BEFORE: I worked a 12-hour shift yesterday at NewFest Pride, which is an offshoot of the annual NewFest, which is in October. At some point their leadership probably decided it would be nice to do another smaller event in June, rather than move the entire festival to a different month - that's fine, more shifts for me if I get to work at both events. I've got another LGBTQ-adjacent event tomorrow, and then the Tribeca Festival starts on Thursday. So it seems to be either feast or famine, since I took off a week in may to visit my parents, my last paycheck was almost non-existent, and I'm hoping for a bigger one in two week's time. I'm also applying for work at the NY Comic-Con and also the Anime NYC event in August - I've got a co-worker who also works at those events, controlling crowd lines and giving a lot of directions. I figure I could do that, though they may just stick me outside on a street corner holding up a sign to tell people which entrance to use. Well, I guess a gig is a gig, I'd rather spend four days doing that and making some money than NOT doing that - it beats digging ditches outside Kuala Lumpur. I've got a couple other irons in the fire, jobs I applied to that I'm waiting to hear about. We'll see.
Martin Donovan carries over from "The Apprentice".
THE PLOT: A young man's experience in a juvenile detention center touches on the tumultuous changes that befall his family and the community in which he lives.
AFTER: I made something of a mistake, perhaps, or rather, my software made a mistake for me. I can't afford Microsoft Office (who can, except for big businesses?) so I use a freeware knock-off called OpenOffice, which was used in the independent film studio I worked in for a long time. Really, the word processing software is JUST like MS Word, except for when it decides to take a sample of something from one part of your document, copy it and insert it in a random location somewhere else in your document. So I had some actor listed in this film in my document as "Michael Campe" and "Scott Williams" for a long time without realizing that the software had taken the name of the actor "Campbell Scott" and inserted it within the name of Michelle Williams. If that hadn't happened, I might have followed this film with "The Fabelmans", which is a film loosely based on Steven Spielberg's childhood that I've been trying to link to - I'm sure there would have been some material there about his Dad, and I'm on a Fathers Day theme this month. But it's too late, I've programmed the month already, I'm not fine-tuning it any more, I don't even want to know where that path would lead me, because the die is cast. I've been kind of holding off on "The Fabelmans" because David Lynch makes a cameo in it, and I've been trying to figure out a way to use that to work the documentary on Lynch into my line-up, but so far it's been impossible, I don't have an outro. So screw it, I'm putting "The Fabelmans" on my romance list because there's probably some relationship worthy stuff in there, and it could help me make links and fill up February next year, also maybe this will help increase the chances of watching it one of these days.
I'll follow the Ryan Gosling link out of this one, it's fine, really, and June's all booked up, anyway, though I left two spaces open in case I get really busy (Tribeca Festival shifts are LONG) and so this will allow me to skip a night here and there and still make it to a July 4 movie on time. I also replaced a three-film chain with ONE film so that I'd hit Father's Day spot-on. For some reason, I initially programmed as if Fathers Day was on June 20, but it's not, it's on June 15. My mistake, but I've fixed it and I'm back on track. There's some stuff in tonight's film about fatherhood, but it's an absent father - that still counts. Leland's father is a famous author who lives in Paris but left his wife and son a long time ago. Over the years he got in the habit of sending Leland a ticket to Paris on his birthday, but Leland never used the tickets, one time he got on the plane but only got as far as New York and thought, "Eh, that's close enough, let's see what the Big Apple has to offer." Sure, I get it, but that led to so many other problems in his life, I wonder if it would have just been easier in the long run to go to Paris and visit Dad, even if that wasn't high on his list of things to do.
This is a very confusing film, partially because it starts in the middle of the story, at what someone was deemed the most exciting moment, right after Leland was arrested for murder, and then it flashes back through Leland's life so often and to so many different points in his life that this essentially becomes a non-linear narrative, and we the audience then need to piece his story together because the filmmaker couldn't be bothered to tell the story in the proper order. If you're a long-time reader of my blog, you know that I HATE movies that use this technique, unless they're directed by Tarantino or else Wes Anderson decides to get cutesy with the flashbacks. All other directors should be banned from telling a story this way, because mostly their films just end up feeling like they cut all the footage into little bits, threw all of the spliceable pieces in the air and then edited the film in the order that they picked the pieces up from the floor. Yes, I know nobody edits on film any more (everything is computer), but that's how I was taught, so that's the way I imagine that editors still work.
Tarantino, of course, subverted time when necessary because there is some information that you may not need at the start of a film, but you WILL need it eventually - "The Hateful Eight" is a great example. Some information becomes very very important in the middle of the film, but if he gave it to you at the beginning, that would be too early, you would know TOO MUCH as the story develops, you would in fact know more than the characters do, so he does a flashback scene and gives you the back-story that you need, exactly when you need it. THAT is the proper use of flashbacks. "The United States of Leland" ALMOST comes close to this, because what we all really want to know is why Leland killed that person, and giving it to us in the beginning would be way too soon, for that same reason, we would then know more about the situation than the film's characters do. Without it, we're all asking the same question as they are, "WHY?" But the problem is that we then get TOO MUCH information delivered via flashback, and not all of it is helpful, much of it is extraneous, and then by the end I wasn't even sure that any attempt had been made at all to give us that answer.
Really, it's a lot of confusion. And we dive back into the past so many times, even in the middle of scenes, that it's hard to keep everything straight - in particular Martin Donovan's character (he's a detective or something, and the father of the Pollard girls, one of whom dated Leland for a time) has a flashback of how Leland looked on a particular day, with his hand in his pocket, and...what? I didn't understand the shot, there was no point to this flashback, it meant nothing, it only wasted 60 seconds of film. So, it should be cut, as it served no purpose. Leland's own narration says things like "I don't remember much about that day..." well, great, that's not helpful at all. Why not have the character tell us what he DOES remember, not about some red-haired girl serving him ice cream on a totally different day? It's almost maddening how this film refuses to give us any information about anything.
Here's what we can piece together from the flashbacks - in the past, Becky Pollard broke up with Leland, because a previous boyfriend who was in prison for dealing drugs got released, and she got back together with him. Leland went back to New York at one point, and looked up the mother of the Calderon family that took him in when he couldn't pay for a hotel (there's some rule that only an adult can get a hotel room, which Leland didn't know. But then how do we explain "Home Alone 2"?) and who he visited several times over the years. On his most recent visit, he learned that Mrs. Calderon had gotten divorced and it's implied that Leland slept with her (on the rebound from Becky? not sure) but he felt that the spark in her eyes that he had seen before was now gone.
Meanwhile, in the present, there is Pearl, a teacher at the juvenile detention center who wants to know more about why Leland killed that boy (don't we all?) and it's partially because he's curious, and partially because he wants to help Leland, but it's also because Pearl wants to write a book about Leland, he thinks there's a story there (I wouldn't be so sure...). Pearl is also familiar with the books that Leland's father has written, and he correctly assumes that the novelist has come to town, and is staying in a hotel under the alias of one of his characters. But when he meets Mr. Fitzgerald in the hotel bar, he says he's there to help Leland out, however the author figures out Pearl's motive to write a book, and that's the end of that conversation.
Pearl also has a long-time girlfriend who lives in California, and we see him have an affair with a co-worker at the prison. Why? Again, there's no real answer other than that is a thing that people sometimes do. If this is meant to be some kind of foil concurrent storyline to the main story, it's another dud because the two stories have nothing at all to do with each other. Really, it's just another time-killer, if you ask me. Pearl eventually flies to California and reconciles with his main girlfriend, but so what? Without getting into his motives for cheating or his motives for regretting that, it's just another branch of the tree that leads nowhere in particular.
Some characters are completely extraneous - you could remove them from the film and it wouldn't make one damn bit of difference. Yes, the Pollard family is important, because Leland dated Becky Pollard, and killed her intellectually disabled brother, Ryan. There's another sister, Julie, who serves no purpose other than to cry whenever we see her. After the murder, Julie breaks up with her boyfriend, Allen, who then gets himself arrested and thrown in jail, I guess because he blames Leland for the break-up? Like most things here, that's completely unclear. I just guess we're never really going to find out exactly why Leland killed Ryan.
If you really want to connect the dots here, and it's really a stretch if you ask me, then maybe Leland's affair with Mrs. Calderon and his bad feelings about his girlfriend going back to that drug dealer ex made him deeply depressed, and this led him to kill someone who couldn't even understand love or happiness and never would? Or maybe the murder was just a stand-in for Leland's intent to commit suicide? Or maybe we can trace everything back to Leland's father abandoning him as a young boy? I don't know, it's enormously frustrating because if any of those are the cause, why can't the movie just tell me that, instead of being so very oblique about it? It's like somebody here doesn't know the basics of storytelling, and they just put all the scenes in random order to cover that up. Really, if you had a point to make with this story you had plenty of opportunities to do that, and it just never ended up happening. I'm kind of shocked that this wasn't a career-ending project for all involved.
Directed by Matthew Ryan Hoge
Also starring Ryan Gosling (last seen in "Albert Brooks: Defending My Life"), Don Cheadle (last seen in "White Noise"), Chris Klein (last seen in "Say It Isn't So"), Jena Malone (last seen in "Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire"), Lena Olin (last seen in "Spaceman"), Kevin Spacey (last seen in "Elvis & Nixon"), Michelle Williams (last seen in "Species"), Ann Magnuson (last seen in "Keith Haring: Street Art Boy"), Kerry Washington (last seen in "The School for Good and Evil"), Sherilyn Fenn (last seen in "Nothing Compares"), Matt Malloy (last seen in "Jeff, Who Lives at Home"), Wesley Jonathan, Michael Pena (last seen in "Shooter"), Michael Welch (last seen in "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1"), Ron Canada (last seen in "The Hunted"), Troy Winbush (last seen in "The Bonfire of the Vanities"), Nick Kokich (last seen in "The Alamo"), Yolonda Ross (last seen in "Phil Spector"), Leyna Nguyen (last seen in "Eagle Eye"), Jim Haynie (last seen in "The Fog"), Randall Bosley (last seen in "Envy"), Jody Wood (last seen in "Rules of Engagement"), Robert Peters (last seen in "Lying and Stealing"), Kathleen S. Dunn, Tony McEwing, Lawrence Lowe, Charles Hess, Kimberly Scott (last seen in "Respect"), Angela Paton (last seen in "Eye for an Eye"), Ryan Malgarini, Maria Arcé (last seen in "Movie 43"), Dell Yount (last seen in "Phone Booth"), Clyde Kusatsu (last seen in "Made in America"), Melanie Lora, Rene Raymond Rivera (last seen in "Dog"), Alec Medlock, Jim Metzler (last seen in "River's Edge"), Evan Helmuth (last seen in "Jobs')
RATING: 3 out of 10 inmates playing basketball
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