Shotgun Wedding

Year 16, Day 62 - 3/2/24 - Movie #4,663

BEFORE: Jennifer Lopez carries over from "Second Act" and in a few days she'll be tied with Toni Collette for most appearances this year, both will have five.  Not a lot by last year's standards, but quite enough J.Lo for one year, for sure.  She might pop up in archive footage in some documentaries, you never know.  Once I hit the docs all bets are off, because somebody like David Letterman or Paul McCartney could appear 8 or more times very easily, or Nixon or Reagan could make another comeback. 

Here's todays' line-up for TCM's "31 Days of Oscar", Day 23: 

Best Actor Nominees:

4:00 am "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" (1932)

6:00 am "The Great Dictator" (1940)

8:15 am "The Thin Man" (1934)

10:00 am "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" (1939)

12:00 pm "Anatomy of a Murder" (1959)

3:00 pm "Elmer Gantry" (1960)

5:45 pm "East of Eden" (1955)

Best Actor Winners:

8:00 pm "Lincoln" (2012)

10:45 pm "A Man for All Seasons" (1966)

1:00 am "Sergeant York" (1941)

3:30 am "Yankee Doodle Dandy" (1942)

OK, 8 seen out of 11 today. Same problem as before, I've seen the later remakes of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" and "Goodbye, Mr. Chips", but not these earlier versions.  And maybe as a kid I might have seen "Yankee Doodle Dandy", only I can't really prove it.  So I'm only confident about 8 of these, but that brings me up to 97 seen out of 262, up to 37%. Hoping for a few more last-minute surges like this so I can finish over 40%.

THE PLOT: Darcy and Tom gather their families for the ultimate destination wedding but when the entire wedding party is taken hostage the bride and groom must save their loved ones - if they don't kill each other first. 

AFTER: I've already started to break down my romance films watched this year into categories, for the end of year wrap-up.  It's just never too early.  One category will probably be "Movies where the wedding didn't happen, or almost didn't" and this fits right in with that theme.  I have to point out, though, that the movie is a bit misnamed, because a "Shotgun Wedding", traditionally has been slang reserved for a case where the bride is pregnant, and/or the groom does not want to get married, so the bride's father has to use a shotgun to ensure that he goes through with it.  Am I wrong?  Some film production company kind of co-opted the term, because none of those conditions apply in this story.  There simply must have been a better title to use - also I didn't see any of the pirates in this film using a shotgun, so that's another strike against it. 

(Speaking of shotguns, though, I just started playing "Red Dead Redemption", which is an Old West-themed video game from 10 or 11 years ago, from the same company that made the "Grand Theft Auto" games, which I started re-playing during the pandemic, only I didn't get very far.  But last week we saw a used copy of this game in a Gamestop, only it was too busy there to stand in line and buy it, so she got it for me from Amazon for like $14.  Well, two sessions in and I can't stop playing it, and YES there are shotguns in the game, also revolvers and knives and lassos, horses and wagons, duels and hidden gold bars. If my blog goes dark for the next week, you'll know what happened to me, I'm back in the old west shooting coyotes and skinning deer.  Damn, it's a lot of fun and I'm two sessions in but already about 30% through the game.  It's got elements of GTA combined with the giant explorable world of the last 2 "Zelda" games, so I think I'm hooked, I didn't even want to stop playing to eat dinner.)

Anyway, I didn't watch "Shotgun Wedding" under the best conditions, I came home on Friday night and had two beers, which is pretty normal, except these were STRONG beers, one was an Allagash Tripel, and then hours later I kind of fell asleep 30 minutes into this movie.  Woke up, rewound back to where I fell asleep, tried again, and fell asleep again. I then slept until NOON and had to finish the movie after that.  Now, was it the beer or was it the movie?  The movie's got a fair amount of action in it, as you'd expect from a comedy-romance-action hybrid, so let's say it was the beer. 

However, I could make a case for the movie putting me to sleep, because it's one of those deals where there's about a 30 minute story in a 90-minute movie, so the characters have to say everything three times, to stretch out the plot to feature-length.  There's a point where the two mains have to do something dangerous and they can't agree on HOW to count down to do it, groom TOM wants to count down from 10, and then bride Darcy says, "No, we don't count down from 10, what is this, a rocket launch?  We count down from FOUR!" and then Tom disagrees, saying they should count down from THREE, like everyone does, Darcy argues back that when you count down from three, you really GO on four, so really, when you count down from three, you're really counting from four, and this discussion goes on for another two minutes, perhaps, but it's just WAY longer than it needs to be, and really, the whole movie's like this.  Other long-winded discussions are over how to not let go of a live grenade, whether to disable a pirate with a net or a bottle of hairspray lit on fire, and most importantly, whether Tom and Darcy should get married in the first place.  

Put the Indonesian pirate story on hold for a second, because the real meat of the story is whether these two should get married, and I've seen this already this month, several times.  But in a neat gender-swap TOM is the perfectionist here, the "Groom-zilla" who is obsessing over every little element, when DARCY is the one who wanted a very simple wedding, or better yet, just to elope with her pro-baseball player husband.  Tom made the problem worse by not listening to Darcy when she expressed her desire for a small wedding, and then made things EVEN WORSE by inviting both of their families to this private island in the Philippines for the elaborate ceremony.  But to be fair, Darcy is somewhat responsible, too, for not raising her concerns earlier about the wedding being too extravagant, also turning down the money from her rich father to pay for the wedding, which ensured that this new couple would be in over their heads trying to pay for it.  So they've both made mistakes, and finally they hash the whole thing out just before the ceremony, the argument gets a little heated, and the wedding is off.

But wait, because while they were arguing the aforementioned South Pacific pirates take all the wedding guests hostage, and they make them all sit in the swimming pool for some reason while they seek out the bride and groom, who are conveniently elsewhere.  Now the first assumption would be, hey, Tom's an MLB player, so he must be famous, and the pirates are going to hold him for ransom because he's an American sports star.  Well, that's not the right back-story, there's a different reason for who wants to kidnap them, but they do still want ransom from Darcy's rich father.  No spoilers here, part of the fun is figuring out who's really the villain here. 

The rest of the fun comes from watching Darcy and Tom have to transform themselves into warriors to take down the pirates, one by one, and then overcome their fears, obstacles and lack of true fighting skills to find a way to either call for help, or rescue the hostages on their own and maybe take some of the main pirate gang out of the picture.  It really shouldn't be possible for two normal people to become Rambo-level soldiers in a matter of hours, but hey, come on, it's a movie, just not a very believable one. 

The family members are probably the best part of the movie, this was a huge missed opportunity, when you cast people like Jennifer Coolidge and Cheech Marin and then for the vast majority of the movie, they're not DOING anything, just sitting in a swimming pool.  What a waste, and I wonder how many actors spent a week of their life sitting in water up to their necks and ended up questioning their choice to be in this movie. That could not have been comfortable for them - but hey, it could have been worse, originally Armie Hammer was supposed to be the male lead, only he got cancelled and his role when to Josh Duhamel, who I think did a much better job in the role than Hammer ever could have. 

Also starring Josh Duhamel (last seen in "Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!"), Lenny Kravitz (last seen in "Count Me In"), Jennifer Coolidge (last seen in "Promising Young Woman"), Sonia Braga (last seen in "The Jesus Rolls"), Cheech Marin (last seen in "The War with Grandpa"), Steve Coulter (last seen in "A.C.O.D."), D'Arcy Carden (last seen in "The People We Hate at the Wedding"), Callie Hernandez (last seen in "Under the Silver Lake"), Desmin Borges (last seen in "Carrie Pilby"), Selena Tan (last seen in "Crazy Rich Asians"), Alberto Isaac, Melissa Hunter, Pancho Cardena (last seen in "Bullet Train"), Alex Mallari Jr. (last seen in "The Adam Project"), Tharoth Sam, Worapojd Thautanon, Zachary Wood, Vladimir Acevedo, Powpong Kopholrat, Hector Anibal (last seen in "The Lost City"), Asia Munma, Ray Raymundo, Iana Ramirez, Vlad Sosa, Maria del Mar Fernandez Gonzalez, Jose Mota Prestol, Joey Ciotti 

RATING: 5 out of 10 weird-looking cocktail napkins (what a poor editing job, I had to freeze-frame to see those napkins, why cut away after a nano-second from a sight gag that you've been building up to?)

Second Act

Year 16, Day 61 - 3/1/24 - Movie #4,662

BEFORE: Jennifer Lopez carries over from "The Back-Up Plan" and this is how the month begins, but honestly right now I have no idea how it's going to end.  I've only programmed up until St. Patrick's Day, which will be on March 17 this year.  This weekend I've got to start figuring out where I'm going to go from there, but here are the links that will get me to some very Irish movies:  After J. Lo, John Bradley, Lake Bell, Mary Steenburgen, Jane Fonda, Loretta Devine, Giancarlo Esposito, Sharon Stone, Ellen Burstyn, Catherine Keener, Maddie Corman, Michael McGrath, Brendon Gleeson, Jon Kenny, and Brendon Gleeson again. Yep, see, very Irish there at the end. One option would be to go next to "A Haunting in Venice" followed by "Oppenheimer", but let me wait and see if some better chain presents itself - I can probably watch whatever I want for a while before I have to link to something for Mother's Day, but let me add in whatever's freshly streaming in March before I decide. 

But here's todays' line-up for TCM's "31 Days of Oscar", Day 22: 

Best Director Nominees:

6:15 am "The Informer" (1935)

8:00 am "The Crowd" (1928)

9:45 am "Great Expectations" (1946)

12:00 pm "The Heiress" (1949)

2:00 pm "I Want to Live!" (1958)

4:15 pm "12 Angry Men" (1957)

6:00 pm "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" (1967)

Best Director Winners:

8:00 pm "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town" (1936)

10:15 pm "A Letter to Three Wives" (1949)

12:15 am "Marty" (1955)

2:00 am "The Awful Truth" (1937)

OK, 5 seen out of 11 today. "12 Angry Men", "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner", "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town", "Marty" and "The Awful Truth".  That's nearly half, that's got to improve my score? This brings me to 89 seen out of 251, up to 35.4%.  Just nine more days to go until the countdown is over, but TCM saved some of the most popular films for the last week.

THE PLOT: A big-box store worker reinvents her life and her life-story and shows Madison Avenue what street smarts can do.

AFTER: I've already proven that watching a month's worth of romance movies WILL mess with your head - I'm pretty sure I've seen more break-ups and weddings that got called off at the last second in 2024 alone than I have in real life, that's a little odd but yeah, the math checks out.  I determined that I've definitely spent more time driving cars in video games than I have in real life, in a way that's nearly the same thing.  In both cases it's a heightened experience, for sure - would you rather drive safely and carefully both ways on your commute for the next 40 years, or play a video-game like "Grand Theft Auto" where you can smash up your car and run over pedestrians without any repercussions.  The choice is clear - I just started playing "Red Dead Redemption" for the first time and already I've ridden a video-game horse more than I ever, ever will ride a real horse in the real world.  Not my thing. 

But you get what I'm trying to say?  The stuff in rom-coms is highly exaggerated, each one has to show a bigger break-up (or break down) than the last film did, because the writers figure it's oh-so-more exciting that way, either the couple will get back together, which is great, or they won't, but they'll both move on to some new bigger, better, more perfect relationship.  I know down deep that NONE of this relationship stuff is real (except once in a while, like surely some things from screenwriter's relationships must creep in here and there, there's stuff in "Loser" and "You People" and "Somebody I Used to Know" that simply MUST be based on somebody's real romantic relationships, because things are just so darn specific - why would somebody write about these things this way unless they really happened?  OR maybe that's just a dodge, the writer WANTS us to think things could happen this way between two people so they add specific details so we figure that it must have. 

"Second Act" is really kind of the opposite, I feel like I can state with certainty that this situation would NEVER happen to anyone, not ever, so the specific details here don't really help plead her case, we know this just isn't the way the business world WORKS, damn it!  People don't go from grocery store assistant manager to cosmetics company consultant overnight, even if they DO fudge a few details on their resume.  There's a word for that, it's umm, FRAUD, even if it was done by her nephew hacker on her behalf, it's still not right that she ACCEPTS the job in the company's executive offices, with an assistant and an apartment nearby that is both fancy AND schmancy.  Yeah, you don't just quit your job one day because you got passed over for store manager and then send out five resumes the next week and land a job at this major, major company that makes shampoo and make-up and, umm, some other stuff I guess. 

Maya is also some kind of "expert" on Franklin & Clark's whole product line, just because she used to re-stock aisles #4 and #5 at the supermarket.  That doesn't logically follow, OK, so she may now the product names and how much each one casts, I'll give you that, but she wouldn't be able to interpret the data from a focus group, or, more importantly, know which type of people are buying the company's "organic" shampoos and WHY the other people are not.  Nope, gotta call a few NITPICK POINTS on this one, Maya may be fast talker and a smooth operator, but there's just no way she could learn all this stuff in one week - it should take her about a week just to figure out what the questions are, let alone come up with the answers.          

I wasn't even sure this was a "romance" per se, or if the IMDB just lists it that way out of some kind of default.  Maya breaks up with her soccer coach boyfriend sort of early on, because he wants to get married and start a family, but she's not ready.  Possibly because she never told Trey about the baby she had as a teenager, which she gave up for adoption.  (Gee, I wonder if that plot point will be important later - you can count on it!)

That's just one example of the things this film gets bogged down in - there's barely any room for romance, what with Maya's long-lost daughter, the race to make cheap truly organic shampoos and the customer research for months just to find out there's no tangerine-scented ones out there already?  Also the catered events for JUST the executives, the back-stabbing that takes place in board meetings and the "Working Girl"-like rise of a bit player to a real mover and shaker in the company.  But you know sometimes "MORE" is not a good thing, remember the sub-plot in the movie "Striptease" about the plight of American farm laborers?  No, of course you don't, because it was there but it just wasn't necessary, and there's a lot here that is similarly unnecessary. 

It's a work movie, it's a relationship movie, it's a Christmas movie, and a few other things as well.  Please focus on just a few things, please, because we don't have much time together and if you can't focus then it's going to feel by the end that we just didn't accomplish much here, but the reason it feels that way is because, well, we just didn't.  And the whole thing's kind of moot because Maya would never have been hired at that company in the first place, because she lied about her resume and her experiences, and never saw fit to correct things during her initial interview or, really, any time after that easier.  No, no, just tell HR what days you're available and then they can take it from there.  And no, you don't get to file for unemployment now!

Also starring Vanessa Hudgens (last seen in "Tick...Tick...BOOM!"), Leah Remini (last seen in "Handsome: A Netflix Mystery Movie"), Treat Williams (last seen in "The Eagle Has Landed"), Milo Ventimiglia (last seen in "That's My Boy"), Annaleigh Ashford (last seen in "Unicorn Store"), Charlyne Yi (last heard in "The Mitchells vs. the Machines"), Alan Aisenberg (last seen in "Irresistible"), Freddie Stroma (last seen in "13 Hours"), Dave Foley (last heard in "Revengeance'), Larry Miller (last seen in "A Guy Thing"), Dierdre Friel (last seen in "Here Today"), Lacretta, Dan Bucatinsky (last seen in "Air"), Dalton Harrod, John James Cronin, Phil Nee (last seen in. "Sabrina" (1995)), Meng Ai, Elizabeth Masucci (last seen in "Shame"), Michael Boatman (last seen in "The Peacemaker"), Ed Jewett (last seen in "What's Your Number?"), Anna Suzuki (last seen in "Set It Up"), Ellen Cleghorne (last seen in "Grown Ups 2"), Brianda Agramonte, 

RATING: 4 out of 10 ginkgo leaves

The Back-Up Plan

Year 16, Day 60 - 2/29/24 - Movie #4,661

BEFORE: Jennifer Lopez carries over from "The Boy Next Door" and it's Leap Day - an extra day, something a bit unexpected and un-planned for maybe is in store, originally I thought maybe that should be "Gigli", but I've decided against watching that one, because i need to cut the list down. Again.  This one still feels like it might be on theme for the "extra and unplanned" day, though. 

Here's the format breakdown for movies watched in February:

5 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Boys and Girls, I Could Never Be Your Woman, The Wedding Ringer, A Guy Thing, I Don't Know How She Does It

6 Movies watched on cable (not saved): Over Her Dead Body, Loser, Moonlight and Valentino, Sex Drive, The Answer Man, The Boy Next Door

5 watched on Netflix: The Wrong Missy, You People, A Walk to Remember, She's the Man, Your Place or Mine

1 watched on iTunes: An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn
4 watched on Amazon Prime: People Places Things, Think Like a Man, Think Like a Man Too, Somebody I Used to Know
2 watched on Hulu: Together Together, The Last Song

1 watched on Paramount+: The Back-up Plan

1 watched on Peacock: Bros

1 watched on Pluto TV: LOL

1 watched on Roku: Alex & Emma

2 watched on a random site: Made in America, Whatever It Takes

29 TOTAL

And here's todays' line-up for TCM's "31 Days of Oscar", Day 21: 

Best Director Nominees:

5:30 am "Anna Christie" (1930)

7:00 am "Lady for a Day" (1933)

8:45 am "The Southerner" (1945)

10:30 am "Bad Day at Black Rock" (1955)

12:00 pm "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" (1948)

2:15 pm "Never on Sunday" (1960)

4:00 pm "Witness for the Prosecution" (1957)

6:15 pm "Midnight in Paris" (2011)

Best Director Winners:

8:00 pm "The Quiet Man" (1952)

10:30 pm "Giant" (1956)

2:00 am "All Quiet on the Western Front" (1930)

4:30 am "The Divine Lady" (1929)

OK, 5 seen out of 12 today. "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre", "Witness for the Prosecution", "Midnight in Paris", "Giant" and "All Quiet on the Western Front".  That's something, right? This brings me to 84 seen out of 240, up to 35%.  I'm not sure how my percentage can go up at this point if I've seen less than half of today's films, but that's how math works, I guess. Still with just 10 days left in the countdown I don't see how I'm going to get back to 40%.

THE PLOT: A woman conceives twins through artificial insemination, then meets the man of her dreams later that same day. 

AFTER: There's been some debate raging in our country about when life begins, and for many years it seemed like maybe we'd settled this, landing on the notion that life begins with birth, but then others saying life begins at conception, and now things are all fuzzy again. (We still count how old someone is from the day they were born, and we still have birthdays and not conception-days, so I still have hope that this planet won't get over-populated and good sense can prevail in the cases of rape, incest and protecting the health of at risk pregnant mothers).  

The latest wrinkle concerns frozen embryos in Alabama, which the state courts have decided are children and therefore alive, despite being frozen and incapable of breathing, thinking or functioning in their current state.  Because they're embryos.  Somebody has confused the potential for life with life itself, it seems, and now the whole process of in-vitro fertilization, in which the extra embryos are destroyed at some point, is tantamount to murder, and any clinic that was helpful in creating life is now, in the eyes of the court, equivalent to a death camp.  

So here's a wacky thought, maybe take a look at the science involved and learn what an embryo really is, instead of letting God, or your notion of God, or someone who says they speak for God (which is ridiculous if you just think about it) determine what an embryo is and whether it's allive, or just has the potential to be alive in the future, because those two states are different.  We don't look at a ball of dough, a can of tomato sauce and a package of mozzarella cheese and say, "Look, it's a pizza!"  No, those things are just the ingredients, together they have the POTENTIAL to be a pizza, but it's going to take some time and some work and an oven before you can truly call that a pizza - until then, if the cheese was moldy you'd probably want to throw it out, and sure, then maybe you're not eating pizza for dinner, because you've thrown away a vital pizza ingredient, but you didn't throw away a pizza, you just threw out some bad cheese.  Can we get some clarity on this point, please?  

My point is that you can't have it both ways - if you don't like abortion and you want to outlaw that, we've got a conflict there between living in a free society where we have a separation of church and state and a group of people thinking that they have to regulate a process because it's what God wants, allegedly.  But if you want to regulate abortion, then you also have to regulate IVF, which is only fair, because you've decided that messing with reproduction is messing with God's plan for us.  We're either living in a free country or in "The Handmaid's Tale", and I have hopes that the legal system will eventually work this all out, only it may take an election year or two, and right now it could still go either way.  Look, I don't have kids and I'm not likely to have kids, so I don't have a dog in this fight, but I'd like very much for humans as a species to not have so many kids that we break the planet any more than we already have. 

OK, rant over, let's get to the romance movie. Really what we're dealing with here is bad timing, put to use for comic effect in a rom-com.  Zoe has dated "many, many" guys over the last five years, but for some reason has never found "the one" that she wants to marry and/or have a family with. Umm, look, I kind of see the problem here, it's probably not a LACK of male partners, probably exactly the opposite.  I saw Albert Brooks interviewed on the Bill Maher show, promoting the documentary made about his life and career, and they ran what he said about how he found the love of his life.  Very simply, he stopped looking - and I love this quote, it's SO Albert Brooks.  So I think the problem here is that Zoe just never stopped looking, so maybe she found the "right guy" three or four times, she just never stopped looking.  Or she's secretly afraid of commitment, who can say but I'm going to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that she just forgot to settle, and settling is very important, because then you stop looking and you can maybe accomplish something.  Marriage is like a job, and at some point you need to stop job-hunting and actually, you know, maybe do some work.  

So she decides to have a baby on her own - fortunately she had a few jobs in the tech industry or something, before she left that career to own and run a pet store.  But she's apparently got some money saved up, enough to pay for the sperm bank and the IVF treatments, the doctor bills, pregnancy clothes, baby supplies, child-care and schools, hopefully.  I know, I know it's fiction and we shouldn't be concerned about this, but fiction still needs to reflect the real world and all of its challenges.  I still need to believe that these characters can pay their bills on a monthly basis and afford the NYC apartments that I see them living in, otherwise, what exactly are we doing, Hollywood? 

Anyway, she meets an attractive man as they fight over a cab on a rainy day, as you do, and then she sees him again, selling his cheese at a Farmer's Market.  Seems like fate or kismet that they run into each other again and again, but it happens, especially if you hang out in the same Manhattan neighborhoods each day or ride the same subway trains or hail cabs from the same corner, again and again.  So let's assume that the Farmer's Market is somewhere near her pet store and we'll work forward from there, OK?  And then once you notice somebody and you recognize their face, you're more likely to notice them again if you see them again. 

They meet cute and they start dating, but she doesn't QUITE know how to tell him that she might be pregnant.  Then things get overly confused when her dog breaks the pregnancy tester and for some reason eats the test strip with the plus sign on it - this was all very wonky, and the plot of a movie really shouldn't depend on whether a handicapped dog in one of those little doggie wheelchairs throws up or not.  

But there's a lot of vomiting in this movie, again, hardly ideal, but that's how we know Zoe is pregnant for sure, she throws up, because isn't that what pregnant women do?  J. Lo's character throws up when she smells seafood, she throws up when she's nervous, she throws up at the drop of a hat - so if watching a beautiful woman is somehow your kink, man, are you in luck here.  The bigger problem, of course, is how do you tell the man you're dating that you're pregnant, by anonymous sperm donor, and then what are the consequences of that?  I would say that of course, honesty is the best policy and she should of course tell him sooner rather than later, but really, what's the harm?  It's not like he's going to figure out that she's pregnant in a few months, maybe he'll just think she's gaining weight and throwing up a lot.  JK. 

Seriously, though, there was perhaps a temptation to go down the road of, "Well, just don't tell him, allow him to think that it's HIS baby, and she got pregnant right after they slept together for the first time."  Well, that would be wrong, so thankfully the movie doesn't even flirt with going down that road.  She does tell him the truth, and sure, there's fall-out from that, they split up briefly but then they decide they'd rather be together than apart, and Stan has to decide if he wants to be along on this crazy ride.  Besides, he lied to her, too, he didn't mention that he's still in night school and trying to make something of himself - after he'd been married, opened up a Vermont inn with his wife, and then the business failed and he got divorced too.  He now runs his parents' farm and he's making the best of that by crafting artisanal cheese, which is NOT a terrible plan.  But he wants to run his own cheese and produce shop, unfortunately he's more a of a planner than a doer - well, you do have to dream it before you can do it. 

The rest of the film is just more weird complications that have to be endured and dealt with - like the Single Moms group invites them to a live at-home birth that involves a swimming pool (this was apparently a trend back around 2010) and what they witness SHOULD have been enough to convince anyone to give birth in a more reasonable hospital-like setting.  Zoe tries to buy a double-stroller for the twins and more baby clothes than they would ever need, but then the stroller was too big or something, so Stan went to the stroller store, and all of THOSE strollers were too big, too - I don't know, this part was really unclear and he ended up commissioning a custom-made stroller from the sales clerk, and that stroller was somehow better?  Again, very unclear, if there was a better way to make strollers, why didn't the stroller store sell them that way?  Similarly, if there was a benefit to Zoe sleeping with the special pillow, then why did Stan throw it in the dumpster?  I get that he was jealous that she was snuggling with the pillow instead of him, but it's either "sleep pillow is good" or "sleep pillow is bad", the film needed to pick one.  Is it "home birth good" or "home birth bad"?  Again, pick one.

I don't really care for all the pregnancy stuff - I'm not in this film's target market.  I came here just for the romance part of the story, all the rest is just mindless noise.  I'm glad these two were able to work things out and find a way to overcome bad timing and stay together, but really, how's this going to work if we've calculated out how much two babies cost to raise and the film freely admits there's just not enough money in the world to get that done?  So, therefore, it's impossible to pay for two kids and I'm wondering why anybody in the world would even attempt it.  Thanks, you're justifying my lifestyle and my decision to stay out of that demographic. 

Also starring Alex O'Loughlin (last seen in "The Holiday"), Michaela Watkins (last seen in "Ibiza: Love Drunk"), Eric Christian Olsen (last seen in "Cellular"), Anthony Anderson (last seen in "You People"), Noureen DeWulf (last seen in "Endings, Beginnings"), Melissa McCarthy (last seen in "The Little Mermaid" (2023)), Linda Lavin (last seen in "Betty White: First Lady of Television"), Tom Bosley (last seen in "Divorce American Style"), Maribeth Monroe (last seen in "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle"), Danneel Harris Ackles (last seen in "Still Waiting..."), Robert Klein (last seen in "Tales from the Darkside: The Movie"), Carlease Burke (last seen in "Save the Date"), Amy Block (last seen in "Keeping Up with the Joneses"), Jennifer Elise Cox (last seen in "A Very Brady Sequel"), Adam Rose (last seen in "The Bounty Hunter"), Peggy Miley (last seen in "Just Before I Go"), Sadie May Beebe, Logan Lauriston, Barbara Perry (last seen in "I Was a Male War Bride"), Art Frankel, Anslem King, Manos Gavras, Rowan Blanchard (last seen in "A Wrinkle in Time"), Riley B. Smith, Samantha Hall, Jared Gilmore, Peyton Lucas, Marlowe Peyton, with a cameo from Cesar Millan, archive footage of Ron Howard and the voice of Frank Welker (last heard in "Species"). 

RATING: 4 out of 10 sea urchins on a server's tray

The Boy Next Door

Year 16, Day 59 - 2/28/24 - Movie #4,660

BEFORE: Kristin Chenoweth carries over from "Bros" and all types of romance films are being considered this year, including tales of obsessive love gone wrong - hey, I included "Swimfan" last year, or was that the year before?  If that one counts then this one does, too.  

Here's todays' line-up for TCM's "31 Days of Oscar", Day 20: 

Best Sound Nominees:

7:00 am "Gold Diggers of 1933" (1933)

9:00 am "Naughty Marietta" (1935)

11:00 am "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" (1939)

1:00 pm "This Land Is Mine" (1943)

1:45 pm "The Last Metro" (1980)

3:00 pm "The Brave One" (1956)

5:00 pm "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" (1963)

Best Sound Winners:

8:00 pm "Grand Prix" (1966)

11:15 pm "The Hurricane" (1937)

1:15 am "Strike Up the Band" (1940)

3:30 am "The Great Caruso" (1951)

Damn, only 1 seen out of 11 today.  But a good one, "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" is one of my favorite films of all time, and maybe the first film where I learned about what cameos were, as I watched the film to see The Three Stooges and also learned who Buster Keaton was. 

This brings me to 79 seen out of 228, down to 34.6%. We've still got three categories left, though, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Picture, where I hope to do better. 

THE PLOT: A woman, separated from her unfaithful husband, falls for a younger man who has moved in next door, but their torrid affair soon takes a dangerous turn.

AFTER: Kicking off an almost-week of Jennifer Lopez movies, I was going to watch six but I think I'm going to cut it down to 5, because I've just heard such terrible things about "Gigli", so I'm in no rush to watch it - someday, maybe.  But I've added "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore", which is an Oscar-winning film, and that trumps a Razzie-winning film, right?  OK, so I need to drop something to make space.  We should have a tie for first, then, once the romance chain is over - at the moment Toni Collette still leads with five appearances in 2024. 

When I saw this film come out, it sure sounded like a film she's made before - "Enough", where she was on the run, hiding from an abusive husband and then I think she fought back by learning martial arts or something and, quite literally, fighting back.  So at first I thought maybe Ms. Lopez had been in so many films that she was starting to repeat herself, or remake films that she was in before. No, this one's a bit different, it's not her ex-husband who's out to harm her, it's the attractive high-school student next door who transfers into her English class after sleeping with her.  SO many things wrong with that, the first of which is that the guy is like 28 or something but never finished high school, so sure, put him in a class with the 16-year-olds, what could POSSIBLY go wrong?  He forges the transfer paperwork and also sends an e-mail from her address to the principal, requesting that he be added to her literature class.  

First of course, he shows up and charms her after moving into his grandfather's house to help out while Gramps gets a kidney transplant.  He helps fix her automatic garage door, then he, well, he takes care of some other equipment around the house that needs attention, if you know what I mean.  And here it looked like Claire Peterson might get back together with her ex-husband after some friendly co-parenting, however since his next business trip is to San Francisco, that reminded her that he cheated with a woman from there, so she suspects that maybe he's still seeing that woman, what a turn-off.  It's too bad, her soon-to-be-ex, Garrett is very apologetic, he swears the affair is over, but how can she be sure?  This is probably enough to justify Claire sleeping with Noah, but remember she does this BEFORE he's a student in her class, so technically she didn't sleep with a student.  

She realizes her mistake, though, and she tries to end things, but it's too late, Noah has become obsessed with her, to the point where he threatens her family if she doesn't continue to date him or at least sleep with him, and really, that's the mark of a true romantic, isn't it?  "I will kill your family unless you keep acting like you love me."  Nope, no red flags there at all, just go on about your business.  When the brakes go out on Garrett's sportscar, nobody really puts two and two together, except Claire knows Noah did it, and possibly that's how his parents died, too.  Again, nothing to see here, please move along.  

Meanwhile, Noah befriends Claire's son, takes him under his wing and convinces him to take up boxing (N.P.: what high school has a BOXING team?  Wrestling, sure, but boxing?) and then starts to turn him against his own father.  Noah takes out the kid who's bullying Claire's son and fractures his skull, which gets him expelled.  Ah, the things we do for love.  Noah may be down, but he's not out, he takes his shot by kidnapping the vice-principal and then Claire's husband and son.  Well, he didn't have much of an endgame plan, sure, but you've maybe got to admire his tenacity, right?  Sure, he had pictures and video of himself sleeping with his teacher, but I suppose just getting her fired wouldn't have gone far towards winning her over - no, you've got to think big, like triple kidnapping big, I get it. 

This was all pretty predictable, in the same vein as "Fatal Attraction" and "Swimfan", only the obsessed person is male here, for a change.  Hey, it's J. Lo, maybe the guy just couldn't control himself.  Can you imagine having her as your English teacher?  Maybe you'd obsess over her too - I hate to victim-blame here, but she may just have that effect on teenagers, especially 28-year-old ones. 

Also starring Jennifer Lopez (last seen in "The Mother"), Ryan Guzman (last seen in "Everybody Wants Some!"), Ian Nelson (last seen in "The Hunger Games: Catching Fire"), John Corbett (last seen in "Street Kings"), Lexi Atkins (last seen in "Ted 2"), Hill Harper (last seen in "Beloved"), Jack Wallace (last seen in "Senior Moment"), Adam Hicks, Francois Chau (last heard in "Raya and the Last Dragon"), Bailey Chase, Kent Avenido (last seen in "The Gambler"), Travis Schuldt (last seen in "The Giant Mechanical Man"), Brian Mahoney (last seen in "The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day"), Raquel Gardner (last seen in "Species II"), Kari Perdue, Chad Bullard, Forrest Hoffman, Alex Geschwind.

RATING: 4 out of 10 trips to the hardware store 

Bros

Year 16, Day 58 - 2/27/24 - Movie #4,659

BEFORE: Seth Meyers carries over from "I Don't Know How She Does It" and we're trying to be more inclusive here at the Movie Year, so I've programmed a gay rom-com, with the assumption that it will fall into place here, I mean a romance film is a romance film, right?  

Here's todays' line-up for TCM's "31 Days of Oscar", Day 19: 

Best Foreign Language Film Nominees:

6:00 am "Woman in the Dunes" (1964)

8:30 am "The Shop on Main Street" (1965)

10:45 am "The Fireman's Ball" (1967)

12:00 pm "The Virgin Spring" (1960)

1:45 pm "The Last Metro" (1980)

4:00 pm "Mon Oncle" (1958)

6:00 pm "Au Revoir Les Enfants" (1987)

Best Special Effects Winners:

8:00 pm "8 1/2" (1963)

10:30 pm "Babette's Feast" (1987)

12:30 am "Indochine" (1992)

3:15 am "Sundays and Cybele" (1962)

5:15 am "Closely Watched Trains" (1967)

Wow, another goose egg for me today - I probably should have watched some of these by now, like "8 1/2", a true classic - but I watched the English language remake, "9", but that doesn't count for much on today's tally.  And "Babette's Feast" has been recommended to me, by an actor who was starring in a stage version of the same story, but as you may know, I don't take recommendations for my blog, except very rarely - in fact, somebody recommending a movie might make me LESS likely to want to watch it. But foreign films in general don't really fly with American audiences, so that kind of works the same way.  By all means, if you don't want anybody watching your classic movies channel today, program a bunch of foreign language films.  This brings me to 78 seen out of 217, down to 35.9%

THE PLOT: Two men with commitment problems attempt a relationship. 

AFTER: Well, I sit here day after day, complaining about how THIS romance movie is almost exactly like THAT one, because they all have carnivals in them for the high-school kids to double-date at, and why can't somebody do something different?  I sure got what I asked for today, in fact I got way more than I expected.  I keep almost apologizing for movies made in 2003 or 2004 by saying, "Well, it was a different time..." and it was - because here's a movie that reflects how much has changed - it's full of gay men, but also features lesbian, bisexual and trans actors, in fact straight actors might be in the minority on this cast.  So you have to think that dating and relationships have gotten much more complex, because nothing's as simple as generic rom-coms make them out to be, there's a whole wide spectrum of options out there, if you're young and into it.  I'm not, but I try very hard not to be all judgy about it, I'm a bit fascinated by this world even though I'm not a part of it. 

For starters, there's the whole pronouns thing - people wanted to be called by the pronouns they want, reflecting who they feel like on the inside and not be defined by their genetics or their body parts, so some people still go be "He/Him" and "She/Her" and that may not be the same pronouns they were assigned at birth, while other people want to be called "They/Them" and for the most part, people at large have been willing to accommodate.  The whole English language changed so that people would feel better about themselves, and that's an amazing thing.  Language is mutable, of course, so naturally it should change, to reflect the changing times and the changes in attitude.  "Marriage" was once a word that had a very specific meaning, and that has changed, too, first because we put the word "gay" before it, and now you don't even have to do that any more, "marriage" now just means a commitment between any two people, then can be a man and a woman or two men or two women or some other combination.  And despite the conservatives complaining about the "slippery slope", so far changing the definition of that word has not led to people marrying animals, and they warned us that would be the next illogical step. 

"Thrupple" (or "throuple") is a commonplace word now, even though we already had "threesome", that word just wasn't doing the job, so a new one was coined.  You probably know it's a couple that involves three people in a (somewhat) committed relationship - but other new words have come along, like "polyamorous" and the new words are always just a bit behind, by that I mean they reflect things that have been part of the culture for years, but we just weren't discussing them openly, maybe because we didn't have the right words yet, which help us gain some understanding maybe.  But then even using words like "tops" and "bottoms" to help define and understand relationships maybe tells us just a little bit too much, but they're there now, so what was once a very private thing has become less so, but the words do help us understand a bit about what's going on behind closed doors - whether that's good or bad I don't really know.

We don't have specific words for a man who transitioned into a woman who still dates women, or the reverse, a women who transitions into a man and dates men, but I think over time as the situations become more normalized maybe there will be specific words for all the spaces in-between the traditional man-woman thing that everybody was so comfortable with for thousands of years.  But again, all the new words and definitions are there to help us understand situations that have always been there, in some fashion, but we weren't talking about.  All of this is really just my way of saying that I don't usually watch movies with so many gay male sex scenes, because that's not the world I frequent, but it is the world we all live in. OK? 

I went into this thinking that it doesn't matter, gay or straight, a rom-com is a rom-com, but that's not the case at all, in fact the main message of the film debunks the standard "love is love is love" myth that it's all the same, no matter the orientation or gender or self-identification.  So perhaps that's just what the cis people tell themselves to make it easier for them to accept gay and trans people.  But there's now just a new language that's developed, there are new cultural norms, new practices, new ways of BEING when you let people decide for themselves who they want to be and who they want to love.  The gay people from the 1970's and the 1990's would probably be completely blown away to see what's going down today, but that's human evolution for you.  To be "conservative" and ignorant of what's happening in people's everyday lives therefore seems really short-sighted, and I'm saying this as a straight man. Very few of the people I work with who are in their 20's are completely straight, everyone's on the scale somewhere, and I have to respect that.  To be on the safe side, I just assume all of my co-workers are gay or at least bi, and I'm usually right - I can claim to have well-functioning gaydar, at least. 

Anyway, the details - Bobby is a 40-year old gay man who claims to have never been in love, or at least he's never found somebody to love exclusively.  He frequents Grindr dates, where the small talk usually amounts to "Hey, what's up?" before they get naked, then he walks around the city for a while or hangs out with friends, and combined that's a romantic single life, if that can somehow not be a contradiction in terms.  He meets Aaron in a club, of course, but Aaron keeps ditching him for hotter guys, Aaron's not on Grindr or any of the other apps, plus he's got a regular-hookup with a gay couple, so he doesn't get with Bobby right away, but the more time they spend together, the more they envision maybe getting over their commitment-phobias and slowly they unlock the secrets of hooking up with each other.  It involves some pushing, shoving and slapping before they make out, but I'm trying hard not to judge what I don't really understand. 

Meanwhile, Bobby gets an opportunity to work at NYC's first queer-based museum (I'm not sure if there really is one IRL, besides the Stonewall Inn, but I'm going to Google that) and he encounters difficulties working with the bi- and trans- people who are also the curators on some kind of board, because of course everyone has a different opinion on what should be in the museum, based on their own experiences.  Even a proposed exhibit about whether Abraham Lincoln was gay is a matter of some controversy - some members feel that just because he was into wrestling and lived with several male roommates over the years, that's not enough proof to say he was gay or even bi.  

Things progress between Bobby and Aaron, and they take a trip together to Provincetown, they have to work out whether they want to be monogamous or allow each other the freedom of an open relationship, and then when Aaron introduces Bobby to his parents, it's a bit of a disaster because Bobby is so outspoken about teaching a gay friendly curriculum in elementary schools, and Aaron's mom is a second grade teacher who disagrees, at least at first.  Aaron makes the mistake of asking Bobby to "tone it down", which is maybe the worst thing you can ask a gay person to do, to not be themselves.  Eventually, despite the interference of Debra Messing, they work something out, which is to have their own form of commitment, namely to stay together for the next three months and then re-assess things.  Well, considering how complicated things in today's world, maybe something like that is the best you can hope for.  Sure, gay marriage has been legal across the country for a while now, but that's not the end-all and be-all for all relationships, because if you have gay marriage then you also have to have gay divorce, and gay "almost getting married and somebody changing their mind right before the ceremony".  

I really want to get to the film "Fire Island", too, because I worked at the big gala premiere of that film, Bowen Yang was there, John Cameron Mitchell was there (though I recognized him and my gay co-worker did not) and the line stretched down the block and around the corner.  We filled up the large theater, had a screening, then filled up the large theater AGAIN for a second screening, which leads me to conclude that America is not only ready for movies like that, they are desperate for more of them, there's clearly an underserved portion of the populace where LGBTQ+ based movies are concerned.  For years there were only a few art-house movies, like "The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love", "The Crying Game" and such.  Then of course "Brokeback Mountain" came along, but when there's money to made, eventually Hollywood is going to figure out how to make gay movies mainstream without being all condescending about it, and "Bros" is a big step in that direction.  The main complaint here seems to be that the film tried too hard to be relatable, and thus failed to do so.

Also starring Billy Eichner (last heard in "The Lion King" (2019)), Luke Macfarlane (last seen in "Kinsey"), Guy Branum (last seen in "No Strings Attached"), Miss Lawrence (last seen in "The United States vs. Billie Holliday"), TS Madison (last seen in "Zola"), Dot-Marie Jones (last seen in "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story"), Jim Rash (last seen in "The Nines"), Eve Lindley, Monica Raymund (last seen in "Arbitrage"), Guillermo Diaz (last seen in "The Terminal"), Jai Rodriguez (last seen in "The New Guy"), Amanda Bearse, Debra Messing (last seen in "Irresistible"), Peter Kim, Justin Covington, Symone, Ryan Faucett, Becca Blackwell, D'Lo, Harvey Fierstein (last heard in "Mulan II"), Bowen Yang (last heard in "Night at the Museum: Kahmunrah Rises Again"), Dahlia Rodriguez, Derrick Delgado (last seen in "Tick...Tick...BOOM!"), George Dvorsky, Jamyl Dobson, Brock Ciarlelli, Jillian Gottlieb, Everett Quinton (last seen in "Hello Again"), Thomas Vorsteg, Julia Scotti, Feliziano Flores, Ryan Daly, Brayden Morgan, William Popp, Joey Taranto, Courtney Bassett, Doug Trapp (last seen in "Irresistible"), Shannon O'Neill, Matthew Wilkas (last seen in "Top Five"), Chris Henry Coffey, Alexandra Lopez Galan (last seen in "West Side Story")

with cameos from Kenan Thompson (last seen in "Clifford the Big Red Dog"), Amy Schumer (last seen in "I Feel Pretty"), Kristin Chenoweth (last seen in "Idina Menzel: Which Way to the Stage?"), Ben Stiller (last seen in "Hubie Halloween") and archive footage of Meg Ryan (last seen in "Top Gun: Maverick"), Tom Hanks (last seen in "De Palma"), Brad Paisley.

RATING: 5 out of 10 Christmas films on the "HallHeart" channel with token gay characters. 

I Don't Know How She Does It

Year 16, Day 57 - 2/26/24 - Movie #4,658

BEFORE: Greg Kinnear carries over from "The Last Song" and should this one count as a romance film or as a Mother's Day film?  I've been on the fence about this one, but I guess since I need it here to help link my February chain together, I'm treating it as a film about a marriage, not about how hard it is to be a mother.  Maybe it's both things, that's OK, but I need it here as a film about a marriage where there are kids, and OK, what effect parenting has on the relationship.  

Here's todays' line-up for TCM's "31 Days of Oscar", Day 18: 

Best Special Effects Nominees:

6:30 am "Green Dolphin Street" (1947)

9:00 am "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" (1944)

11:30 am "Mutiny on the Bounty" (1962)

2:45 pm "Forbidden Planet" (1956)

4:30 pm "Topper Returns" (1941)

6:15 pm "Them!" (1954)

Best Special Effects Winners:

8:00 pm "Fantastic Voyage" (1966)

10:00 pm "Blithe Spirit" (1945)

11:45 pm "2001" (1968)

2:30 am "Destination Moon" (1950)

4:15 am "Tom Thumb" (1958)

Another 6 seen out of these 11 ("Mutiny on the Bounty", "Forbidden Planet", "Topper Returns", "Them!", "Fantastic Voyage" and "2001") brings me to 78 seen out of 205, or 38%. It's a little weird that a classic movie channel is celebrating special effects from the 1940's and 50's, because they were all terrible by todays' standards.  The technology of special effects, by its very nature, got better as time went on.  

THE PLOT: A comedy centered on the life of Kate Reddy, a finance executive who is the breadwinner for her husband and two kids. 

AFTER: I think this could have worked as EITHER a romance film or as a Mother's Day film, but I just needed it here to make the chain that I wanted, this film ended up serving as a connector between the Miley Cyrus films and the Jennifer Lopez films, but that's OK, that's still a vital purpose. There's the standard love triangle here as Kate Reddy's new business partner has some type of romantic feelings for her, and this grows the more time they spend together, but really, that's a red herring here, she was never going to leave her husband for this guy.  However, her spending more time with the rich business partner and less time with her husband and two kids is a source of some concern, and sure, there's a strain on her marriage, but this was maybe going to happen no matter what. 

As the movie so enjoys pointing out, there's still a terrible double standard, as women are expected to somehow juggle a career, a marriage, and child care, while also maintaining her sanity, and stereotypically men aren't expected to do this, not as often anyway, and still not as a matter of course. I think things have changed over the last 20-30 years, and caregiving fathers are more commonplace now, women who earn more than their spouses are also more common now.  It's just this traditional "male as breadwinner" thing is partially being phased out, and I"m fine with that.  Who wants to work hard at a soul-crushing career for a pile of money, anyway.  JK, I would if I could but I haven't really had the same opportunities, nobody's hiring white males now because all the HR departments are trying to make their companies "more diverse" so hiring another white guy is counter-productive.  That's my story and I'm sticking to it. 

People keep constantly saying the movie's tagline when referring to Kate, they simply don't know how she "does it."  The problem here is that she DOESN'T do it, not successfully, anyway - the movie keeps reminding us that she's breaking one promise after another to her husband and kids.  Plus the family uses a nanny, and so that's cheating, right?  The nanny is a surfer (in BOSTON?) so she's constantly late, but I guess she's helpful in the long run. Maybe there are some beach areas in Massachusetts where people do surf, but come on, isn't it too cold for that like six months out of the year?  Kate also resorts to cheats like buying a store-made pie for the school bake sale, then smushing it up a little so it looks homemade.  Again, that's cheating!  

Her best friend, Allison, is another working mother, only a single one. Their nemeses are the "Momsters", these are the mothers of other kids at the same school who do NOT have jobs, they take care of their children full-time (or at least pretend to, they seem to have nannies too) and then act all opinionated and look down on the mothers who are trying to have careers, too.  Hey it's fine if your husband is a well-paid lawyer or something, but if he's just a carpenter or remodeler or something, who can blame Kate for traveling for her higher-paying job in the financial industry?  Should one type of mom REALLY be looking down on the other type of mom just because they're not full-time moms?  Why not a little solidarity, why can't these women band together and collectively demand a little more parenting be done by men?  

For example, we see Kate and her husband Richard working hard to control the wild birthday party for their son, and then they have to do all the clean-up after, too.  Meanwhile, Wendy, one of the momsters tells the camera that she knows how to throw a perfect birthday party, too, she just calls up Ernesto at Party Services and they handle the whole thing.  Man, this movie really want us to hate rich moms, they keep making them look all judgmental and spoiled.  Why do this if it's going to alienate even a portion of the moms in the audience? 

Kate is stretched thin, between the proposal for a new type of retirement accounts, flying to Cleveland to meet with the investors, bouncing back and forth between Boston and New York, while still trying to be a parent and also have a loving relationship with her husband, even though she's been traveling off and on for two months.  And this is just the proposal for the new accounts, once she gets the job there will be more work in setting the whole thing up and maintaining the new accounts, so I'll guess she'll see her kids over the holidays, at least.  NO, but wait, she's got an emergency meeting on Thanksgiving weekend, it's the only time that the CEO can meet with them!  (NITPICK POINT: Nobody, simply nobody works on Thanksgiving weekend, not even the top top most successful executives.  This is why Manhattan always looks like a ghost town during the Macy's parade, all the real New Yorkers have flown off or driven off to somewhere else.)

Ironically, the movie also tries to do too much - it can't fix love triangles, give parental advice, and show women how to juggle their careers and family, keep their bosses from falling in love with them and not make their husbands feel "less than" if their jobs don't bring in as much of a salary.  Then there's the business of also trying to convince single pregnant women to carry their babies to term (because even if they say they "don't want kids", they're really just misunderstanding what a wonderful process it all is.  Give me a freakin' break, if somebody says they don't want to be a parent, just let them not be a parent!).  Really overstepping here, if Kate's assistant wanted to get an abortion, she really should have stayed out of it and let her make her own decision. 

Of course, the plotlines go a bit to the extreme, like when the entire class gets lice, and Kate is affected too.  But another NITPICK POINT, I don't think there are businesses that exist JUST to help people rid themselves of head lice.  This is not a thing in Massachusetts, not anywhere - have you ever seen a "Lice Enders" shop?  What a terrible business model, just sitting around the converted hair salon, just waiting for the kids in your town to get infected with head lice. How does that place even stay in business?  That would be like opening a clothing store and only selling shirts that have one arm, or pants that are missing a leg, and just waiting for people who are amputees to move to your town and discover your very speclalized shop. 

And the big revelation at the end?  Kate realizes that her husband and kids are feeling neglected, so she vows to cut back on her business trips and spend more time with them.  Oops, sorry, should have said SPOILER ALERT, but that's the big banner headline?  Couldn't she have just figured that out from the start and done more telecommuting?  Worked from home on her computer?  I guess maybe that just wasn't done as commonly in 2011 as it is now, and we have the pandemic to thank for it.  More parents these days are finding ways to work from home so they CAN have it all, they can have a hand in raising their kids AND also get their work done - I mean, sure, thank God for computers and all that, but I wonder just how many people working at home now are working as hard as they would have if they were still commuting to an office.  At least when you're in an office you're not likely to be distracted by your TV, your music and yes, your kids. Just saying. 

Also starring Sarah Jessica Parker (last seen in "Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me"), Pierce Brosnan (last seen in "Black Adam"), Christina Hendricks (last heard in "Scoob!"), Kelsey Grammer (last seen in "Think Like a Man Too"), Seth Meyers (last seen in "The Last Blockbuster"), Olivia Munn (last seen in "Love Wedding Repeat"), Jane Curtin (last seen in "Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time"), Mark Blum (last seen in "Human Capital"), Busy Philipps (last heard in "DC League of Super-Pets"), Sarah Shahi (also last seen in "Black Adam"), Jessica Szohr (last seen in "Ted 2"), Emma Rayne Lyle, Julius Goldberg, Theodore Goldberg, James Murtaugh (last seen in "Night Falls on Manhattan"), Eugenia Yuan (last seen in "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny"), Beth Fowler, Michael Hogan (last seen in "Coffee and Cigarettes"), Marceline Hugot (last seen in "She Said"), Steve Routman (last seen in "The Trial of the Chicago 7"), Raymond McAnally, Timothy Finch (last seen in "The Wedding Ringer")

with a cameo from Mika Brzezinski (last seen in "Running with Beto") and archive footage of Cary Grant (last seen in "De Palma"), Rosalind Russell (last seen in "Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind"). 

RATING: 4 out of 10 PowerPoint slides

The Last Song

Year 16, Day 56 - 2/25/24 - Movie #4,657

BEFORE: Miley Cyrus carries over from "LOL", obvi.  And Greg Kinnear was in one of the first romance films this year, I said that I'd circle back to him, and now is that time. There was so much cross-over between the romance films that I simply couldn't follow every link, there was an embarrassment of riches in that regard, which can make it tough to land on an order - knowing that film #2 in the chain links to #25 is great, but it's also useless and ultimately confusing if putting those two films together doesn't make for a "better" order, whatever that is. 

I'm trying to get back into playing some video-games, but as soon as I start, I realize I just don't have the time.  Plus I remember having a lot of fun playing "Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories", and suggesting to my wife that she play it too, but she skipped that one and moved on to GTA 4 and 5, and I haven't played either of those.  I never finished "GTA: San Andreas", I reached a point where the missions were too difficult for me, so I stopped.  But I did play some of these games over during the pandemic, then I went back to work and didn't have time to keep going - movies, TV, comic books and work all pull me in different directions, and something's got to give.  Mostly I play games on my phone now, that I seem to have time for, but I'm even falling behind on those.  I've still got another week before my next shift at the theater, so maybe I can fit in some more video-games, but last night I stayed up until 5 am playing GTA and I really shouldn't do that often, then I sleep until noon and my sleep schedule is already terrible, I don't need to make it any worse. 

Here's todays' line-up for TCM's "31 Days of Oscar", Day 17: 

Best Actress Nominees:

6:30 am "Camille" (1937)

8:30 am "I'll Cry Tomorrow" (1955)

10:30 am "Baby Doll" (1956)

12:45 pm "A Star Is Born" (1954)

4:00 pm "Far From Heaven" (2002)

6:00 pm "Gaslight" (1944)

Best Actress Winners:

8:00 pm "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1951)

10:15 pm "Moonstruck" (1987)

12:15 am "The Country Girl" (1954)

2:15 am "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" (1966)

4:45 am "Dangerous" (1935)

Another 6 seen out of these 11 ("A Star Is Born", "Far From Heaven", "Gaslight", "A Streetcar Named Desire", "Moonstruck" and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?")  This brings me to 72 seen out of 194, or 37.1%. Finally my score is improving, only now it's so late in the game that all progress will be slow.  I'll do well on Special Effects but then probably terrible on Foreign Language Films. 

THE PLOT: A rebellious girl is sent to a Southern beach town for the summer to stay with her father. Through their mutual love of music, the estranged duo learn to reconnect. 

AFTER: This is another movie based on a Nicholas Sparks book, like "The Notebook" and "A Walk to Remember".  There are a few more of those out there but the films ended up quite below the radar, so I have to decide if I want to add them in the future.  Probably next year's brick films need some mortar to join them together, so I really should take a look - but there will be plenty of time for that. I won't need to land on a viewing order for next February until December of this year, and the landscape could be completely different by then.  It's hard to do a chain AND stay within a genre, sure, but if there are enough films from that genre on the list, and enough connections, then certain things are possible. 

But with a story from Nicholas Sparks, you can expect things to fall into the "It's Complicated" arena, and it won't just be that somebody thought she saw her boyfriend making out with someone at the bathroom stall in school, and made an assumption based on the purse she saw on the floor.  We've got some serious issues tonight, like the fact that Ronnie's parents are divorced and she got in some kind of trouble up north for shoplifting, plus she got accepted into Juilliard and seems to have no intention of going.  And then when she arrives in Georgia, she gets caught up in the plight of the sea turtles on the beach, and the fact that a very hungry raccoon wants to eat the eggs before they hatch.  OK, I have no idea how a city girl knows so much about sea turtles, but since she's a vegetarian we can also assume she's big on animal rights, or something?  She's got PETA on speed-dial, I don't know, but aren't raccoons also part of the natural order, and don't those little trash pandas have a right to flourish, too?  

Ronnie's father also has problems, he's helping to rebuild the local church that burned down, because he was the last one seen inside, so naturally everyone in town assumes it's his fault, either he's a secret arsonist or he was careless with some candles, either way he's to blame.  He seems to agree, because he was on some kind of medication last year that maybe clouded his judgment (umm, yeah, remember that, it might be important later).  

Meanwhile Ronnie keeps bumping into local hottie Will, who first spills her shake when she walks too close to his beach volleyball game, so she hates him from the start.  (Therefore, they're destined to be together?). Later the aquarium sends over a volunteer to help watch the turtle eggs, and what do you know, it's him.  That's a small beach town for you.  They bond, sort of, only her father says they have to sit 6 feet apart while watching the turtle eggs - HA! - doesn't he know that if he forbids them to get together then that's exactly what they'll want to do?  Or maybe that was his plan all along, so his daughter would at least be happy or distracted and not be just moping around the house and getting into trouble at the carnival.  Oh, yeah, there's a carnival in town, for like the fourth or fifth movie this year - it seems to be the go-to for this year's rom-coms, where should we send the teens on a date?  Oh, just say there's a carnival in town, because isn't there always?

Will lets Ronnie into his world, which involves working at the aquarium - but then one of his exes tracks Ronnie down and tells her, "Oh, he does that with ALL his girlfriends..." so she cools on him for a while, but come on, what's the big deal?  If you went to a movie or out to dinner with your previous lover, does that mean you can NEVER do that with your next partner?  Let's be real here, the partners change frequently but the things that you DO with your partners tend to not change, because fun things are still fun things no matter who you're with.  Right?  Don't let the haters make you think you're not special, Ronnie.  

Ronnie also gets caught up in the situation of Blaze, a local girl who's dating the very abusive dirtbag, Marcus.  Things get so bad that Marcus interrupts Will's sister's wedding while Blaze is working there and Ronnie's a guest, forcing Will to engage in a fist fight - and who gets blamed for this?  Ronnie and Blaze!  It's just not fair, how is the male dirtbag's behavior somehow the fault of the girl he's been abusing?  Calling shenanigan on this one, and Will's Rich parents needed to put the blame where it belongs.  But that's really what this film is about, people feeling guilty for things that are just NOT their fault, while the real guilty parties go unpunished.  Hey, life's not fair, sometimes you take the blame for burning down a church when you didn't do it, and sometimes a raccoon eats your eggs while you're off somewhere else, just being a turtle.

Ronnie eventually learns to lighten up, play music again and spend some quality time with her father before his illness is revealed, and her little brother pitches in to get the stained-glass window done for the church, which might be against child labor laws, but that's where we find ourselves.  So then the only remaining question is, can Ronnie forgive Will for not telling the truth about her father's innocence, and can these crazy kids transfer to colleges in the same city and maybe get back on track to have some kind of life together?  

Co-starring in this film led to a real-life relationship for Liam Hemsworth and Miley Cyrus, though they were on-again and off-again they got engaged in 2016, married in 2018, and divorced in 2020.  There's no real record of the exact cause of the break-up, but Miley had been dating both men and women before that, and also, well, she's Miley Cyrus, so I think we can read between the lines there and understand what "irreconcilable differences" means.  As one character says in this movie, "Well, sometimes love just isn't enough."  Or we can go with "it's complicated."  

Also starring Liam Hemsworth (last seen in "Empire State"), Greg Kinnear (last seen in "Loser"), Kelly Preston (last seen in "Eulogy"), Bobby Coleman (last seen in "Friends With Money"), Nick Lashaway (last seen in "In Time"), Carly Chaikin (last seen in "In a World..."), Adam Barnett, Kate Vernon (last seen in "Malcolm X"), Nick Searcy (last seen in "The Best of Enemies"), Melissa Ordway (last seen in "The Incredible Burt Wonderstone"), Carrie Malabre, Rhoda Griffis (last seen in "One Missed Call"), Lance E. Nichols (last seen in "Beautiful Creatures"), Hallock Beals, Stephanie Leigh Schlund (last seen in "The Hunger Games: Catching Fire"), Michael Jamorski, Phil Parham, Bonnie Johnson.

RATING: 5 out of 10 service shops in the Blakelee Brakes franchise