BEFORE: I may have told you before about how my wife manifested a Dairy Queen - we went to a Dairy Queen in North Carolina near my sister's house and enjoyed it (like, who wouldn't enjoy hamburgers and ice cream?) but we were complaining about how there weren't many Dairy Queens or Waffle Houses in New York. As we were driving on Long Island a few months ago, just as she was saying "Dairy Queen" and pointing out the window, I saw that we WERE driving right by a Dairy Queen. Wait, can you do that again? Point out the window again and say "Waffle House" and we'll see what happens.
Before that, sometime in September 2022, we were also in Long Island and eating at an IHOP in Huntington. From our booth we could see a very abandoned diner across the road, and it got me thinking about opening up a competing pancake place, maybe the Municipal House of Pancakes, which I think was a Simpsons joke. OR, since it was the fall season, about a Halloween-themed pop-up restaurant, the Haunted House of Pancakes, putting two things together, riffing off the IHOP name, plus the place already looked scary because it was an abandoned diner, so you might not need to do much. Then of course, my brain started thinking of all kinds of spooky-themed menu items like ghoul-ash and fettucini afraid-o and ghost pepper chili, stuff like that.
Well, I was scrolling on Instagram last night and saw a video promo for the Haunted House of Hamburgers, which is a real L.I. restaurant out in Farmingdale. It's basically my concept, the whole place is decorated for Halloween year-round, like the old Jekyll & Hyde restaurant that they used to have in Manhattan. They serve tombstone tacos and monster mac & cheese, and a haunted house salad. There could be more puns in the names of food items, but they do have a vampire "steak" sandwich and "I-scream" shakes. It's basically my idea, just without the pancakes, so I don't know if somebody was spying on me in that IHOP or if somebody manifested my idea by coincidence, but we might have to check this out next weekend on a road trip.
Look, I can't really apply myself enough to design and build and manage a real restaurant, I'm more of an idea guy. Also I have no restaurant experience, but I do have a lot of ideas.
Joanna Lumley carries over from "Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie".
THE PLOT: A comedy of manners set against the backdrop of contemporary London and the international art scene.
AFTER: OK, I don't know what I was expecting tonight, but somehow I was expecting more than this. This is just a movie about people who work in the art world cheating on each other and having sex with multiple partners, and the art dealer / art gallery thing is just a backdrop. This could have taken place in any industry, hell, I could have written a similar story in the indie film or animation community, I'm sure there are plenty of stories there of people sleeping around, just not mine. But as we've established, I can't quite apply myself to write a movie screenplay because that seems like a hell of a lot of work. The hands-on research might be fun, though...
Is an art dealer and an art gallery owner the same thing? I'm not so sure. In other words, are displaying art and buying/selling art handled by the same people? I only have experience with art from animated films, and in those cases, I dealt directly with the collectors and fans, the people who wanted to own a tiny piece of an animated film that they liked. I hit that market hard for the last three years, to the point where suddenly there was no more market at all for art from that animator, because it seemed like I got zero response after social media posts about having a spring art sale, which was followed by a summer art sale, a fall art sale, etc. I think either people figured out that if you have a sale that goes on for 12 months, that's technically not a sale, it's your 12-months out of the year prices. Or we reached the point where simply everyone who wanted to collect art from that animator got what they wanted. I unknowingly worked myself right out of a job thanks to the laws of supply and demand. Oh, there was still plenty of supply, but I fulfilled orders until there was no more demand. Who knew?
I did strike a deal with a museum in Annecy, France - now there's a big animation festival there every year, but the museum was not connected to the festival, it was run by the city government, however they were very interested in art from films that had been in that animation festival. They also were interested in storyboards, sketches, any rough art from certain films, in addition to the finished pieces. I went back-and-forth with them for 2 months, finding the pieces they wanted and in some cases suggesting ones they didn't even know they wanted - now, they had a set budget and they weren't inclined to go over it, but still, any money raised for the studio was helpful. However, by the time the money got approved by the city government and then sent, another two months had gone by, and that meant another two months of studio rent and other expenses, so really, as soon as the money cleared, it needed to be spent. That's kind of when I realized that no matter how hard I worked, I could not get this animator out of debt, unless he was willing to cut back on his expenses and/or get a real agent to license his film library.
Of course, it might have been not helpful that the artist was still alive. I seem to recall that once an artist dies, there could be more demand because, well, no more supply is coming. That's kind of what this film touches on, but I wish it could have touched on it a little harder instead of just being a swapping partners bedroom farce. The main (?) story is about a Mondrian painting, which is the "Boogie Woogie" of the title, only in real life it's called "Victory Boogie Woogie" and was not an early work of Mondrian, but rather a later, unfinished one. The one seen here in the film is (duh) not a real Mondrian, they probably just made a fake one, and it's displayed in a man's apartment in a diamond shape, which does make a little sense if the lines were meant to be NYC streets, but it's a bit unusual perhaps for an artist to treat the canvas as a diamond, rather than a square.
Anyway, the man who owns it bought the painting himself from Mondrian, and even though he and his wife are getting behind on paying their bills, he refuses to sell the Boogie Woogie, even though doing so would bring him $11 million or possibly more. Several of the art dealers in the film contact him with offers, but his answer is always, "Over my dead body!" Well, you know, be careful what you wish for. Also, strike while the iron is hot, just putting that out there, you can live pretty well off $11 million for a long period of time, even longer if you bank that money and spend it wisely. Meanwhile his wife and butler are conspiring to try to get him to sell it, most likely they're sleeping together because everybody in this film is sleeping with somebody on the side.
There's a married couple, the Maclestones, who run a gallery, and they're both sleeping with other people, she's sleeping with an artist named Jo Richards and he's sleeping with Beth, who manages a different gallery for Art Spindle. The Maclestones split up, shocking, I know, who could have foreseen that their open marriage concept was a bad idea - and the divorce becomes contentious because it means splitting up a large art collection and a pair of dogs named Picasso and Matisse.
Things get more complicated when Beth tries to open up a gallery of her own, and Art Spindle accuses her of poaching his clients. Which of course she has been doing, and she's also been having sex with several of them, including a female video artist named Elaine, who documents all the hook-ups and break-ups in her life on video, and she cheated on her girlfriend Joany to sleep with future gallery owner Beth, or maybe it was done in the name of art. That leaves upstairs neighbor Dewey out in the cold, he can't work with Elaine, Art Spindle won't consider his gallery pitch and he also can't find a boyfriend, so naturally he wants to kill himself.
Jean Maclestone goes to New York with the artist Jo Richards, but it's not long before he's also sleeping with Beth - apparently everyone sleeps with Beth, because they think that will get them into her gallery. The novel this was based on was apparently written before 2000, and seems to be about a time when nobody was ever faithful to anyone else, but really, that sounds like the "free love" 1970's, not the late 1990's when people were still afraid of AIDS and the pendulum was kind of swinging back to the more conservative side again.
Honestly this story seems to be firing in a lot of different directions at once, without having a clear focus about anything, including how relationships come together and fall apart, everything just sort of happens without getting a handle on the WHY of it all. People aren't just rutting animals, not everyone tries to hump everything that moves, and not everyone in the art world is cut from the same cloth. Instead of 15 different characters, this film feels like it has the same character 15 times over, with different names, if that makes any sense. Also it just mostly goes around in circles without ever getting anywhere, and the sex isn't even very sexy. Sorry, I've got to call them like I see them. It's strange when "Nightbitch" got more into the creative process of being an artist than this film, which should have been all about that.
Directed by Duncan Ward
Also starring Gillian Anderson (last seen in "The Pale Blue Eye"), Alan Cumming (last seen in "Personality Crisis: One Night Only"), Heather Graham (last seen in "About Cherry"), Danny Huston (last seen in "Fade to Black"), Jack Huston (last seen in "Kill Your Darlings"), Christopher Lee (last seen in "Dracula A.D. 1972"), Simon McBurney (last heard in Wolfwalkers"), Meredith Ostrom (last seen in "Factory Girl"), Charlotte Rampling (last seen in "Dune: Part Two"), Amanda Seyfried (last seen in "Letters to Juliet"), Stellan Skarsgard (last seen in "Deep Blue Sea"), Jaime Winstone (last seen in "Tomb Raider"), Alfie Allen (last seen in "How to Build a Girl"), Gemma Atkinson, Silas Carson (last heard in "Locke"), Sidney Cole (last seen in "The Two Popes"), Sergio James (last seen in "Captain America: The First Avenger"), Michael Culkin (last seen in "Dorian Gray"), Josephine de la Baume (last seen in "The Hitman's Bodyguard"), Omar Alma, Michael Estorick, Rosie Fellner (last seen in "Heist"), Stephen Greif (last seen in "Risen"), Maria Papas (last seen in "A Good Year"), Jenny Runacre (last seen in "Goodbye, Mr. Chips"), Ebe Sievwright, Jan Uddin
RATING: 4 out of 10 insurance policies
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