BEFORE: In the category of "Things You Should Never Say to Your Wife", I'm going to add the phrase, "Hey, I've got a four-day weekend coming up..." because as soon as I said it, I saw the words hanging there and tried desperately to put them back in my mouth. I suddenly had no excuse for not spending one of those four days moving around boxes in the basement, so we could start the process of shredding old tax receipts and also start putting together a pile of old electronics for an e-waste recycling event at the end of the month. Also we got two big bags of trash jettisoned, which included some big stuffed animals won at carnivals years ago but ones that probably absorbed some bad juju in a room that occasionally floods during the rainy season. Anyway, that's how you lose a day from a holiday weekend, you end up moving boxes around to try and free up some floor space, and then before you know it, you go grocery shopping, wash a load of laundry, call your parents, roll some meatballs and try sorting your DVD collection, and your long weekend is over. C'est la guerre.
Dean Norris carries over from "Carry-On". And here are the actor links that should get me to October 1 and the start of the horror chain: Kerry O'Malley, Mary Holland, Jon Hamm, Joanna Lumley, Christopher Lee, Calum Gittins, Matthew Sunderland, Adrien Brody, John Malkovich, Mark Wahlberg, J.K. Simmons, Robert Morgan, Hadley Robinson, Ramy Youssef, Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Amy Smart, Greg Germann, Jay Pharoah, Taylor Hunt Wright, Greg Kinnear, Iman Crosson, Chris Witaske and Christopher McDonald.
In addition to a couple of almost-maybe-horror films this month, I've got a couple of back-to-school films, a few films about the sports, and yeah, two more time travel films before we get to the really scary stuff. Prepare for the road less traveled by and (I'm guessing) another very weird month. Hey, at least I got to catch up on some episodes of "Hangin' with Dr. Z" on YouTube, but it's back to work tomorrow.
THE PLOT: During World War II, 855 women joined the fight to fix the three-year backlog of undelivered mail. Faced with discrimination and a country devastated by war, they managed to sort more than 17 million pieces of mail ahead of schedule.
AFTER: Eight months ago, December 2024, during the guild awards/nomination screening, Tyler Perry came to the theater where I worked, I want to say it was for a SAG or PGA guild screening of this film. Yeah, the theater gets booked for these things in December, which is fine because the school is essentially in holiday break mode after Thanksgiving, so I'll take whatever shifts I can get, now that my home for the holidays is the same as my home the other 11 months of the year. Kerry Washington was there, too, and a couple of the other actresses, this seems a bit like pandering but yeah, I get it, if you're an actor you have to kiss up to the guild voters every once in a while and talk about the film you just made like it IS the Most Important Film Ever Made.
Up until that point in my life I had managed to avoid all things Tyler Perry, because I just figured he'd found his audience dressing up like a hyperbolic cartoonish black matriarch named Medea, and that bought him his house (and his other house and his car and his giant studio lot and probably half of Atlanta) so why even try to make something relevant? Stick with what works for you, that's my motto. (I have heard that Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta has a replica of the White House - it's a bit unclear to me whether this means they have an interior Oval Office set, or a full-scale replica of the entire building. We went to Atlanta in 2022 and we tracked down a 3/4 scale model of the White House in Decatur on Briarcliff Road, so if there's another one at Tyler Perry Studios, that means that the Atlanta area oddly has twice as many White Houses than Washington DC does.)
Now I'm supposed to check the screenings every 20 or 30 minutes, for quality control on the sound and picture - which I do, but come on, if something's wrong with the sound a guest is very likely to storm RIGHT out of the movie and give me an earful. Anyway I checked in on the screening of "The Six Triple Eight" and saw the most ridiculous scene in the whole movie, which is set in the Oval Office, where Sam Waterston is FDR and Susan Sarandon is Eleanor Roosevelt (well, they got the bad teeth right) and Dean Norris as a general is explaining why the troops have not received mail in the last 10 months and nobody back home is getting mail from their sons or husbands or brothers, so really, nobody knows if their loved ones are alive or dead and it's all a big disaster but eh, what can you do?
Also in that Oval Office meeting is Mary McLeod Bethune, played by Oprah Winfrey, or some would say "over-played". Look, I know that FDR was progressive and all, but if that general was as racist as the movie would have us believe, would he even consent to be in a meeting with a black woman telling him how to fix the problem? No, he would not. So Oprah has the solution to the problem, which I'm willing to accept IRL, sure, but this was a different time, and so I doubt very much that the meeting would have gone down in this way. It's all ridiculously over-the-top, everybody on screen is talking like Foghorn Leghorn by way of Huey Long, and Oprah says something like, "General, have you tried the female Woman Army Corps to help solve the problem? Well, have you tried the Black Negro African-American Female Woman Army Corps? Because THAT, sir, is the answer to your current problem." Give me a god-damned break. Like how could she even know in advance that these people would be able to do what she said they could do? She didn't know the magnitude of the problem, or the exact cause, or whether those people had the skill set and the determination to do what she thinks they can. It's a bit like saying, "Well, if I put the rocket on the back of my motorcycle, and hit the ramp just right, I know I can jump over those 18 buses." when the last guy who tried couldn't even clear 10 buses.
A bunch of things in the rest of the film are almost as heavy-handed, too. I don't need to be preached at or reminded that racial intolerance is bad, mmkay? Like, we know this. Sure, it's great to be reminded and we need to remember that 1940's were a different and still quite bigoted time, but you only need to make that point a few times, not 50,000. We understand it, we're modern people and we know the ways that the people of the Greatest Generation had it rougher than us. Yet it seems to be ALL that everyone in this film can talk about, and surely they must have laughed, loved, eaten some good food once in a while and done other things when they weren't focused on racial intolerance, or else it took up every second of every waking hour, which come on, is a bit hard to swallow. OK, there's one dance here in the film where the 6888th division can relax a bit and cut loose, however at the same time we're also reminded that the women were expected to "entertain" the black male soldiers, so that means that when they weren't being discriminated against, they were kind of being pimped out. Let's hear it for the U.S. government, which clearly had its priorities in line. What happens in World War II stays in World War II, I suppose.
Then we've got the "miracle moments" near the end of the film, after the women of the 6888th completed their 6-month task in 2 months (umm, they kind of cheated, right? Just keeping it real.). You can't really have things both ways, they either gave the 6888th division this task because they needed to get it done, or they gave them the task because someone wanted them to fail. Both things simply can't be true, so which is it? Similarly, the Roosevelts seem shocked that nobody is getting mail back from the soldiers, they don't believe it at first, then they suddenly 100% believe it because ONE white lady stood outside the White House for two days in the rain. Really, is that all it takes, is that how we're going to separate fact from fiction, one Karen got a little wet in the rain so therefore everything she says must be the truth and gets to dictate national policy? COME ON.
We're treated to a montage of the Black WACs realizing the enormity of their task, then setting up their new headquarters so they'll have a mess hall, proper sleeping quarters, a giant sorting room, and even a beauty salon. I'm honestly shocked that there wasn't a full-on fashion show with them trying on different outfits to figure out what to wear while they sort the mail. If this is true, it must have taken weeks to clean and decorate their new headquarters, and that's weeks that maybe could have been spent on starting to, you know, actually do the task at hand. I know, proper planning prevents poor performance, I'm just saying that we didn't need the montage.
Don't even get me started on them having church service with the chaplain that was sent by the general to spy on them. The clock is ticking, there's a set amount of time to do the task, and you're going to have CHURCH service on Sundays? That's also more time that could be spent sorting the mail, how the hell did they finish so early if they wasted a couple of hours in church each week? You might also think that the success of their mission would be gradual, like maybe a little bit of mail would be delivered, then some more the following week, and more as the weeks went on. Nope, it turns out that mail is somehow not like a faucet, it's like a fire hydrant, it's either full-on or off, it's all delivered or none of it is, because after two months of trying, suddenly one day everybody in the world gets their mail, which kind of calls the whole method of storytelling here into question.
I'm sorry, I'm just not buying it, the process that these women went through seems all kind of made-up after the fact, llike some screenwriter didn't research what really happened so they just kind of spackled over the holes instead of putting in a whole new wall. That may appear to do the job, but you're really just setting yourself up for major structural problems later on.
Directed by Tyler Perry (producer of "Precious" and star of "Alex Cross")
Also starring Kerry Washington (last seen in "A Thousand Words"), Ebony Obsidian (last seen in "If Beale Street Could Talk"), Sam Waterston (last heard in "Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time"), Oprah Winfrey (last seen in "Martha"), Susan Sarandon (last seen in "Music by John Williams"), Milauna Jackson, Kylie Jefferson, Shanice Shantay, Sarah Jeffery, Pepi Sonuga (last seen in "Under the Silver Lake"), Sarah Helbringer (last seen in "I Love My Dad"), Jay Reeves, Jeanté Godlock, Moriah Brown, Gregg Sulkin, Donna Biscoe (last seen in "One Missed Call"), Baadja-Lyne Odums (last seen in "Flatliners"), Jeffery Thomas Johnson (last seen in "Citizen Ruth"), Nick Harris, Austin Nichols (last seen in "LOL"), Scott Daniel Johnson, Eugene H. Russell IV, Ben Peck (last seen in "Just Mercy"), Bill Barrett (last seen in "Fly Me to the Moon"), Helene Henry, Ben VanderMey, Meghan Perry, Veanna Black (last seen in "The DUFF"), Brian Kurlander (last seen in "A.C.O.D."), Kerry O'Malley (last seen in "The Killer"), Ciara Caffey, Dawn Raven, George Gallagher, Nina Jones, Bern Cohen (last seen in "Game 6"), Bill Skinner, and archive footage of Michelle Obama.
RATING: 5 out of 10 gas masks
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