hardly matters, I'm still left disappointed. 

Also starring Mark Duplass (last seen in "Your Sister's Sister"), Ray Romano (last seen in "Robert Klein Still Can't Stop His Leg"), Kadeem Hardison (last seen in "Made of Honor"), Marguerite Moreau (last seen in "The Mighty Ducks"), Dendrie Taylor (last seen in "Horse Girl"), Alexandra Billings, Matt Bush (last seen in "Trouble with the Curve"), Jen Kuo Sung (last seen in "Escape Plan: The Extractors"), Stephen Oyoung (ditto), Lu Junchang (ditto), Sierra Fisk, Ever Mainard, Jack McGraw (last heard in "Toy Story 4") 

RATING: 5 out of 10 burnt pizzas

I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore

Year 15, Day 237 - 8/25/23 - Movie #4,527

BEFORE: OK, I made it to work on time at 6:30 am yesterday - hey, for me that's quite an accomplishment, I've spent decades NOT being at work before 10 am.  I have to make special preparations to be somewhere by 6:30 am - like no caffeine in the evening, no sugar at night, and I need to fall asleep in the recliner with the news on and the sound low.  Also, I may need a cat on my lap.  Back in the old days, like pre-age 50, if I had to be somewhere super early I'd just stay up all night and crash the next afternoon, but I don't think I can do that any more, I'd be dead tired by 10 am these days if I tried to pull an all-nighter.  Anyway, I was there to open up the theater and everything went well with the event, which was the school-wide staff meeting.  Next week comes orientation meetings, so at least one more early morning shift for me.  

It felt weird since I haven't been at that job for the last two months, like I didn't forget how to do anything but I spent two months at home, getting out of shape - not that I was ever IN shape, but still, it's getting harder for me to do physical stuff, so at some point I need to find a less taxing job, or think about packing it in. Maybe it's a bit on the nose that a film with this title came up on the schedule today....

Devon Graye carries over from "Nope". 

THE PLOT: When a depressed woman is burgled, she finds a new sense of purpose by tracking down the thieves alongside her obnoxious neighbor.  But they soon find themselves dangerously out of their depth against a pack of degenerate criminals. 

AFTER: The point of the film is that people act like assholes all over - across the board, generally speaking and you can see it everywhere, people cutting in line, people driving like maniacs on the highway, people giving away major plot points to that book or movie you haven't finished yet - God, those people are the absolute WORST, aren't they?  Not me, of course, I always issue SPOILER ALERTS and in person I always ask people if they WANT to know details about a movie they haven't seen before i spill them.  My wife had to drag the twist in "Nope" out of me, I had to double-check she was OK with it before I talked about it. I'm sure I'm an asshole in many other ways, like I let my wife pay for too many restaurant checks, and I never lock the front door the way she wants me to, and I'm sure there are other things I do that I'm unaware of.  I try to cook dinner whenever I can, same goes for loading and unloading the dishwasher, and I've got my own bathroom in the basement, you can probably guess why.  I make sure the DVR records the shows she wants to see, and I'm helping her navigate through the new Zelda video-game, just as I navigate for her when she drives while we're on vacation.  

A big part of life is finding that one person who helps you navigate life, I think - and you don't have to like all of the same things, but it sure helps if you HATE some of the same things, or if you're at least united when you plan big vacations and smaller road trips.  Like if we didn't both like BBQ and buffets, our last four vacations would have been big busts, and in between the big things we did, we made sure to leave room in the schedule for smaller things, like swinging by a fenced-off lot outside Houston that contained GIANT busts of all the U.S. Presidents, or visiting a geek market in North Carolina or spending time at a giant antiques warehouse outside Atlanta.  We're over 50 now, so we decided we had to take up antiquing, as long as there's a Waffle House or an IHOP nearby. 

Ruth does eventually make a connection here with her neighbor, Tony, but there are a lot of steps on that road - at first she's very angry with him because he lets his dog, Kevin, poop in her yard, right next to the very prominent "No pooping" sign.  Maybe he thought that sign was for people, not for dogs, after all, dogs can't read signs.  But whatever - in order to make up for his offense, Tony at least agrees to go with Ruth when she uses an app to track her stolen computer to a very shady house across town.  The police, meanwhile, are not willing to help her, because just having that app denote that her computer is in that house is not enough for a search warrant.  So Ruth and Tony barge in and demand the computer - technically that may also be stealing, but they're stealing it BACK, so I guess that's OK?  Ruth and Tony then go on to engage in other not-so-nice behavior, but it's all with the intent of balancing the scales.  

I don't really have an answer here, but if somebody steals your computer, is it OK to steal it back?  Her aunt's silverware was also stolen from Ruth's house, and when they locate the collection for sale from a dealer, is it OK to steal it back from him as well?  He may have bought it from the thief, and not known it was stolen property.  But Ruth feels violated by the theft and she ends up going a pretty fair distance to try and make things right.  At the same times, she spies the thief, or at least someone wearing a sneaker that matches the footprint in her backyard, so it seems that her amateur sleuthing pays off, because it's just not possible at all that two people in the same city could be wearing the same brand of sneakers, right?  Wait a minute, I think I've found an N.P. here.  She finds somebody wearing sneakers that are CONSISTENT with the tread seen in that footprint, but that's not conclusive evidence, is it?  

We know she's probably right, though, because the movie spends a lot of time on that guy, Christian, and his two cohorts as they fence stolen merchandise, buy a gun, and start planning for the "big job".  Ruth and Tony are hot on their trail, though, and so their paths may cross again.  But come on, maybe Ruth should have quit after getting back her computer and that silverware, but she doesn't, she keeps on going and ends up in a lot more danger, just because of some petty sense of revenge, or maybe just that desire to convince people to not be assholes.  Yeah, good luck with that, Ruth, if ever there were an uphill battle, it's that one. 

This film ended up raising a lot of good questions about how the universe works, or how it should, I guess.  Is it OK to steal something back from a thief who stole it from you?  Is it OK to impersonate a cop to sit down with your thief's step-mother to learn more about him?  Is it OK to destroy the lawn topiaries of somebody who wasn't helpful in your quest for justice?  And most important of all, is it better to smash your burgers down when you grill them, or just flip them?  I'm definitely in the second camp, because smashing the burgers squeezes out the juice, and everybody wants a juicy burger, right?  So please, Food Network (and Guy Fieri in particular) can we come to a damn consensus about this?  For everyone profiled on your network who doesn't smash the burgers, there's someone else who does.  PICK ONE METHOD.

Another point made in this film is that there are people who act selflessly, serve as nurses or war doctors in the field, or they spend their spare time bringing meals to sick people, and then when those people die, they're just as dead as everyone else, just useless carbon.  It's most likely true, however it's also very depressing, so therefore, not really helping.  We also learn that police detectives, generally speaking, are not very helpful when it comes to solving crimes - however, this should NOT be seen as an invitation to pick up the slack yourself.  It's just not safe. OK, lessons learned, let's move on to the next flick.

Also starring Melanie Lynskey (last seen in "Hello I Must Be Going"), Elijah Wood (last seen in "The Trust"), David Yow, Jane Levy (last seen in "Nobody Walks"), Myron Natwick (last seen in "Cats & Dogs"), Christine Woods (last seen in "Dean"), Robert Longstreet (last seen in "Judas and the Black Messiah"), Gary Anthony Williams (last seen in "Comic Book: The Movie"), Lee Eddy (last heard in "Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood"), Derek Mears (last seen in "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping"), Jason Manuel Olazabal (last seen in "Inside Man"), Maxwell Hamilton, Matt Orduna, Michelle Moreno, Jeb Berrier, Macon Blair (last seen in "The Hunt"), Robin Blair, Buck Eddy-Blair, William Sydnor Blair, Marilyn Faith Hickey (last seen in "Men of Honor"), Jared Roylance, J.J. Green, Taylor Tunes, Kayla Dixon, Audrey Walker, Chris Sharp, Jana Lee Hamblin, Dana Millican (last seen in "Leave No Trace"), Ray Buckley (last seen in "World's Greatest Dad"), Lenka Becvar, Dagoberto Rodriguez, 

RATING: 5 out of 10 throwing stars 

Nope

Year 15, Day 235 - 8/23/23 - Movie #4,526

BEFORE: Jennifer Lafleur carries over again from "The Do-Deca-Pentathlon". Just five films in this week's plans, I lost a day to traveling back from Massachusetts and I'm not watching a movie tonight, because my second job kicks back in tomorrow, so I've got an early morning.  So that means NO caffeine, NO sugar tonight, and I need to try to be asleep by 11:30 or so.  Last year I worked the all-staff meeting that I needed to chain-drink iced coffees to stay awake, and I ended up crashing hard at about 1 pm.  I'd like to try and avoid that this time around. 

OK, a movie today but no movie for tomorrow, and then I'll check in again on Friday.  I can still stay on track for my September schedule and land a film about 9/11 on the right day.  I think. 

THE PLOT: The residents of a lonely gulch in inland California bear witness to an uncanny and chilling discovery. 

AFTER: I feel like this film is kind of like "Sorry to Bother You" - do you remember that one?  I watched it because everybody was talking about it, particularly the part about black people succeeding at a telemarketing company by using their "white voices" (which were actually provided by white actors) and then also mysteriously, there was one character's name that got BLEEPED every time it was said - so everybody was intensely curious.  But does anybody remember the second half of that film?  No?  Just me?  There was a huge plot twist and the second half ended up being a rather shocking, but far-fetched commentary on not just race relations, but something akin to modern-day slavery, only with a sci-fi angle to it.  And then, just a few months later, NOBODY was still talking about it - the moment had come and gone. 

I think this is kind of a problem with these "shocking twist" movies, and Jordan Peele has now directed THREE of them, if you count "Get Out", "Us" and this one.  Hey, while we're talking about instant nostalgia, remember "Get Out"?  Simply EVERYBODY was talking about it at one point - "Hey, did you see that movie?  The one with the big shocking twist and a far-fetched allegory about race relations and maybe slavery, with a sci-fi angle to it?"  Then remember just a few months later, NOBODY at all was still talking about it?  Yep, the moment had come and gone. It did well, though, everybody saw it and talked about it and recommended it to their friends - but once the shock is over, do you tend to go back and watch it again and again, you know, for fun on the weekends?  No, you probably don't.  Unless you do, and I don't know why you would.  

Then along came "Us", and I'll admit I was late for that party, too - that was a movie about a black family that had an identical family of their doppelgangers show up at their house and try to kill them.  I won't say that EVERYBODY was talking about that movie, but it got some traction.  Fewer people were saying, "Hey, did you see that movie, the one with a big, shocking twist and a far-fetched allegory about race relations and maybe slavery, with a sci-fi angle to it?"  But maybe a couple - I watched it with high hopes, thinking it could be the next "Get Out", only it really wasn't, it was its own thing, but I could barely make sense out of what was going on - something about a whole underground (literally) society that was designed to replace Americans and for some reason had its origins in the "Hands Across America" movement.  Umm, I think.  Let me check my notes...

So now we get another movie from the same director, and guess what, for a couple of months I think a lot of people were talking about it, and those people who did go to see it were saying, "Hey did you see that movie?  The one with the big shocking twist and a far-fetched allegory about race relations, with a sci-fi angle to it?"  I won't say EVERYBODY saw it, but it did earn $171 million against a budget of $68 million, still not bad, although by this time I think the genre of the shocking twist movie might be producing diminishing returns, I mean, come on, "Get Out" earned over $255 million and had a budget of just $4.5 million, so it might just be the most profitable movie ever, I'm not sure.  But I think that just like with "Get Out", once you watch "Us" and "Nope" once each, there's no real reason to go back and watch them again, they don't have the re-watchability factor of, say, "Thor: Ragnarok", which I could watch every weekend if I had the time.  It's OK, the latest "Thor" film wasn't one I'd watch again and again, just once was enough, just as I probably won't re-watch "Guardians of the Galaxy 3" as often as I would the first two films in the series.  

And damn, I sure don't want to give away the secrets behind "Nope", but if you can remember way back to July of 2022, instant nostalgia being what it is, this was pitched and promoted as a UFO movie - sorry, they're called UAP's now, for "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena" because I think that even in real life, we're somehow beyond the "flying saucer" phase of our collective belief in alien visitation or whatever.  But as a character in "Nope" says, they changed the name to UAP's and then everybody stopped caring.  We know SOMETHING is going on in the skies, but we'll be damned if we know exactly what it is.  Back in the day, people would just say it's a weather balloon or a meteorite or maybe some swamp gas, and anyone who claims they got abducted and/or probed would be labeled a nut or a freak.  But with everything else going on in the world today, from wildfires and floods to race riots and political insurrections, pandemics and politics, who the hell has time to watch out for UFO's or UAP's?  

I watch the show "The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch", which is an ongoing, never-ending series on the History Channel, of all places, and it's a weekly update on the experiments going on at a particular ranch in Utah, one that figures in Native American stories about shape-changing aliens and strange lights that emerge from a mesa, and I started watching it because my mother was following it, and I wanted to prove to her it's a bunch of horse hockey.  They rope you in with reports of strange frequencies being broadcast in the area, and radiation sickness felt by the team members, and then they respond by launching drones and shooting rockets into certain areas of the sky above the ranch, then recording the UAPs that their processes supposedly cause to appear in the sky, and footage like that, after all, is very difficult to fake. Right.  Also each week they bring in tech experts from other parts of the world to set up telemetry and lasers and night-vision cameras and satellite tracking devices that all fail spectacularly, like clockwork, in order to guarantee that the show will air for at least seven more seasons.  (They also pull this with every treasure-hunting show on the same channel, like "The Secret of Oak Island".  I can promise they will never, ever, find treasure or determine what the secret of Oak Island is, because as soon as they do, the show's over. Once you set up a never-ending narrative, what's the impetus to find any sort of closure?)

Anyway, "Nope" is about a black family that runs a horse ranch in California, and trains animals to appear in Hollywood productions.  But after the family patriarch is injured by metal that allegedly fell from a plane, and an unfortunate on-set accident, the business falls upon hard times, and they're forced to sell some of their horses to the tourist-trap mining town adventure theme park down the road, which suddenly seems to be doing more business.  Then siblings OJ and Emerald Haywood notice that the electric power in the area has been fluctuating more and more, and several horses that escaped from their stables at night have full-on disappeared.  They go to an electronics store and buy a bunch of cameras and monitors, apparently thinking that if they can get footage of a UFO abducting a horse, they could be like Oprah-famous.  Or at least get a never-ending show on the History Channel.

The siblings are assisted by a tech salesman from the electronics store, and a renowned Hollywood cinematographer/camera-man who at first advised them to not chase this dream, then suddenly changed his mind and showed up with non-electronic crank-style cameras to try to outsmart this whatever-it-is.  At the same time, the theme park down the road that bought up some of their horses reveals their new live entertainment show, which involves leaving a horse in the middle of the canyon, just like the goat they left in the T. Rex pen in "Jurassic Park".  Hmm, very mysterious, what happens to the horse?  I thought that the aliens only mutilated cows, what if they don't like horses?

The owner of the theme park is a former child actor, and there's a whole aside about how he was on a TV sitcom decades earlier that prominently featured a chimpanzee living with a human family. "What could POSSIBLY go wrong there?" you're no doubt asking, and sure enough, there was an incident on a birthday-themed show after some balloons popped and the chimp went a little crazy.  This is an interesting-enough aside that perhaps deserved to be its own movie, but as part of "Nope", it's honestly a little difficult to see how it fits in, other than kind of being shoehorned into this completely separate plot.  So the monkey injured a couple actors, who cares?  They're replaceable, aren't they?  The actors, not chimps.  But are we supposed to draw an allegory between a chimpanzee injuring humans and aliens abducting people for experiments?  It's an analogy that just doesn't WORK, no matter how I look at it - so I'm wondering why it's there in the first place.  It feels like something Tarantino would have referenced in "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood..." if only he'd thought about it.  But here it's just one more thing that stands in the way of the audience figuring out what's happening at the ranch.

I don't want to say any more about what DOES happen on the ranch after this, because, well, that's the film.  But I will mention some things that you may never look at the same way again after watching "Nope", and these things are:  Siegfried & Roy, those "tube man" waving car-salesman promotional thingies, Corey Hart's song "Sunglasses at Night", nature documentaries, chimpanzees (of course), Wild West theme parks, the song "Purple People Eater", and OK, probably clouds too.  Don't say I didn't warn you. 

The more I think about it, the more I think that both this movie and "Don't Look Up" were badly mis-named.  If you ask me, those two movie titles should have been swapped.  This film CLEARLY should have been called "Don't Look Up", and that other film was all about people trying to deny there was a meteor headed toward Earth, so why wasn't THAT called "Nope"?  I don't get it...

I can't write any more, anyway, it's after 11 pm and for once in my life, I have to go to bed at a very normal hour tonight - my second job starts up again tomorrow with the college-wide staff meeting, held at the theater, so I have to be there at 6:30 am and open up the building so the breakfast caterers can set up.  Now, of course, it feels very weird to be going back to this job after two months off - all through July and August I was wondering how I was going to get through the summer, and I was so inactive I couldn't WAIT to go back to work, and well, now it's time and it feels like my staycation was ultimately too short.  Oh, well, can't worry about that now, I've got to get to sleep so I can be out the door by 5:15 am.  Fun times! 

Also starring Daniel Kaluuya (last heard in "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse"), Keke Palmer (last heard in "Lightyear"), Steven Yeun (last seen in "Minari"), Michael Wincott (last seen in "Dead Man"), Brandon Perea, Wrenn Schmidt (last seen in "Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer"), Keith David (last heard in "DC League of Super-Pets"), Devon Graye (last seen in "I Am Michael"), Terry Notary (last seen in "The Call of the Wild"), Barbie Ferreira, Donna Mills (last seen in "Joy"), Osgood Perkins (last seen in "Not Another Teen Movie"), Eddie Jemison (last seen in "Adrienne"), Jacob Kim, Sophia Coto, Andrew Patrick Ralston (last seen in "Horse Girl"), Lincoln Lambert, Pierce Kang, Roman Gross, Alex Hyde-White (last seen in "Ishtar"), Hetty Chang, Liza Treyger (last seen in "The King of Staten Island"), Ryan W. Garcia, Courtney Elizabeth, Haley Babula, Michael Busch, Gloria Cole, Conor Kowalski, Ahmad Muhammad, Rhian Rees. 

RATING: 6 out of 10 SNL cast members

The Do-Deca-Pentathlon

Year 15, Day 234 - 8/22/23 - Movie #4,525

BEFORE: Steve Zissis carries over from "Jeff, Who Lives at Home" and so does at least one other regular actor from the Duplass Brothers' films.  I'm not joking when I say that this film has been nearly impossible to link to, if not for the connections between the films made by the same directors/producers, who seem to draw from their own little stable of actors, it probably wouldn't have been possible at all.  I love to say that everything is connected, but is it really that way?  You can see below how many actors in this film have managed to NOT be in any of the other 4,500 movies I've watched - how is that even possible?  Nearly everyone who was in this film showed up, put on wardrobe, said their lines and then had the same thought, which apparently was, "Well, now I've been in one movie, I guess that's enough, so what else can I do with my life?"  It's very odd. 

As a result, I can state with some certainty that this is the LONGEST any film has ever been on my DVR without me watching it - or at least this is the movie that's CURRENTLY been on my DVR the longest, I recorded this one in May of 2019, so it's been sitting there, taking up space for over three years, this was running on cable even before the pandemic started, and so maybe about 1,300 films have been watched since then without me being able to link to it.  Really, jeez, that takes some doing.  But I'm clearing it off the decks today, thanks to the Duplass bros. 

THE PLOT: Two brothers compete in their own private 25-event Olympics. 

AFTER: Sure, it would have been great to watch this during an Olympic year, but that just wasn't in the cards - I'm afraid that if I let this chance to watch it slip by, I'll never get another one.  (The next Olympics will be in Paris, btw, starting July 26, 2024.  Remember how the 2020 Olympics were held in summer 2021 because of the pandemic?  And then the next winter Olympics happened just six months later, instead of 2 years later?). Well, it turns out this film really didn't have much of a connection to the Olympics, my bad. It's just a film about two very competitive brothers in their 30's.  

There are some things I've noticed over the years JUST because I happened to watch two films back-to-back - like I just noticed after watching two films from Mark and Jay Duplass together that both films are about brothers who are competitive (or combative) and they have a widowed mother - so now I'm wondering if these films are autobiographical in the same way, if they were made at a time when the directors' father had passed away, but not their mother.  I just tried to confirm this with a Google search, but let's assume for the moment that I'm correct. Sure, why wouldn't the two brothers make two films focused on brothers who compete with each other for their mother's affection?  It makes sense, at least in retrospect.  But now I also want to know if the Duplass brothers had these types of physical competitions while growing up, to prove which one was the "better brother".  

I kind of wish the movie had focused more on the sports, really.  The list of what the 25 sports actually ARE is confoundingly blank, perhaps this signifies that the brothers are making up the challenges as they go along, but damn it, I want to know.  Also, the videotape of the previous 25-event competition was conveniently recorded over, so we won't ever know what those sports were, either. Oh, sure, we see the two adult brothers doing the long-jump, and there's arm wrestling, something in the swimming pool, and laser tag of course, but a comprehensive list on that piece of notebook paper, would it have killed to you to show that in the film?

The world of film editing is its own magical, mystical process.  Perhaps the directors didn't know which scenes would be usable in the film and which wouldn't because they were dealing with two very, well, let's say "unathletic" actors, with dad bods and pot bellies, who could be sure what they would and wouldn't be able to do, physically speaking, that would look genuine on film?  But as a result, because we never see them doing 25 different sports, it really feels like something's missing, and that's a pretty big something to be missing.  

What's more important is the dynamic between the two brothers, and how their competitiveness affects the older brother's marriage.  I'm assuming Mark, the married one with a kid, is the more responsible older brother, while Jeremy is the single, care-free screw-up brother, I mean, come on, that's just how brothers work, right?  But allowing Jeremy back into his life, even for just his birthday weekend, is a total trigger for Mark, he falls right back into the old pattern of being super-competitive and trying to beat his brother at everything, even though he promised his wife he wouldn't get into that psycho-trap again. He can't help it, it's ingrained because of the 18 or 20 years he spent in that pattern.  This happened to me this past weekend, just being around my sister while she coordinated my parents' packing and moving, I fell right back into my own trap where I let her tell me what to do and how to do it, and I don't speak up or fight back because, well, it's just easier if I don't. 

The title of the film, unfortunately doesn't make much sense, if there are 25 sporting events that take place, that would have a different name, if it were to exist.  A pentathlon would have five events, and a decathlon would have 10, since a dodecahedron is a solid with 12 sides then I assume a do-decathlon would be 12 events, and so therefore the name of the event evokes the numbers 12 and 5, so how do you get 25 from that?  It only works if you acknowledge that the brothers, who were teens when they named their sporting event, just had no idea how the Greek language worked.  So I guess that's enough of an explanation, no NITPICK POINT required here, but still, I'm not entirely satisfied.  

Anyway, it's really more about family dysfunction than anything close to real sports, so if that's your cup of tea, by all means, proceed, maybe you'll see a reflection of your own family in here, in addition to a reflection of the Duplass family.  Still, part of me wishes the directors had taken the storytelling a bit more seriously, just as we all wish these two brothers would take their own lives a bit more seriously.  Just me?  Or perhaps since I had such an enormously long wait to watch this film, there was just no way that the film itself could possibly live up to the expectations that the wait generated? 

Oh, wait, I do have a NITPICK POINT: Mark sneaks into bed with his wife, after playing ping-pong all night with his brother, and he gets there just before it's time to get up and celebrate his birthday weekend.  How is he not exhausted for the rest of that day, if he didn't get any sleep?  And how does his wife not notice that he's all sweaty, and he probably stinks, too?  He sure didn't have time for a shower before sneaking back into bed.  

I'm thinking that maybe not many people have seen this film - it made only $10K in theaters, and it's only got 6 reviews on the IMDB. This aired on cable, I swear it - at least it did in May 2019, but wouldn't you know it, I just deleted the proof.

Also starring Mark Kelly (last seen in "First Man"), Jennifer Lafleur (also carrying over from "Jeff, Who Lives at Home"), Julie Vorus, Noël Wells (last seen in "Dreamland"), Reid Williams, Brendan Robinson, Jordan Stidham, Ricky Dillard, Johanna Igel. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 push-ups

Jeff, Who Lives at Home

Year 15, Day 233 - 8/21/23 - Movie #4,524

BEFORE: OK, I had one actor appear live in that "Dungeons & Dragons" movie and then carried over to "GOTG 3" with a voice performance, and now another actor who did a voice in that same film carries over to a live-action appearance.  There's some balance in nature, or something.  Judy Greer voiced a CGI character called "War Pig" in that Marvel movie, and she also appears in this one. 

We got back Sunday from three days in Massachusetts, we helped (a bit) with the packing up of my parents' apartment, and I sat with them in their hotel room while the movers and my brother-in-law packed up the truck, then he drove off with their furniture on Saturday and we bought them dinner from their favorite Italian place, then on Sunday after breakfast (and church, for some reason...) my sister loaded them into the van and they all headed for North Carolina, while we drove back to NY.  Mixed emotions for sure, because they've always lived in that suburban Boston area, so this is a huge chance, and I won't be able to visit them as often in the future now.  But they weren't getting the supervision and medical care they need, so hopefully living with my sister will provide that.  

I also feel quite guilty that I'm not contributing to their care or their upkeep, but then again, I never have in the past.  They had worked things out financially where they could move out of their house and into assisted living if needed, but then as time wore on things got more complicated and more expensive, forcing the move.  Also it seems like they've lived longer than they expected to, which should be a good thing.  

THE PLOT: Dispatched from his basement room on an errand for his widowed mother, slacker Jeff might discover his destiny (finally) when he spends the day with his unhappily married brother as they track his possibly adulterous wife. 

AFTER: I'm kind of torn on this one, because it seems like just a short (83 min.) little indie feature that's not really ABOUT much, there's some relationship stuff in here but maybe not enough to qualify it as a romance, and honestly, not much even happens during the course of the film.  Or, does it?  

The other way to look at this one, maybe, is that perhaps it only appears that not a lot is happening - there's certainly not much action or violence or family squabbling - but then maybe a lot is going on beneath the surface, there's some subtext about Jeff being a complete fuck-up who had to move back in with his mother while he smokes a lot of weed and doesn't look for a job.  Look, I feel you, Jeff, OK?  This was supposed to be the summer where I landed a better job, maybe even my first full-time gig, and I could move on and move up from my job where I've really stayed much, much longer than I should have. I get that feeling of being paralyzed and filled with doubt, because what if I quit my job and then there's nothing else out there for me?  Or worse, I take a new job and I hate it even more than the job I have now?  These are the things that worry me, so I don't make that move or change anything, and life just keeps going....

Jeff is also obsessed with the movie "Signs", and the apparent lesson that he learned from the film is that minor details, like where you leave glasses of water around the house, could be very important and if you wait long enough and pay close attention, you should get some kind of signs from the universe that you're where you're supposed to be, or at least on the right track.  Can I take some kind of lesson from Jeff taking that lesson from the movie "Signs"?  Like, when I go back to my second gig in a few days, am I going to get some kind of sign that I belong there, or perhaps some kind of sign that I don't, and I should move on?  Man, that's tricky, I mean, like what happens if you don't get any kind of sign at all, do you just stay the course, or do you then feel like you don't have much of a future at all?  

I do try to look for lessons in the films I watch, or at least connections to what's going on in my life - for example, this film is all about somebody dealing with his older sibling and being kind of a screw-up by comparison - I certainly felt that way over the weekend when my sister arranged all the moving and packing, while I was just sent to get take-out meals each evening, and this just let me to feel very pissed off because I was just sent out like an errand boy, I didn't get to choose the restaurant, just told where to go and what to order, and then I didn't even get reimbursed for the meal. (I paid for dinner on Friday AND Saturday night, but I didn't even eat any of Saturday's meal, I went out with a friend instead - so is that fair?  I'm not going to complain because my sister paid for the moving van, the transport van, and she has to buy them meals all the way to North Carolina...and then all their meals after that, so maybe I'm luckier than I feel.)

There's also a bit where Jeff's brother, Pat, finds his wife at a Hampton Inn with another man, possibly having an affair with him.  Well we did stay at a Hampton Inn this weekend, gotta love that "free" hotel breakfast, it's delicious but then you have to deal with a room full of parents with small kids, and maybe some foreigners.  On Saturday I had breakfast at my parents' hotel, which was a Marriott Residence Inn, and OK, breakfast is really the same everywhere you go, but it was a classier vibe of eggs, bagels and cereal at the Marriott.  Plus the other guests were friendlier and I had a few polite conversations there with the hotel guests, and instead of parents with kids and foreigners, I definitely got more of a "swingers convention" vibe at the Marriott. Too bad there was no way for me to find out if I was right about that.  

Anyway, Jeff kind of follows the "signs" and gets distracted while on an errand for his mother, to get some wood glue at the Home Depot so he can replace the missing slat in the shutters.  Jesus, Jeff, if you're going to live in your mother's basement you should be able to complete a simple little chore, once in a while!  But instead he follows a man with the name "Kevin" on his basketball jersey off the bus, because he'd been getting wrong-number phone calls at home asking for "Kevin", and the coincidence was too great to ignore.  This led him to play in a pick-up basketball game with the Kevin in question, and this led to... well, no spoilers here, but there's something of a domino effect at work here.  

Through many twists and turns, the odd effects of this random day do end up serving a higher purpose, or so it seems.  Jeff eventually finds himself in a position where he can do something very heroic, and then you have to wonder about how if any of the previous events of the day had shaken down differently, then perhaps Jeff wouldn't have been in that right place at the right time.  So, what does that mean, was there a secret purpose to the whole day, or is everything just random?  Also by the end of the day, Pat's rocky relationship with his wife seems to be in a much better place, and even his mother has found love after being contacted by a secret admirer at work who contacted her via AOL instant messenger.  (Geez, remember that?  How old is this movie?  2011?  Were people still using AOL back then, or had text messages already caught on by then?  

This is another film written and directed by the Duplass brothers, Jay and Mark.  While I may not have seen every film that they've directed, produced and/or starred in, and I don't seek their movies out like I do for, say, Wes Anderson, I've still seen a bunch of them - they produced "Horse Girl", "Duck Butter", "Outside In", "Blue Jay", "Adult Beginners", "Manson Family Vacation", "The Overnight", "The Skeleton Twins", "Safety Not Guaranteed" and "The One I Love", and also wrote "Cyrus" and "Table 19".  That's a pretty decent track record - though I'm still not sure which of those count as "mumblecore" and which ones don't.  So I think maybe today's film is worth a try, and if it's not your thing, well at least then it didn't take up too much of your time.

Also starring Jason Segel (last seen in "Windfall"), Ed Helms (last heard in "Ron's Gone Wrong"), Susan Sarandon (last seen in "That's My Boy"), Rae Dawn Chong (last seen in "Tales from the Darkside: The Movie"), Steve Zissis (last seen in "Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot"), Evan Ross (last seen in "Just Before I Go"), Zac Cino, Joe Chrest (last seen in "Where the Crawdads Sing"), Robert Larriviere (ditto), Matt Malloy (last seen in "Outside In"), JD Evermore (last seen in "Broken City"), Katie Aselton (last seen in "The Tomorrow Man"), Ian Hoch (last seen in "Elvis & Nixon"), Wally Crowder, Deneen Tyler (last seen in "Welcome to the Rileys") and the voice of Jennifer Lafleur (last seen in "The Skeleton Twins")

RATING: 6 out of 10 office cubicles near the water cooler