BEFORE: Back at the theater today for the Tribeca Film Festival, it's day 1 of 12, and I've got four LONG shifts to get through. So this post will probably be made late, I won't get home until 1 am most likely, and I'll be too exhausted to watch a movie for tomorrow. So I'll deal with tomorrow tomorrow. Last night I stayed up too late watching this "One More Time" movie and so I'll probably be a wreck all day. I've stayed up too late so many times now that it's quite difficult for me to go to bed early, it's darn near impossible. Which is a problem when I have to work in the morning, that means I get about four hours of sleep, and it's not really good sleep. Ah well, I can sleep tomorrow until noon or later, then get up and watch a movie.
Oliver Platt carries over from "Cut Bank".
THE PLOT: A New York City crooner plots his comeback and gets a visit from his daughter.
AFTER: Well, this is really almost a complete nothing-burger of a movie, unless you really really want to hear Christopher Walken sing. He's not bad, he started out as a song-and-dance man (a skill he didn't show off for YEARS, until that Fatboy Slim video "Weapon of Choice"), and really, it was Woody Allen who set him on the course of playing unhinged crazy people by casting him as the strange brother in "Annie Hall". Just think about all the psychos he played after that - it all came from there.
But this is a perfect first Fathers Day movie, if you don't count Donald Trump stealing his father's money in "The Apprentice" by having him declared mentally incompetent. Yeah, that happened. Here Jude is a twenty-something woman who's trying off and on to have a musical career, but that's not easy when your father is Paul Lombard, this film universe's equivalent of Tony Bennett or something. It's a lot to live up to, but when Jude gets kicked out of her apartment after a rent dispute (the landlord wanted rent, and she didn't want to pay it) she heads east for her father's house in the Hamptons.
The Hamptons is about as far as you can get from NYC, out on Long Island, and it's something of a rich person's beach paradise, lots of great restaurants and fancy shops and such. We drive out to Long Island on the regular, but we just don't go out that far, we'll find a nice restaurant in Stony Brook or Ronkonkoma or Smithtown or something and be happy with that. Plus they have Dairy Queen's and Friendly's out there, and not in the five boroughs proper. If there were a Waffle House out on Long Island, we'd probably be out there every damn weekend. But I digress...
Jude's father has been married at least five times, his two daughters sit around and try to remember them all and what their problems were. Well, that's life as a famous musician, it doesn't matter if you're rock or pop or jazz or classical, you probably get married and divorced a lot, the more famous you are. Paul wants to cut a new album, he's written a new song called "When I Live My Life Over Again", and he's convinced it's going to be a boffo smash number one big hit. Umm, sure. Paul has what we call "artist brain", he just can't possibly imagine that he's past his prime or no longer relevant, and retiring is out of the question, because his next comeback is just around the corner. As if. Paul also gets contacted by the Flaming Lips who want him to open for them at their next Long Island concert, and Jude has to try to break it to him that they probably asked ironically, they don't really like his music, it's all a big goof.
Jude also used to date her sister's husband, Tim, before he was married to Corinne, obviously. But that whole situation is awkward and with Jude hanging around the McMansion, it's only a matter of time before they almost fall together again, but they stop themselves in time. It could very easily have happened though, and that's dangerous. Jude is also dating her analyst, who is a married man, this is also a less-than-ideal-situation.
Paul goes golfing every morning, but one day Jude follows him, and learns that he's not going to the golf course, he's going to a hotel for another in a long line of affairs. She forces him to come clean to his current (5th) wife, who, um, does not take it well. Not only does she want a divorce, she also wants publishing rights and royalties for the song "When I Live My Life Over Again", she says she wrote it but Paul says he dictated it to her while driving, that's why the lyrics are in her handwriting. There are a number of possible solutions here, either give her the credit and money, or take her to court, or just never release the song, because half of zero is still zero. There's one more solution, of course, but it involves blackmailing her. Well, OK then.
That's it, that's pretty much the whole movie, whether that's enough for you I can't say, but I don't think it was enough for me. It's a whole lot of nothing happening, if you ask me. Jude takes off for California, because hanging around her sister's husband who is also her ex isn't healthy, and for that matter, hanging around her father's house and blaming him for everything isn't all that healthy either.
Directed by Robert Edwards (producer of "The Last Laugh")
Also starring Christopher Walken (last seen in "Gigli"), Amber Heard (last seen in "Her Smell"), Kelli Garner (last seen in "Horns"), Hamish Linklater (last seen in "Unicorn Store"), Ann Magnuson (last seen in "The United States of Leland"), Henry Kelemen (last seen in "Mr. Popper's Penguins"), Sandra Berrios (last seen in "Little Children"), Gavin McInnes, John Ellison Conlee (last seen in "Kinsey"), Danny Fischer, Rosharra Francis, Bree Sharp, Julia Garrison, Jonathan Wu, Robert Lurie, Veronika Dominczyk, Michael De Nola, Joe McGinty, Jordan Lage (last seen in "Birth"), David O'Brien, Charlottie Rydberg, Mollie Goldstein, Jim Forbes.
RATING: 4 out of 10 updates to Paul's Wikipedia page (which he is NOT supposed to make himself)
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