Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe

Year 16, Day 160 - 6/8/24 - Movie #4,749

BEFORE: Oh, yeah, I have access to Paramount+ now, because of some merger with Showtime, and since we pay for Showtime on premium cable, that means we also get access to the Paramount streaming service. I don't have much use for it, unless there's something on it that is exclusive and not streaming anywhere else.  Also, I might watch the other seasons of "Star Trek: Discovery" this summer if things slow down at the movie theater, which they tend to do in July and August.  (I know this sounds crazy, but the theater is run by a college, and the summer session doesn't seem to hold events there.). I watched Season 1 for free when it aired on CBS, but I refused to pay for another streaming service to watch the rest. 

I enjoyed "Beavis and Butt-Head Do America", or at least I think I did, so this is one of the rare things on Paramount+ that I'll allow to rise to the top of the list.  We also watched the new South Park specials like "The End of Obesity" because they don't seem to be making any new regular 30-minute episodes to air on Comedy Central any more. 

David Herman carries over from "Strays". 

THE PLOT: After a judge sentences them to space camp, a black hole sends our adolescent heroes 24 years into the future where the duo misuse iPhones, embark on a quest to score and become targets of the Deep State. 

AFTER: Yeah, I probably could have passed on this and not missed anything, it's not like there's any new ground being broken with a new Beavis and Butt-Head movie.  They waited 26 years to make another movie with these characters, so clearly there wasn't much demand for one, or else Mike Judge just didn't need the money, but then suddenly he did.  I hung out with Mike Judge once, he came to our booth at San Diego Comic-Con once in 2006, but that was 18 years ago, no contact or encounters with him since then.  I remember a lot of sketchbooks or autograph books suddenly appearing out of nowhere when people realized there were THREE noted animators standing in the same booth, but Judge got bored of signing things very quickly and said (in a very Butt-Head-like voice), "This sucks, I'm gonna go look at some swords or something..."

So, from what I know about animators, they tend to be very self-centered people who keep wanting to do original stuff, much of which doesn't work, so eventually they are forced to return to their characters who were popular once, and find a way to revive them.  I think there's a new "Beavis & Butt-Head" series now, I don't know if they watch music videos together in the new show, because who even knows what a music video is any more?  I don't think MTV has even aired one in 15 or 20 years, and once upon a time that was ALL they played.  Anyway, if you're curious how these characters could have not aged (or matured) at all in the last 26 years, this film explains it, they were sent 24 years into the future, from 1998 to 2022.  A real, actual, story-based reason why they haven't been on TV in so long - it's not necessary, but I guess it's nice that it's there?

Look, this could have been worse, they could have explored a whole multi-verse of Beavises and Butt-Heads, with hundreds of variations, or they'd have to travel between the dimensions in some kind of "EveryBeavis EveryButtHead All at Once" kind of thing.  Or worse, like the Spider-Verse franchise which assumed that if five Spider-Men were good, then 270 Spider-Men would be even gooder - but at some point "more" just becomes "way too much", doesn't it? Honestly, I was hoping something for a little closer to "Bill & Ted Face the Music", but this one just didn't go that way.  They actually showed some restraint here, but I bet if this was made after last year's Oscars it would have been a whole different deal. 

Instead there's just ONE other version of themselves that our heroes encounter, from a parallel dimension where everything is kind of futuristic and/or backwards, so they are called "Smart Beavis" and "Smart Butt-Head" but OF COURSE the ones we're familiar can't really wrap their heads around the whole interdimensional counter-part thing, or properly follow their instructions or advice at any point, because, well, they're dumb and I guess that's part of their charm.  

It all starts when they accidentally burn down their school's science fair, after coming a bit too close to actually participating with a valid science experiment and maybe getting a passing grade on something.  Nope, fire is a much better result, let's not set that entertainment bar too high.  The judge at their trial, for some reason, blames society for them not being properly educated and awards them the prize from the science fair, 8 weeks at space camp.  It's a little tough to say whether that's a reward or a punishment, and for that matter, is space cool or is it too nerdy for them?  Doesn't really matter, it's just a story device that gets them aboard the space shuttle so they can wreck that, too.  

Serena, the female Space Shuttle captain is ready to sacrifice herself, because there are seven people aboard the shuttle, and only enough oxygen for five.  But Beavis and Butt-Head, who all along keep thinking that Serena wants to have sex with them, put on spacesuits to go watch her change clothes from outside the shuttle (classy...) and she takes the opportunity to smack them into space with the shuttle's arm.  She thinks she's killed them, but is surprised when they turn up again, 24 years later, after traveling into the future via black hole, and by then she's the governor of Texas, and they are the skeletons in her closet, the two kids who died aboard her shuttle. You might think that she'd be happy to see them, because if they're alive, she didn't kill them back in 1998, so yeah, the movie gets this a little backwards, because instead she just wants to kill them. Again. Is that just because of how annoying they are? 

It's weird, I know, she wants to kill them to cover up the fact that she murdered them.  Also the Pentagon is tracking them because of the time anomaly that brought them back to Texas, thinking that they are aliens.  Umm, no, they're just stupid kids who don't seem to understand anything about modern society, so I guess I can see how that got confused, aliens wouldn't get all our human things, either.  Meanwhile, Smart Beavis and Smart Butt-Head keep trying to get them to go through time portals to return to 1998 and fix continuity before the universe collapses, but these two knuckleheads keep getting distracted, and also failing upwards. They get stuck in a Port-a-Potty because, well, this isn't exactly Shakespeare stuff. 

Our heroes visit a college, learn about white privilege, and misunderstand it completely, thinking this means they have the right to steal a police car.  They go to jail and an inmate asks them to hold his bag of drugs, but of course Beavis swallows them and does the old Cornholio bit for a while, though it's long past the point of being funny.  Finally they get back to their old house, only to learn that it's up for sale, Beavis' mother died at some point and the house has been empty for a while, but they've somehow gotten it in their heads that if they can meet Serena there, she'll have sex with them, which couldn't be further from the truth.  Really, this is a case of a movie firing in many directions at once, hoping to hit some comedy at some point.

I mean, maybe it's for the best - during a very backwards car chase, Smart Beavis and Smart Butt-Head show a vision of what their lives will be like, once they go through the portal and get back to a reality where they never went through the black hole in the first place.  They're old and fat and still watching TV together, so just keep reminding yourself that things could always be worse than they are, then they don't seem so bad.  It's actually pretty good advice.  You have to figure that if you could see across the non-existent multiverse and learn about the other versions of your life, maybe in 50% of those, you'd be worse off.  Or just don't bother and try to make the best of the life that you get. 

Also starring the voices of Mike Judge (last seen in "The Front Runner"), Gary Cole (last seen in "Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!"), Nat Faxon (last seen in "Charlie's Angels" (2019)), Chi McBride (last seen in "Let's Go to Prison"), Andrea Savage (last seen in "You People"), Carlos Alazraqui, Susan Bennett, Mary Birdsong (last seen in "Made of Honor"), Greg Chun, Phil Davis, Chris Diamantopolous (last seen in "Empire State"), Zehra Fazal, Ashley Gardner (last seen in "He Said, She Said"), Brian Huskey (last heard in "The Bob's Burgers Movie"), Toby Huss (last seen in "Balls of Fury"), Phil Lamarr (last heard in "Quiz Lady"), Whitney Martin, Michael Massimino, Jim Meskimen (last heard in "Driven"), Tig Notaro (last seen in "Together Together"), Toks Olagundoye (last seen in "Unicorn Store"), Jimmy O. Yang (last seen in "Me Time"), Stephen Root (last seen in "Stanley & Iris"), Martin Starr (last seen in "Spider-Man: No Way Home"), Tru Valentino

RATING: 4 out of 10 trays of nachos

Strays

Year 16, Day 159 - 6/7/24 - Movie #4,748

BEFORE: All right, I've got to fill the space between now and Father's Day somehow, I can't just take the week off - anyway that wouldn't really connect with what I have planned. I ended up working the first day of the Tribeca Film Festival, got called in on my day off because someone else called in sick.  Hey, I'm happy to take the shift, I was only scheduled for three days of the festival and now I'll end up working four - I still get tomorrow off and then I'll report back on Sunday.  I met a woman working the box office who also manages one of the venues at the Sundance Film Festival, and I was able to tell her that I've been there, three times, though it was a couple decades ago and my last time there was 20 years ago.  Still, I've got a history, I've been some places and I've done some things. 

Dennis Quaid carries over from "Yours, Mine & Ours". 

THE PLOT: An abandoned dog teams up with other strays to get revenge on his former owner. 

AFTER: I also happen to know two of the producers of this film, because I've been some places and I've done some things - I'm talking about Christopher MIller and Phil Lord, who also produced "The Lego Movie" and the "Spider-Verse" movies and I think maybe also "Cocaine Bear".  Chris was an intern for me once upon a time, and then left for L.A. and has had a tremendous career ever since, except it seems that "Strays" maybe didn't really catch on.  It's adult-themed animation, and I can attest that's a VERY difficult demographic to target - I mean, come on, dogs are cute and kids love dogs and everybody loves dogs, but if that dog movie gets an "R" rating, well you've lost half of your audience right there.  Mom & Dad just aren't going to be bringing their three kids to the movies to see talking dogs drop a lot of f-bombs. 

This film uses the "talking animal" form of animation, where I assume they film real dogs doing tricks and then animate the mouths, or maybe the whole thing is CGI, I don't know, they're doing wonderful things with animating fur now so that it looks super-realistic and you can't tell it's CGI - unless it's that horrible fake-looking mountain lion seen in "Me Time".  OK, the IMDB trivia section confirms these were REAL dogs used for about 95% of the shots in this film.  Good to know.  

I started this Movie Year with a film called "The Worst Person in the World", but that was largely a metaphor for how people feel about themselves when they break up with their romantic partners, but this film may genuinely have a character who is "The Worst Dog Owner in the World".  His name is Doug and he blames his puppy Reggie for the break-up of his relationship, as Reggie walked into a room carrying a pair of women's underwear that his girlfriend did NOT own or recognize, which meant that Doug had another woman over for sexy time.  His girflriend then wanted to take Reggie when she moved out, but Doug kept the dog JUST to spite her, and not because he loved or even liked the dog.  Then Doug got depressed and stopped paying his bills and couldn't afford to live there any more, so he got an eviction notice, and if you trace it back, well that's the dog's fault in Doug's mind, because he can't possibly blame himself for all of his problems that he caused. 

So Doug keeps throwing Reggie's ball further and further away, then driving an hour with him in the truck just to throw the ball, believing that Reggie won't find his way back this time.  But, NITPICK POINT, wouldn't it be easier just to take Reggie to a shelter?  Sure, it's a shitty thing to do, but it's easier than driving the dog three hours away just to toss him out of the truck.  And he won't find his way home from the shelter, just saying.  Anyway, at some point Reggie can't find his way back to Doug, but remains optimistic that he someday will.  Instead he finds Bug, who saves him from some bullying Rottweilers and teaches him the rules of being a stray dog.  

At the dog park, Reggie and Bug meet two more friends, Maggie and Hunter and they have wild nights where they eat garbage and drink beer from dumpsters and then end up peeing on each other in some kind of weird dog bonding ritual.  Through his friendship with the other dogs, Reggie eventually figures out that his owner Doug was a bad person, and though he doesn't deserve the love of a dog, Reggie still wants to return to him, but with a new mission, to bite his dick off. Well, it's good to have goals, I guess. 

There are some funny moments here, but the film keeps going back to the well of the most basic things we know about dogs - that they love humping things, they don't mind eating garbage and that they poop a lot.  Every solution to one of their problems as they make their way back to Doug's place seems to revolve around one of these things.  When they're captured and put in an animal shelter, they can't get out by humping or eating, so the only thing left they can try is pooping, and whaddaya know, it works somehow.  It's disgusting and the shelter employee ends up covered in poop, but if all you have is a hammer then everything looks like a nail.

Oh yeah, dogs also like to play with toys, and many dogs are good with kids.  They also have keen senses of smell, so they're able to locate that girl scout who got lost in the woods, and then they can bark really loud so the police dogs can find them.  Such good doggos!  I can't help but think that Bug's back-story seemed very familiar, I could swear I saw something very similar in another film, was it "The Secret Life of Pets 2"?  Not sure.  Anyway, Bug ends up being adopted by that Girl Scout, and Reggie remains a stray so he can teach younger pups about how to live out on the street and maintain a positive attitude.  

This feels like the kind of movie that got made during the pandemic - there are not a lot of stars in the live-action, and there's not usually more than one human in a scene.  Of course most of the film features the dogs, and the voices were recorded later in sound studios, and there wouldn't be as many COVID restrictions this way, each star could just record their lines separately. 

Also starring Will Forte (last seen in "That's My Boy"), Brett Gelman (last seen in "Without Remorse"), Charity Cervantes, Jade Fernandez, Mikayla Rousseau, Mike Dolphy, Aven Lotz, Hannah Alline (last seen in "The Hunt"), Garrett Hines (last seen in "Trumbo"), Dan Perrault (last seen in "The Company Men"), Keith Brooks (last seen in "The Tomorrow War"), Hedy Nasser, Dexter Masland, Ryan Dinning (last seen in "They Cloned Tyrone"), AJ Bernard

and the voices of Will Ferrell (last seen in "Barbie"), Jamie Foxx (last seen in "They Cloned Tyrone"), Isla Fisher (last seen in "Blithe Spirit"), Randall Park (last seen in "Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom"), Rob Riggle (last seen in "Just Before I Go"), Josh Gad (last seen in "The Wedding Ringer"), Sofia Vergara (last seen in "The Female Brain"), Jamie Demetriou (also last seen in "Barbie"), Greta Lee (last heard in "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse"), Jimmy Tatro (last seen in "The Wolf of Snow Hollow"), Harvey Guillen (last heard in "Puss in Boots: The Last Wish"), Jack de Sanz, Phil Morris (last heard in "Teen Titans GO! To the Movies'), David Herman (last heard in "The Bob's Burgers Movie"), Jaquita Ta'le (last heard in ""Pinocchio" (2022).

RATING: 5 out of 10 dropped pizza slices

Yours, Mine & Ours

Year 16, Day 158 - 6/6/24 - Movie #4,747 - FATHER'S DAY FILM #3

BEFORE: Well, what else can I do with a movie about two parents but put it somewhere between Mother's Day and Father's Day?  Makes sense, right?  It connected to "Because I Said So" through one of the child actors, so originally I was going to watch it right after coming back from my week off, but then in working out the path to Father's Day I realized that didn't really work, also I would need it later on to make another connection, so moving it to here in the chain solved two problems.  I often find that if a film doesn't fit, it's better to drop it and then if it serves another purpose as a link later, then dropping it was totally justified.  I dropped "Men, Women & Children" last year for space reasons, still trying to work it back into the chain - who knows maybe next year it will be JUST the film I need to make this same type of connection. 

David Koechner carries over from "Balls of Fury". 

I'm getting close to the halfway point for the year - I was going to leave some empty spaces because the Tribeca Film Festival will be taking place for the next 10 days, and I may have some very long shifts.  But then I didn't like which movie fell on the halfway mark for the year, so I found two more films I want to see and of course that loaded up the schedule, so now there are no free days.  Well, I can sleep in July, I guess, no worries. 

THE PLOT: A widowed Coast Guard Admiral and a widowed handbag designer fall in love and marry, much to the dismay of his 8 and her 10 children. 

AFTER: I caught the end of a documentary film about child stars the other night - not the new controversial one about the teens who came of age while working for Nickelodeon, but a different one about the stars of older shows like "Leave It to Beaver" and "What's Happenin'?", it looked like it was made for HBO about 20 years ago, and I'd love to find it now and put it on my list, but it's not popping up on the IMDB, no matter who I search on.  Anyway, I should probably add "Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV" to my list anyway, even if it's not really my thing.  A couple of those Nick and Disney stars pop up in tonight's film, though again, I'm not really an expert on those shows. 

Speaking of 20 years ago, tonight's film came out in 2005, but it's a remake of a film from 1968 that had Lucille Ball (with 10 kids) marrying Henry Fonda (with 8 kids).  Maybe back in 1968 larger families were more in vogue, or it was easier to support 18 kids on a military salary, but I question whether that was possible in 2005, it certainly wouldn't be now.  Your mileage may vary, of course, but I guess there's a certain thrill in watching a blended family of 18 kids on screen because if you have two or three kids that are driving you absolutely bonkers, well then you can take comfort in the fact that your life could be SO much worse.  This is how I and other people with no children probably feel about movies where parents have two kids.  There, but for the grace of God, go I...

Sure, we all watched "The Brady Bunch" in the 1970's, unless you're too young for that and you watched the "Brady Bunch" movies in the 1990's.  (or "Step by Step" or the "Cheaper by the Dozen" remake...). I don't know, even when you figure that this film was made in 2005 it still seems so vastly outdated.  Kids get into trouble, kids have parties when their parents are away, kids make messes out of things.  Jeezus, what year was this?  What happened to "kids look at porn on the internet" or "kids get pregnant unexpectedly" or "kids torture frogs and grow up to become serial killers"?  Isn't this all just too quaint and innocent, sort of?  

I also wish the humor didn't always rely on Dennis Quaid falling down and landing in a bucket of paint or a kiddie pool filled with paint, or falling off the boat and landing in the ocean.  It's kind of just the same thing, over and over again.  Whoever has this fetish for seeing teen girls covered in paint, too, should take a long hard look at themselves in the mirror and think about what they've done.  Also, the things that ends up uniting these two different groups of children is them working together to drive their parents apart - I honestly can't decide if that's idiotic or brilliant, but either way, it's all just very clunky.  

The house party scene in particular - the party was only possible because both parents needed to go out to a special function, one where Rear Admiral Beardsley was offered some commandant position, which he declined because he cared about his family (stupid...).  But as seen many times before in the film, the family has a live-in housekeeper.  WHY ON EARTH would they leave their 18 children alone and not put that housekeeper in charge?  That's exactly WHY the parents have the housekeeper, to watch the kids while they are doing their jobs.  They suddenly forgot they have a housekeeper?  They gave the housekeeper the night off?  What a huge plothole that nobody else seems to have an issue with.

Also starring Dennis Quaid (last seen in "The Special Relationship"), Rene Russo (last seen in "Just Getting Started"), Rip Torn (last seen in "Eulogy"), Linda Hunt (last heard in "Solo: A Star Wars Story"), Jerry O'Connell (last seen in "Scream 2"), Jenica Bergere (last seen in "Gloria Bell"), Josh Henderson, Sean Faris, Katija Pevec (last seen in "Eagle Eye"), Dean Collins, Tyler Patrick Jones (last seen in "Red Dragon"), Haley Ramm (last seen in "Into the Wild"), Brecken Palmer, Bridger Palmer, Ty Panitz (last seen in "Because I Said So"), Danielle Panabaker (last seen in "Time Lapse"), Drake Bell (last seen in "Superhero Movie"), Miki Ishikawa, Slade Pearce (last seen in "Miss March"), Lil' JJ, Miranda Cosgrove (last heard in "Despicable Me 3"), Andrew Vo, Jennifer Habib, Jessica Habib, Nicholas Roget-King, Dan Mott, Mateo Arias, Jaelin Palmer, Connor Matheus (last seen in "Envy"), Jordan Wright (last seen in "Dreamgirls"), Gian Franco Tordi (last seen in "Monster-in-Law") and the band Hawk Nelson. 

RATING: 4 out of 10 coordinated bathroom schedules (which is also stupid, why would a lighthouse need to have more than one bathroom?)

Balls of Fury

Year 16, Day 157 - 6/5/24 - Movie #4,746

BEFORE: Patton Oswalt carries over from "I Love My Dad".  I almost met Mr. Oswalt one time, he came to our booth at San Diego Comic-Con one time, but he was in disguise, and also I was on a break, so I didn't get to meet him in person.  I'd seen him walking around that same convention center a couple years before that, he was with Brian Posehn.  But I did talk to him via e-mail, he did a voice-over for a short animated film that I worked on, called "The Loneliest Stoplight", and for that I processed his paycheck through SAG, along with a donation to his pension fund.  I like to follow all the rules and keep things legal.

THE PLOT: Down-and-out former professional ping-pong phenom Randy Daytona is sucked into a maelstrom when FBI Agent Ernie Rodriguez recruits him for a secret mission. Randy is determined to bounce back and win, and to smoke out his father's killer - arch-fiend Feng.

AFTER: It's not that I was really looking forward to watching this movie, I really just put it on my list because it was airing on cable, and it's just another movie that I've never watched.  Sometimes I just need MORE material to be able to make my links.  But since I try to color-code all the instances of actors being on my list two or more times, I noticed that this film shared a few actors with the Father's Day films on my list.  And if a film can be used to connect Christmas movies, or horror movies or romances, well that's just the kind of thing I need to be aware of, in case I get stuck in February or October or December, or I need to link AWAY from holiday programming or documentaries or something - it does me no good to progam 30-plus docs if I don't have some kind of exit strategy, then the chain gets broken.  

So what I had in mind was connecting a potential Father's Day film with Christopher Walken, called "One More TIme", it's been on my list for a couple years, but every June something more important comes up, or I can't seem to swing the chain in that film's direction to link to it.  But now it's going to serve a different purpose, it's still going to be linking two Father's Day films, just not THAT one - and it looks like I'll have to wait another year at least to watch "One More Time".  Those are the breaks. 

"Balls of Fury" isn't totally off-topic, the main character's father died after betting on him at the Olympics, and when he lost, Korean gangsters killed Randy's father.  Hey, that almost counts as a topic for Father's Day, even if that's not the main plotline of the movie, it says something about the main character that he lost his father at a young age, and he has to go back to the sport that caused his father's death in order to avenge that tragedy.  But this isn't a serious film, it's a very silly comedy - yet even there we find something on topic for the patriarchal themes this week and next.  (Just 11 days left until the holiday, have you made plans to take your father to brunch yet?)

I just didn't find the film to be very funny, while it's plenty ridiculous, there just aren't a lot of jokes.  I kind of expect more from the writing team behind "Reno 911!", as well the "Night at the Museum" films.  But this film about underground ping pong tournaments run by an Asian crime-lord somehow seems less plausible than a film about museum exhibits coming to life at night, if that's at all possible.  And casting a white actor as that Asian crime-lord?  I thought that was a no-no, I mean if you can get Christopher Walken then sure, you should get Christopher Walken, but you also have to be racially sensitive, look at how people freaked out when Tilda Swinton played an old Asian man in "Avengers: Endgame".  That sort of thing will get you cancelled these days. 

Yeah, so this is not really my thing, I freely admit that I'm using this film as mortar tonight to keep two bricks from the Father's Day chain together.  Mea culpa. If this had been funnier then I really wouldn't have minded doing that at all, but that's not where we find ourselves tonight, is it? 

Also starring Dan Fogler (last seen in "Barely Lethal"), Christopher Walken (last seen in "Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind"), George Lopez (last seen in "Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project"), Maggie Q (last seen in "The Protégé"), James Hong (last heard in "Wendell & Wild"), Terry Crews (last seen in "Blended"), Robert Patrick (last seen in "Fire in the Sky"), Diedrich Bader (last seen in "Shazam! Fury of the Gods"), Aisha Tyler (last seen in "Friendsgiving"), Thomas Lennon (last seen in "A Guy Thing"), David Koechner (ditto), Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa (last seen in "Memoirs of a Geisha"), Brett DelBuono (last seen in "Oppenheimer"), Jason Scott Lee (last seen in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny"), Toby Huss (last seen in "Blonde"), Heather DeLoach (last seen in "Anywhere But Here"), Kerri Kenney (last seen in "All About Steve"), Floyd Van Buskirk, Jenny Robertson (last seen in "Role Models"), Jim Lampley (last seen in "Creed II"), La Na Shi, Mather Zickel (last seen in "Babylon"), Jim Rash (last seen in "Bros"), David Proval (last seen in "Smokin' Aces"), Philipp Lawrence Durand (last seen in "World War Z"), Masi Oka (last seen in "Bullet Train"), Cathy Shim (also last seen in "Memoirs of a Geisha"), Greg Joung Pak, Eugene Choy, Matt Sigloch (last seen in "Truth"), Mark Hyland, Justin Lopez, Irina Voronina, Darryl Chan, Aaron Takahashi (last seen in "The Wedding RInger"), Harry Yi 

with archive footage of Muhammad Ali (last seen in "McEnroe"), Jesse Owens, Ronald Reagan (last seen in "Framing John DeLorean"), Nancy Reagan (last seen in "Beauty"). 

RATING: 4 out of 10 poison-tipped blowdarts

I Love My Dad

Year 16, Day 156 - 6/4/24 - Movie #4,745 - FATHER'S DAY FILM #2

BEFORE: Last year's films leading up to Father's Day included "Dom Hemingway", "The Tender Bar", "Nobody" and then "Blended" and "That's My Boy" on the holiday weekend itself. There was a loose theme about absent fathers somewhere in there, but "That's My Boy" was meant to be a comedy about the most cringe-worthy annoying father ever.  Goal achieved, at least until this film got released in 2022.  

Amy Landecker carries over from "Project Almanac". 

THE PLOT: A hopelessly estranged father catfishes his son in an attempt to reconnect. 

AFTER: The director/star of this film claims this is based on a true story, that his father really catfished him in order to chat with him online.  Sure, that's messed up, but really, way to turn your own personal tragedy or messed-up family situation into a narrative work.  Many people do that, only not everyone is so lucky (?) to have a messed-up family situation that has an outside chance of entertaining people while offending them at the same time.  It's modern alchemy, turning straw into gold, making a silk purse out of a sow's ear or whatever you want to call it.  

Hey, is that MTV show "Catfish" still on?  Apparently so, because Season 8 was 95 episodes long, stretched from 2020 to 2024, and the most recent show aired in January of this year.  Wow, that's a lot of people catfishing out there, it's like America's third most popular national pastime or something.  Who knew?  The guy who made the "Catfish" movie, apparently. That guy did the same sort of thing, he formed a relationship with somebody online - a young girl who was supposedly an artist, and then went to meet her in real life, only to find that, well, she didn't really exist.  And it seems this is going on all over the place, because it's so easy to take screenshots and find other people's good times and selfies on social media, and pass them off as your own.  Sure, it's sad because the people doing it aren't happy with their lives and need to pretend that they're someone else having a better time or a better life.  

I don't mean to humble-brag, but I've never felt the need to self-promote my experiences as anything other than what they are.  Between beer festivals, food-based vacations with my wife, comic-cons and the famous people I meet at the college theater, it's enough to make me happy-ish, so there's no need to overhype things.  When was the last time acclaimed actor Michael Shannon asked YOU where the men's room is?  I thought so.  Did Kathleen Turner and Annette Bening trust YOU to put them in a tiny elevator and bring them up to the theater stage?  Nope, that was me.  Onward and upward.  Elliot Page came and visited the theater for a screening at NewFest, and I happen to know we hate some of the same people, but there's no reason to re-hash old feuds. 

The point tonight is that social media has changed the way many of us relate to the world, and if we can't have real friends, at least we can have virtual ones, or followers, or online haters, really, I'll take any form of interaction I can get.  Just wait until somebody figures out that all we really want is to see that number of followers and likes growing and growing, so really, why don't we just program everything to get a zillion likes and we can then all just feel good about everything we post, even if it's not for reals?  Wait, I think we have that already, and it's called TruthSocial...

So with the premise that a father would create a fake online profile because his son has blocked him on social media, the film then takes this idea to the ultimate ridiculous extreme. The father's new profile is based on a cute, friendly waitress he met at a diner in Maine, but he doesn't bother to change her name or anything, he just reposts all of her posts as his own, and why she doesn't spot the duplicate profile, I have no idea.  Maybe she never searches that platform for her own name - also catfishers may not be all that aware how easy it might be to spot a dupe profile. If someone has a very common name, however, there could be a couple hundred Mike Johnsons or Sarah Smiths out there, and then how do you wade through all of those to figure out which ones are fakes or dupes or Chinese bots?  I have a very uncommon surname, but someone with my exact first and last name once called me by phone because we both had profiles on Compuserve, and he was getting ready to delete his profile there, and I had recently joined (this was back in the early 1990's, he was a retired firefighter in Arkansas, still the only other person I ever met who was my namesake...)

So Chuck chats and texts with his son Franklin, but as fake Becca.  Things are going fine until Franklin wants to talk on the phone with Becca, to prove to himself that she's real.  Chuck then enlists his boss/girlfriend to pretend to be Becca, but without briefing her on what's really going on, that conversation does not go well.  Then things get worse when Franklin asks his father to drive him up to Maine (from Massachusetts, I think...) so he can meet Becca in person.  Yeah, that's not going to go well either, but I think Chuck was looking for a way to come clean to his son somewhere on that long car trip, and just couldn't find the words.  Then things get even worse when they stop at a motel and Franklin wants to have virtual sex (sexting) with Becca, and doesn't know his own father is responding, copying and pasting texts from a sexting encounter with his own girlfriend. Yeah it's super awkward. 

This whole thing works cinematically because the film takes the step of depicting two people who are texting each other as being in the same room, even though they're not.  So we're seeing things that aren't really happening except they are, in people's imagination or the virtual world.  So these scenes probably wouldn't have the same impact if they were just texted words on the screen, and of course the actors re-create the virtual events because film is a visual medium, but if you're dead-set against images of a father and son making out, well, you might have a problem with this film.  

It also "works" only because both father and son are straight, and if either one were gay, or if this were a straight father and daughter, that would probably be over the line of good taste.  Even as it is this might be beyond what you might find acceptable subject matter, so don't say I didn't warn you.  As for the ending, I get it, but some people might also find that it's too far over the line. 

The nature of the father here is explained by his former cheating during games of online chess - he was pitting his real human opponents against a chess computer, by playing the same moves, and repeating the computer's responses as his own.  This is sort of genius, and it's still cheating, of course, but it this is how somebody wants to get ahead in life, who am I to say what's wrong?  My wife and I play an online game called Heardle, where you hear the first few seconds of a song and try to name the song (in a number of categories, including Rock, Pop, 70's, 80's, Elton John, Queen, etc.).  The temptation is there to cheat by using Shazam or Siri to identify each song, but that would take 100% of the challenge and fun out of it, so we don't do that.  Or it also  reminds me of Stephen Wright's stand-up routine where he said he wanted to put a humidifier and a dehumidifier in the same room and let them fight it out.  That's funny, but similarly pointless. 

Also starring Patton Oswalt (last seen in "80 for Brady"), James Morosini, Claudia Sulewski, Lil Rel Howery (last seen in "Space Jam: A New Legacy"), Rachel Dratch (last heard in "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse"), Ricky Velez (last seen in "The King of Staten Island"), Sarah Helbringer, J.P. Edwards, Ricky Pak, Seamus Callahan, Zae'on James, Sheri Fairchild, Afrim Gjonbalaj

RATING: 6 out of 10 posted "lost dog" flyers (hey, an element carrying over from yesterday's time travel film!)

Project Almanac

Year 16, Day 155 - 6/3/24 - Movie #4,744

BEFORE: Here we go, my secret goal for ending the Kevin Hart chain with "Die Hart" was to allow Gary Weeks to carry over.  He was also in "Ride Along", but to end with that film, I wouldn't have been able to include "Ride Along 2", or I'd have to watch #2 before #1 in that franchise, but that wouldn't make sense.  

"Project Almanac" has been on my list for a very long time, perhaps longer than any film.  Considering that I put it on a DVD with "Hot Tub Time Machine 2" that probably means it came into my possession in 2016 or 2017, but it could have been on the "Someday/Maybe" list even longer, since 2015 maybe.  Anyway, the film is 10 years old so let's assume that it took me 8 or 9 years to get to it - apparently I'm nothing if not patient.  

What I did was separate out all the time-travel films, like this and "Butterfly Effect 2" (and 3), then came "Paradox" and "Synchronicity" and a few others, but over time it was easier for me to link to the ones that were also romances, like "Needle in a Timestack", or with more popular actors, like "A Wrinkle in Time", but then in 2018 or 2019 I got more hardcore with the linking, and that left a few time-travel films stranded, as they're very hard to link to.  Still, I managed to link to "Time Lapse" and "Time Freak" somehow, and then this year I snuck in "See You Yesterday", but still, the plan all started with THIS one, from 2014, and well, it's been a long road getting here, I hope it was worth the effort. 

There's an outside chance I might be able to sneak another one or two in with horror movies in October, but it will take some more careful planning.  If I don't, well, there's always next year, right? 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "See You Yesterday" (Movie #4,698), "Time Freak" (Movie #3,941), "Time Lapse" (Movie #3,603)

THE PLOT: A group of teens discovers secret plans for a time machine, and construct one.  However, things start to get out of control.  

AFTER: Generally speaking, time-travel movies need to have some visual effects, but they don't have to be overdone.  "Primer" just used a storage unit as the time machine, so they didn't need to do a lot of set construcion, just find a storage company willing to rent out a unit as a set.  "Looper" had some pretty cool effects, if I remember correctly (it's past time for a rewatch, no doubt)

Time travel movies also seem to work best when the travelers are trying to accomplish something, like maybe saving the world - so "Project Almanac" kind of turns that requirement around by giving the ability to time-travel to a group of teenagers, and even though they start out with the best intentions - David Raskin needs a sizzle reel that will get him a scholarship to go to MIT - before long the teenagers are tempted to use the device to better their grades, or get revenge on a bully, or go to the Imagine Dragons concert three months ago.  What could POSSIBLY go wrong?

To be fair, there are some constraints here that narrow down what they're able to do, or rather WHEN they're able to do it.  At first the device can only bring them back one day, then refinements bring the potential travel up to three weeks in the past.  (Apparently the device can't travel forward to events that haven't happened yet, or else they don't consider using the device this way...). So going back and killing Hitler as a baby is off the table from the start, and thus the film neatly avoids the paradox that would be created by changing a notable historical event.  (The paradox is, If they go back and kill baby Hitler, they also eliminate the NEED to kill Hitler in the first place, so they've changed reality to one that they didn't need to fix, therefore in the new reality they never did or will do that, because they would exist in a reality where that didn't need to be done, so they didn't go back and do that, so Hitler would be alive again.)

The whole thing starts when ambitious science high-school nerd David finds his late father's video camera, and while watching footage of his own seventh birthday party (which was the day before his father died in a car crash) David spots someone in the footage that looks exactly like 17-year-old him, watching the party from the other room.  But how could 17-year-old David be at the party for 7-year old David?  And why is he carrying a strange backpack, why does he have that stain on his shirt, and overall, WTF?  This leads David and his two friends to search his father's lab, where they find a copy of the guvmint's instructions on how to build a time machine.  And they know that it MUST be successful, because how else would David be able to crash his own birthday party 10 years ago? 

(Finding someone else's instructions neatly avoids another paradox, because if someone in the future invents a time machine, it would be so easy for them to go back in time, meet their younger self and deliver those schematics, and then we'd all be wondering who invented the time machine, the older guy or the younger version of himself.)

The three nerds stay up all night in the basement for weeks, wiring circuit boards and searching for ways to get more power to the machine, sacrificing gaming consoles and other home electronics, stealing power from car batteries, etc.  NITPICK POINT: What they really needed here was a Marty McFly line of dialogue here, something like, "Wait a minute, are you telling me you built a time machine.... out of an XBOX?"  David, who's very inept when it comes to talking with girls, manages to make contact with Jessie, thanks to a back-pack mix-up and also from getting caught draining her car's battery with jumper cables.  So the three male nerds, along with Jessie and David's sister Christina (who mans the video camera for most of this "found footage" movie, so we hardly ever see her) end up driving out to the woods and jumping back 24 hours, just to have proof of concept.  When they return, they accidentally bring the neighbor's dog forward in time with them, and then they notice that the street is filled with "Lost Dog" flyers that weren't there before.  This is proof that they were able to change reality with their actions, the dog being missing for 24 hours caused its owners to print up flyers. 

This should have been the end of things, surely proving to the enrollment board at M.I.T. that time travel is possible should have secured David both entry and a scholarship, but of course the teens don't stop there.  They go back in time with the winning lotto numbers in order to save the Raskin house from foreclosure, and while it didn't work exactly as they'd planned, it was at least a partial success.  Then they use time travel to beat the science teacher's impromptu morning questions, and after that, they're only interested in becoming more popular at school.  Umm, sure, that's noble, right?  But then David gets the idea to buy some "useless" backstage passes for that Imagine Dragons concert three months ago, and treats his friends by taking them back to when those items were still valid.  Fine, but couldn't he have picked a better band?  I mean, really....were the Rolling Stones not on tour that year? 

It's when David realizes that he missed an opportunity to kiss Jessie, and then goes back to fix it, that things start to really go off the rails.  The film avoids the other time-travel paradox of "What happens when you encounter your past self, but you don't have any memory from your past self of meeting your future self?" (think about it, you'll get there...) by showing that when your current self gets too close to your past self, you both get caught in some kind of feedback loop, and one of you "glitches" out, and apparently eventually ceases to exist, and paradox therefore averted.  Umm, I'm not sure the universe works this way, but whatever, the teens then have to learn to avoid the "glitch" by removing the past self from the equation, like getting him dismissed from school or sending him on a wild goose-chase errand, or just shoving him in a locker for a while, any solution will do.  But this leads to NITPICK POINT #2 because they show that it takes like 47 tries for Allen to beat the science teacher's questions, and that means that they had to distract the past Allen 46 times, or there are 47 future Allens walking around the school at the same time, or shoved in to 47 lockers, and that's a lot of chances for that glitch thing to happen.  

Eventually the teens realize that their messing around with reality has done more harm than good, somehow robberies and arsons are increased in the area (hmm, it could be all those stupid time travelers stealing machine parts and hydrogen, just a thought) but also the school has lost the championship basketball game, and also there was a plane crash in Europe that could have been caused by the "butterfly effect" resulting from one of their trips through time. (It's complicated, I won't get into it here...).  So eventually David realizes that he has to go back, way back, and make sure that he never discovered those plans for the machine in the first place. 

This takes him back to - you guessed it - that birthday party, which is essentially a fait accompli, but at least he gets to see his father one more time, and his father gets to meet 17-year-old David, and if you wonder why David didn't tell his father more about the future or his own fate, well, just watch "The Flash" from last year, the reasoning is essentially the same, just a little less complicated here.   Really, this is right on point with Father's Day coming up, so it's one more piece of evidence that my chain has a mind of its own, or else it's all just coincidence.  Future David blinks out, and reality returns to one where he never gets into M.I.T. or invents time travel - or does it?  Unfortunately there are still paradoxes that result here - and some screenwriter tried SO HARD to avoid them!

Well, the benefit of me taking so long to watch "Project Almanac" is that even though I burned it to DVD eight or nine years ago, the movie scrolled off cable, was not available for some time, but now it's BACK on premium cable channels, either Starz or Paramount/Showtime, I think.  So I was able to watch it On Demand, plus with subtitles, and right now you can too!  

Also starring Jonny Weston (last seen in "Taken 3"), Sofia Black-D'Elia (last seen in "The Promise"), Sam Lerner (last seen in "Nobody Walks"), Allen Evangelista, Virginia Gardner, Amy Landecker (last seen in "Clear History"), Macsen Lintz (last seen in "Hall Pass"), Gary Grubbs (last seen in "Free State of Jones"), Michelle DeFraites, Jamila Thompson (last seen in "John Lewis: Good Trouble"), Katie Garfield (last seen in "The Birth of a Nation"), Courtney Bowers, Patrick Johnson, Joshua Brady (last seen in "Hillbilly Elegy"), Danielle Rizzo, Mychael Bates (last seen in "Frankie and Johnny"), Onira Tares, Mani Yarosh, Andrew Benator (last seen in "Game Night"), Aaron Marcus (last seen in "A Man Called Otto"), Andre Nemec, Anthony Reynolds (last seen in "After the Sunset"), Brett David Stelter, Cameron Fuller (last seen in "Barley Lethal"), Derrin Jordan with a cameo from Imagine Dragons. 

RATING: 7 out of 10 trips on the water slide

Die Hart

Year 16, Day 154 - 6/2/24 - Movie #4,743

BEFORE: Wow, I had a day yesterday, I was late getting to the theater because the L train in Brooklyn was screwed up for like the 5,000th time in recent memory.  The event yesterday was NewFest Pride, and it was the first day of June, which is Pride Month. NewFest is a NYC LGBTQ+ festival that was held for many years in October, and then eventually somebody said, "Hey, June is Pride Month, why don't we also have a smaller event in June, too?"  Which of course just makes sense, and means an extra shift for me, so I'm all for it. When October rolls around I'm usually working NY Comic-Con, so I tend to miss a few days of NewFest in the fall. 

We'll be celebrating Pride here at the Movie Year, too, but through some of the subjects in my Doc Block, from Rock Hudson, Billie Jean King, and Keith Haring to Elton John, Little Richard and Wham!  So all of that is coming up, but because of Father's Day I wasn't able to schedule most of that in June, so July is the best that I could arrange. 

Kevin Hart carries over from "Lift", and now he's WAY out in front, in first place with 9 appearances this year, and he's going to be tough to beat, at least until the documentary block is finished, then we'll see who's leading at the end of all that. 

THE PLOT: Kevin Hart - playing a version of himself - is on a death-defying quest to become an action star. And with a little help from John Travolta, he just might pull it off. 

AFTER: This is another new trend, for an actor to play a fictionalized version of themself, like Nicolas Cage did in "The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent", or like when Bill Murray was in "Zombieland". (or "Space Jam", or "Lost in Translation") I guess maybe it goes back to "Being John Malkovich" or maybe further, I'm not exactly sure.  Or I guess it would be a hot new trend if it hadn't appeared so many times over the last 20 years. Anyway, Kevin Hart plays Kevin Hart here, perhaps the role he was born to play.  

I'm not really sure how this film got made, because there's another listing in the IMDB for an Amazon SERIES with the same name, one which had 10 episodes in its first season, in 2020.  So, is the movie a continuation of that series, or is it those 10 episodes edited together to be a movie-length movie?  Looking through the cast lists, I'm guessing the latter is correct.  Now I don't allow series episodes here in the Movie Year, but it looks like I'll have to allow a TV series that was re-edited into movie form, three years later.  They've got me on a technicality, my hands are tied, because a TV movie is still a movie, according to my own rules.  So my next guess is that they did the same thing with Season 2 of the show, they re-edited it into "Die Hart 2: Die Harter", which only just popped up on Amazon as a "movie".  I can't watch it, though, because it doesn't link to my next film, and my plan is set in stone now, I have to stick with it and I can only add extra films if they don't mess with my linking.  So I'm taking a pass on "Die Hart 2" and I'm kind of OK with that, had enough of Kevin Hart for a while.  And if I don't circle back and pick that up later, yeah, I'm OK with that too.

We follow the fictional Kevin Hart as he has aspirations to headline an action movie, not play second fiddle to Dwayne Johnson, or Ice Cube, or Mark Wahlberg.  Yeah, after this past week's movies, I can see the problem there.  But to become a headliner he needs training, so the studio sends him to Ron Wilcox's action star boot camp.  Oh, yeah, also Hart had a disastrous appearance on a talk show and it was conveniently decided that he should stay out of the public eye for a while - he's got an action movie lined up, but the director is very eccentric and also strict about Hart attending this boot camp. 

What's really going on is that the boot camp is a cover for the action film's shooting, Hart is being filmed 24/7 in a "Truman Show" style, and also everyone around him is an actor, including the big beefy terrorist types who Hart saw threatening Mr. Wilcox.  Nothing is real, everything is very meta, and so of course there's a film-within-the-film being made, the audience knows it and everybody knows it except poor clueless Kevin Hart.  Well, at least the film will contain his genuine reactions to these events.  

Naturally there's a love interest, too, a female actor/student who's also been sent to the boot camp, and part of the challenge, while learning how to pretend to save a stunt dummy from a burning building and also how to do wire-work love scenes, our hero also has to try to figure out what is real and what isn't.  Well, at least it's a semi-original approach to an action movie format. What's that movie with Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy?  "Bowfinger"?  Yeah, it's kind of like that, where they were making a movie with an action star's involvement only he didn't know that a movie was being made around him.  Yeah, I haven't seen that one in a while, it might be time for a re-watch.  

Ah, but Wikipedia is now telling me the real story, the "Die Hart" series was originally made for Quibi, home of the 10-minute videos that went out of business in six months because it turned out that nobody wanted to pay money to watch 10-minute series episodes.  Some of the TV shows made for Quibi were then bought up by Roku, which is I think what happened to a season of "Reno: 911" episodes.  Roku had better luck with "Die Hart" than Quibi did, because they had a business model that allowed them to stay in business, and then I guess re-editing Season 1 of the show into a movie for Amazon was the next illogical step.  It's all proof that nobody really knows how to be successful with streaming platforms, really every company is just throwing a bunch of crap against the proverbial wall to see what will stick and what won't.  

It's just going to be like this for a while longer, with Roku and Pluto and Tubi all doing whatever they can to stay afloat, while companies with bigger budgets like Netflix and Amazon and Disney buying whatever they can or funding the production of their own exclusive content, anything to get a leg up on their rivals.  It's ruthless out there, but each month as I go through the list of new films on Netflix and Amazon, I realize that the movie pie is being divided up into too many slices, because those slices are getting thinner and thinner - Netflix used to add like 100 movies a month, now it seems like if they add 50, that's a busy month for them.  And so it goes...

Which leaves me watching a three-year old Quibi series that got cancelled, bought by Roku, and then re-edited for Amazon.  It's kind of remarkable that produced a 90-minute movie that made any sense at all, while also being funny and more than slightly ridiculous.  But I guess if anybody could do this, it would be Eric Appel, who also directed that fake biopic about Weird Al Yankovic. 

Also starring John Travolta (last seen in "De Palma"), Nathalie Emmanuel, Jean Reno (also carrying over from "Lift"), Josh Hartnett (last seen in "Oppenheimer"), Kenneth Trujillo (last seen in "The Suicide Squad"), Eric Mainade, Joshua Lamboy (last seen in "Pitch Perfect 3"), Brandon Quinn, Milana Vayntrub (last seen in "Ghostbusters" (2016)), Stephan Jones (last seen in "Black Adam"), Jason Jones (last seen in "Framing John DeLorean"), Haley Dumas, Gary Weeks (last seen in "Ride Along"), Devin Scillian (last seen in "Scream 4").  

RATING: 5 out of 10 hidden cameras (at least)