BEFORE: Allison Janney carries over this time from "The Creator". I could have jumped ahead to "Killers of the Flower Moon" via Sturgill Simpson, for that matter I could have connected to that film from "Brothers" via Brendan Fraser - but either of those would get me there too early, I've got a whole month to fill up and I've scheduled that Martin Scorsese film for next Friday. So, admittedly I'm kind of taking the long route there, I've padded the schedule this week with a bunch of films that have been on my Netflix list for too long, and wouldn't you know it, three of them have Allison Janney in them. Great, let's clear them off, bring it on, plenty of time later this month for the bigger, longer films. I can still stay up late, my second job doesn't kick back in until tomorrow, and then when it does, it's just one day a week, things will get busier in February, I'm sure.
What I really should be doing now is figuring out my Documentary chain for the year, now that I have the romance chain locked in. Really, there are four seasons to each movie year, and once I add in the new streaming films according to the IMDB, as more slots become available I need to be either focused on adding romances (done), more docs (should be now-ish), horror films (so I can make this year's chain in August at the latest) or Christmas films (so I'll have more endings available when I come out of October).
I've got 12 documentaries arranged in a chain, and then another mini-chain of five, but I haven't tried to assemble the chains together yet, or connect them with all the loose docs with no cast lists yet, I've got about 40 of those. Then maybe another 15 that have been hanging around my list for a couple years and have been resisting being linked. Well, they'd better learn to play ball if they want to get watched...
THE PLOT: A young man determined to be a military hero ends up on a misguided adventure with his family and his new friend Tally, which leads him to the most unlikely realization of how he can courageously "save lives".
AFTER: This is a bit of a weird one tonight, I can't really tell what category of film this was designed to live in. The main character keeps trying to enlist in the Marines but he doesn't get accepted, so it's not a war film. The backdrop is the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan, but since he doesn't get there, it doesn't really qualify that way either. The relationship he has with this girl Tally never really gets romantic, so it's a non-starter in that category too. Not funny enough to be a comedy, not serious enough to be a drama, by all accounts it's neither fish nor fowl, so where does it belong? Feels like a tiny off-beat festival film, so I'm going to put it in the "just plain weird" category for now, unless something else comes along this year that is similar, which is really not likely.
Ned Chipley keeps taking a bus to San Diego to pitch his case to the Marines Recruiting office, he's apparently been there several times before but he's got a really GOOD feeling about this time, he even brought index cards with the topics he wants to bring up with the recruiter, like how many push-ups he can do and how he really wants to "save lives" and help take down the terrorists. Sure, I get it, in the months after 9/11 there was a spike in the enlistment rates, because Americans wanted to get involved and make the world safe again, but you know what would have made the world safer? More security at Boston-area airports. Which of course we all figured out later, and still we're all taking off our shoes and belts for the TSA, you'd think that since we haven't seen an "underwear bomber" in years that ISIS would have given up by now and we could all relax a bit. We all figured out later that the War on Terror was really just a cover for Dick Cheney's former employer, Halliburton, to get rich, right?
But Ned seems like a decent fellow, honest and sincere - maybe a bit TOO sincere. And what's with the index cards that he puts in the typewriter? Does he have that "Memento" memory problem? Who even uses an old-timey typewriter after 2001? Besides Tom Hanks, that is. Why doesn't Ned have a computer? (Later we see that he DOES have a computer, but it's an old one, like a Commodore 64 or something. Weird.). Ned works at a casino, but he's a janitor there. He lives with his mother and her boyfriend, Bob, and Bob can't work as a truck driver because of some lawsuit he's filed against his former employer, so he just sits in the truck cab and talks to other drivers on his CB radio. OK, umm, who still uses a CB radio in 2002?
Ned finally gets some recognition from the new recruitment officer at the San Diego enlistment office, who realizes that Ned might be wound a bit too tight for military service, or perhaps he's on the spectrum somewhere and wouldn't be a good fit. So he gives him his business card and enlists him in an imaginary service, as a "Sun Dog", his job is to work undercover and keep an eye out for terrorists in his local area, he even gives him that deck of cards where each one had a photo of a wanted terrorist, remember those? (What could POSSIBLY go wrong here?). Ned also meets Tally, who's maybe sort of a prostitute that hangs out in the casino parking lot, we'd seen her proposition Bob earlier in the film. And the guy she was living with in the trailer park suddenly decided he had someplace better to be, so we're never really sure if she latches on to Ned because she's just got nothing else to do.
Ned decides that his boss at the casino sort of looks like an Al-Qaeda agent from the deck of cards, so he buys Tally a camera from eBay and they start trailing him and his friends, who drive around in a white van and seem to be making many trips to a hardware store, where they buy several forms of glue and other mysterious materials. Together they report their findings to the Marine Sergeant, but it's always a bit unclear if Ned's decision that his boss is a terrorist might be motivated by something else, either natural hatred for one's boss, or racism, or maybe both. By this time, we're all wondering what Ned's actual deal is, and that flashback of him in his high school's mascot costume getting too involved in a football game (by tackling the opposing school's running back) - well, it sure doesn't help.
Tally gets confronted by Bob, who remembers her from the casino parking lot - and he clues her (and us) in. Ned has ALWAYS been this way, he wasn't a soldier, he didn't get injured in a war, if anything he's mad at the terrorists because his birthday is September 11, and they took that away from him. Tally comes to the family's Thanksgiving dinner, but then everything sort of changes, Tally's experiences making videos with Ned inspire her to go to film school in San Francisco, Ned's mother decides it's time to follow her dream from long ago, to go to New York and train as an EMT. (NITPICK POINT: Why can't she stay in California and train to become an EMT there? This kind of leaves Ned living with Bob, who's not his father and seems to be always after whatever money Ned makes. Hardly an ideal situation.)
Ned's investigation into those local "terrorists" goes horribly wrong, as we all knew it would, and he's forced to take advice from Bob once he's lost his purpose and needs to find a new one. Bob suggests they get a metal detector and search for lost treasure, maybe they won't find Spanish gold but hey, people are always losing watches and coins on beaches, right? He also tells Ned that he has to know his own limits and set more reasonable goals. Ned, of course, doesn't listen and manages to put a new pipe dream together - I'm not sure this ending made any rational sense, but then again, it didn't need to. As long as he feels he's making a difference in the world, he's doing OK, right?
Also starring Michael Angarano (last seen in "Oppenheimer"), Melissa Benoist (last seen in "Clerks III"), Xzibit (Alvin Joiner) (last seen in "Seal Team Six: The Raid on Osama bin Laden"), Ed O'Neill (last heard in "Ralph Breaks the Internet"), Jennifer Morrison (last seen in "Assassination Nation"), Eric Christian Olsen (last seen in "The Back-Up Plan"), J.R. Ramirez, Alexander Wraith (last seen in "Winter Passing"), Niko Nicotera (last seen in "Father Stu"), Fernando Chien (last seen in "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings"), Nicholas Massouh, Eddie Diaz (last seen in "Collateral"), Solomon Burke Jr., Soledad St. Hilaire (last seen in "Happy Endings"), Tom Berninger, Al Burke, Tommy Kijas (last seen in "Top Gun: Maverick"), Bethany Walls, Ethan Michael Mora (last seen in "Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot"), Larry Guli, Tina Gilton, Larry Krask, Jim Jepson, Deina Torres, Kenneth Beck, Hannah DePaz, Jovanny Diaz and the voice of Adam Lemnah
RATING: 4 out of 10 repeated viewings of "The Deer Hunter"
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