You Gotta Believe

Year 17, Day 270 - 9/27/25 - Movie #5,153

BEFORE: Was working all day yesterday at an animation conference, a bunch of talks and then a feature film to cap off the day. For me it was 9 am to 10 pm, so yeah, a long day and those are starting to wear at me. I followed the steps to work at New York Comic Con, which is coming up in just a couple of weeks, but I've been so busy at the theater and they booked me into so many shifts in October that now I think I may want to take a pass and just NOT work those four days at Comic-Con, just have a little stay-cation at home. Maybe I can buy a one-day pass and attend the Con for one day, spy on the old boss, but it feels weird, I haven't bought a Comic-Con ticket in about 20 years, I always get in free because I'm working for an exhibitor. Yeah, big change, do I want to drop $40 or whatever for a ticket, or just start boycotting the event. I don't think I really want to spend four full days on my feet doing crowd control, I think I'll wear my legs out. You know, I've got 20 years of Con photos to sort through and re-post, maybe that's a better use of my time. 

I can just make it through September under the wire, I think - three days left after today and three films left to connect me to the horror chain. But I'm still on sports tonight, we're moving from college flag football to Little League baseball, there's a progression, right? 

Taylor Hunt Wright carries over from "Balls Out". 

THE PLOT: A LIttle League team of misfits dedicates their season to a player's dying father. In doing so, they accomplish the impossible by reaching the World Series finals in a game that became an ESPN instant classic. 

AFTER: Fresh off the film that makes fun of all the cliches in sports movies that we've gotten used to, here's a movie where the last-place team, the one with all the misfits, comes together and starts to, you know, actually practice and get their sh*t together and somehow make it to the Little League World Series. But how? Why? It's based on a true story, that of the team from Fort Worth, TX that played in that event in 2002.  

Kids are terrible actors, and really none of them can't deliver a good, believable line reading. That's unfortunate, because rather than convince me that this story is "real" it just makes me aware that all of the kids are actors, and they're also not good at it. Better actors would have said their lines with conviction and disappeared into the characters they were playing, and then I wouldn't be thinking about how unreal everything here is. The illusion needs to be maintained - Greg Kinnear and Luke Wilson and the other adults are all great, but our country has a notable dearth of kid actors who can also be believable, it seems. 

Also, I need explanation about how THIS team of misfits, who had a terrible season, made it to the Little League World Series. They try to explain it in the film, but since I don't understand it, that's a fail. There had to be like a hundred other teams in their county, let alone the great state of Texas, with better baseball abilities and better stats for the season, so why the Ft. Worth team?  Yes, they practiced, yes, they conditioned, yes, they rallied together as a team, but all that came LATER, that doesn't explain how they were picked in the first place. The guy from the district said he "had to send a team", was every other team unavailable? I don't get it. Now I have to go and look up the real team's back-story and do the work that the screenwriter here should have done in the first place. It's like a math team question, you don't get credit for a right answer unless you also show your work and everyone knows you got there the right way.  

OK, I just did some research, and it turns out that the Little League World Series involves sixteen teams (the MLB Series, just two) and that means there are tournaments in 16 parts of the U.S. and around the world. Great Lakes, Mid-Atlantic, New England, Southwest, Caribbean and so on. So in those 16 regions, there are varying numbers of teams who play in a round-robin (?) format for the chance to represent their region in Williamsport, PA. The team here was re-named the Forth Worth All-Stars to represent "Texas West" in the Southwest region, the tournament was held in Waco, TX so I guess they didn't have to travel far, and while they didn't have the best record in Pool B, they had an upset over Arkansas from Pool A to advance to the finals against Texas East, which they also won. See? Was that SO HARD, Mr. Screenwriter? 

So let's be clear, here, they were not "invited" to the Little League World Series, no team gets "invited", they have to win their regional tournament. But it was the district guy who sent them into that tournament, and it's still a mystery why he picked a team with a losing record to send to that, if you just present this information to me that way, it feels like they had no chance of winning. But I guess maybe any given team on any given day can win?  All they need is a song or a catch-phrase or a dying father to rally around? 

Once they got to the LLWS, they didn't have the best record either, because they lost to a tough team from Massachusetts, but again, another couple surprise victories plus the round-robin format kept them from being eliminated when the number of teams went from 16 to 8, and then they had to face the team from Louisville, Kentucky, who were bigger, older and more experienced. Somebody was really trying to re-make "The Bad News Bears" here and that may not have been the best plan. Well, no spoilers here but you can look up the results yourself. Still, we have to believe that it was some kind of miracle that they got as far as they did. 

What was up with the soldier? Bobby Ratcliff writes a letter to his son while sitting in an airport and waiting for the delayed plane to board and take him to the World Series. But for some reason it's very important that he was looking at a soldier, like this somehow inspired the letter he was writing? Huh? I mean, we never hear the full contents of the letter, but was it about war or America or baseball or fatherly love? Yes, it's a glaring omission, and yes, it was 2002 so there was a lot of patriotism flying around after 9/11, I get that. But a filmmaker still needs to connect the dots, if the soldier is there for a reason, how about telling us all what that reason is? 

The implication here, because of the choices that are given to Bobby Ratcliff from his cancer doctor, is that after his chemotherapy, he could either start surgery immediately, or fly to Pennsylvania to watch his son play in the Little League World Series. Well, he sure wasn't going to miss that game, so does that mean that he died because he attended that game? Why on earth couldn't he schedule the surgery for next week, like attend the game, fly back, get the surgery. Why wasn't that an option? Was there limited space at the hospital, was the cancer surgeon going on vacation the following week? Again, this doesn't seem to make much sense, things are either one way or the other and it's the filmmaker's job to explain why things are the way they are. Across the board, somebody really dropped the ball here. 

This could have been, should have been a 6 or 7 on my scale, but really, really sloppy work prevents that. I can't reward bad storytelling and no follow-through.

Directed by Ty Roberts

Also starring Luke Wilson (last seen in "Alex & Emma"), Greg Kinnear (last seen in "I Don't Know How She Does It"), Sarah Gadon (last seen in "What If"), Molly Parker (last seen in "Pieces of a Woman"), Lew Temple (last seen in "Domino"), Joaquin Roberts, Martin Roach (last seen in "Loser"), Patrick Renna, Blake DeLong (last seen in "The United States vs. Billie Holiday"), Justin Adams, King Orba (last seen in "Roman J. Israel, Esq."), Ali Hassan (last seen in "My Spy"), Michael Cash, Etienne Kellici (last seen in "Ready or Not"), Nicholas Fry, Jacob Mazeral, Gavin MacIver-Wright, Scott MacKenzie, Zachary Morton, Josh Reich, Jacob Soley (last seen in "Flatliners" (2017)), Evan Hasler, Davide Fair, Seth Murchison, Christopher Seivright, Zachary Cox, Phoenix Ellis, Jackie English, Ashley Emerson, Peter Hoy, Daniel Krmpotic, Sandra Flores (last seen in "The Glass Castle"), Brooke Morton, Walker Connor, Jordan Sawyer, Lance Van Auken with archive footage of Satchel Paige. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 rally caps

Balls Out

Year 17, Day 269 - 9/26/25 - Movie #5,152

BEFORE: Wait, two football films in one week? How does that happen? Really, without me even trying very hard, that's the answer. I've got an all-day animation conference event to work today, so this post will also likely appear very late, but then I've got the weekend to myself, I can relax a bit, except for an e-cycling event that we're supposed to bring our old electronics too tomorrow. So no, I won't get to sleep in, not until Sunday. 

Jay Pharoah carries over from "Get a Job". 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Turkey Bowl" (Movie #4,289)

THE PLOT: With marriage, graduation and the real world looming on the horizon, fifth-year senior Caleb Fuller reassembles the old team of misfits for one last epic run in intramural football.

AFTER: I guess this is supposed to be a parody of every sports movie ever, such as "Varsity Blues" and "Friday Night Lights" and "Bad News Bears", all thrown together. But don't we have "Dodgeball" for that, do we need a similar film about college flag football? I'm guessing we don't. It's self-reflexive, which is usually good, like the way that "Not Another Teen Movie" used all the tropes of high-school romance films while also poking fun at them. But now I'm wondering if you really can do both things, can you use all the stereotypical plot points AND make fun of them at the same time, by having the characters be aware that they are characters in a sports movie, kind of like in a "Deadpool" way? Nah, it just doesn't really work, cute idea though. 

This is a Kickstarter-funded film, so if you backed it and you don't like it, you only have yourself to blame. Maybe you should have pledged more. There's very little to work with in the IMDB "Trivia" section, and even less in the "goofs" section - I guess because if nothing in your movie is meant to be taken seriously, it's kind of impossible to make a mistake? Good to know.  

Anyway, you've seen this film before, even if you haven't seen this film before, because it uses every little piece of every sports film that you HAVE seen, from the last-minute come-from-behind victory against a perceived unbeatable opponent, to the jock falling for the sister of his biggest rival before he realizes the connection, and the coach who dies in an accident but whose death reinforces the bond between the sportsball players and drives them to keep on trying harder. 

But then there are some things that are very unusual, like you may notice the lack of fans in the stadium. Well, OK, either nobody is interested in watching flag football (relatable) or they just couldn't afford to pay extras to sit in the stands. Then there are the play-by-play announcers, who are just the only two guys sitting nearby, they're not sports experts and they're not being paid for their commentary, they're just another two burnouts who happen to go to this college - at least, I hope they do. 

Caleb learns valuable lessons, of course, about how the passion for sports forms a bond between teammates that will last a whole semester, then cool down for four years until everyone realizes that they're about to graduate and they forgot to keep playing sports, so I don't know, maybe let's try to get back into it? It's not glee club, guys, it's your sport and that means it's your life, right after your major, I guess. Caleb also learns that if you fall backwards into getting engaged to someone JUST because her father runs a law firm and promises to hire you after college, well maybe that's not the best foundation for a relationship. Hey, sure, I get it, Meredith is much more fun and not all uptight and weird and she doesn't mind that you still play flag football so I see the appeal, but you may want to tell your fiancee that you have feelings for someone else. 

But none of this is real and so therefore nothing matters and it's all a big parody goof so what's the harm? OK, but then neither does it make any insightful points about life or sports or relationships, it just goes around in circles for a while, killing time until the big final game of the season, which is bound to be a last-minute come-from-behind victory against a perceived unbeatable opponent.

Directed by Andrew Disney

Also starring Jake Lacy (last seen in "Miss Sloane"), Nikki Reed (last seen in "Empire State"), Kate McKinnon (last seen in "Martha"), Beck Bennett (last seen in "Superman" (2025)), Nick Kocher (last seen in "The Bubble"), Brian McElhaney (last seen in "Young Adult"), Gabriel Luna (last seen in "Terminator: Dark Fate"), Will Elliott, Kirk C. Johnson, Sam Eidson, Nicholas Rutherford, D.C. Pierson (last seen in "The To Do List"), Michael Hogan (last seen in "The Cutting Edge"), Clint Howard (last seen in "Rock 'n' Roll High School"), Matthew Broussard (last seen in "All I Wish"), Henry J. Smith III, Donnie Amadi, John Merriman, Lauren Knutti (last seen in "Results"), Matt Beckham, Billy Blair (last seen in "The Last Stand"), Byron Brown, Thomas Fenoglio, Russell Wayne Groves, Gregory Kelly (last seen in "The Devil All the Time"), Jared Knight, Tom McTigue (last seen in "Boyhood"), Joe Self, Aaron Spivey-Sorrells (last seen in "Joe"), Liz Waters, Mark Connelly Wilson, Taylor Hunt Wright

RATING: 4 out of 10 bridal shower gifts

Get a Job

Year 17, Day 268 - 9/25/25 - Movie #5,151

BEFORE: OK, I'm forced to use my skip day because I've been so busy - out late last night working that screening, came home and was only able to catch up on posting, not watching - so Wednesday's gone, and the Wednesday film has to now be the Thursday film. But this is why we HAVE free days, for when the work schedule gets too crazy. Seems appropriate for a film all about working, obviously this would have made a great Labor Day film but that just didn't work out, still it made it into the right month, so that's something. 

Greg Germann carries over from "Bigger than the Sky".

THE PLOT: After college, Will is having problems getting a good, lasting job, as are his roomies, his girlfriend and his just-fired dad. 

AFTER: This is one of those "whatever can go wrong will" movies, or you know, a movie. The idea here was to show everything that could possibly go wrong when looking for a job. Somebody promised you that your internship would turn into a paying gig, and then it doesn't. Somebody promised you a pension, and then fired you. Somebody hires you to be a middle school chemistry teacher and then you end up coaching the basketball team, too. The problem with all of this is that none of this is particularly humorous, and allegedly this is supposed to be a comedy. Well, you could have fooled me.  

Maybe it's the fact that I just spent five months job-hunting myself, and I had interviews that didn't turn into jobs, applications that didn't turn into interviews, and sure, I responded to a bunch of internet postings that turned into nothing at all. I get it, that's life, and I expected a high ratio of time-wasting endeavors to productive ones, but the process is really ridiculous, because sometimes it seems like nobody gets the job they want, and some people don't even know WHAT they want, so they respond to everything and work for a bunch of different jobs and are bad at all of them. Which is why I took the job at the sports arena, because it seemed to be real and nobody was fooling me about there BEING a job at all, and before you know it, I was giving them my bank account number for direct deposit and picking days for orientation and training. But the basketball season starts in late October, it turns out (who knew?) so it's really been a process of "hurry up and wait". But let me just say that if you're job-hunting, I recommend looking for some situation where a whole bunch of people are getting hired at once, the start of a sportsball season is one example, and the movie theaters re-opening in fall 2021 was another one that I took advantage of. 

Someone also attempted to find humor here in an older man's situation, being fired from a long-term job, trying to promote himself via an executive placement service that charged, for their premium package, more than he could possibly afford. So he starts hanging out in a Starbucks-like coffee shop where there's free wi-fi as well as coffee, and calling it his "office" as he seeks out employment via a laptop. Yeah, umm, still waiting for the funny part, guys. That's the plight of Will's dad.  

Will's story is a little different, but he gets a job making "video resumes" for that very same executive placement company (what are the odds of that?) because he has experience making funny YouTube videos. But he can't really apply those skills to the job, because there's a very strict set of guidelines concerning how they want those videos to look, they don't really want to be innovative or ground-breaking or make any videos that go "viral", so already I don't think Will is a very good fit for this company. Later he gets contacted by a company that makes a product called "Sweat" - is it a fragrance, a sports drink, a surfboard wax? I'm just not sure. They want to hire Will to make those ground-breaking, weird, funny videos that he's known for, so yeah, it's not too hard to see that Will's foray into corporate videos is not going to be a prolonged one. 

Will has three roommates and they all get stoned together and play video-games - Charlie gets that job as a chemistry teacher, but most of his lab experiments involve the kids making snacks for when he gets "the munchies" after free period, Luke gets a job as a "clerk" for an investment company but didn't realize that the orders they want him to process all involve getting coffee and sandwiches for the real brokers, and Ethan doesn't have a job at all, but he's created an app that lets you stalk your loved ones via their phone to find out if they're cheating on you and he hopes to get Warren Buffett to invest in it. Well, I knew there were reasons to hate on millennials, and here are three of them. 

Along the way, Will's girlfriend Jillian manages to lose her high-paying job, they never say exactly WHY though, but she certainly regrets spending so much money on shoes and her high-rent apartment, as she's forced to move in with Will and his co-slacker roommates. Well, maybe if you do get a high-paying job you should pay down your debt first rather than spending so much of your salary on clothes, just saying. In lieu of being funny, another way to go would be to have all of these events add up to something, to speak advice to the masses or reveal some greater truth, for the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts - but nah, that doesn't happen either, really it's just a bunch of random happenings that don't add up to much of anything. 

But somebody thought they cracked the code on what's wrong with kids in the 2010s, it all stems from the fact that everybody gets participation trophies now, and therefore they get rewarded for LOSING, and this carries over into other aspects of their life and makes them all soft and entitled. Well, this isn't wrong exactly, but it's perhaps overly simplistic and the problem runs a bit deeper, so you can't just take away the trophy-giving process and fix everything, because those kids are going to get special treatment in other ways from their helicopter parents and the problem is going to remain, sorry. Also it can't be true that parents are somehow too lenient and also not lenient enough at the same time, those things are contradictory and you have to pick one. 

Across the board, there are really no repercussions for bad behavior here, and that's something of a problem. Look, it worked in "Animal House" but it really hasn't worked since, unless you count "Superbad", "Pineapple Express" and every film with Will Ferrell. But if the point is to demonstrate that it's all going to work out in the end, even if you just try to cruise through life and let your career happen to you, but come on, that's a very dangerous message to put out into the world. This film was made in 2012 but sat on a shelf and didn't get released until 2016, so somebody knew. Then when it was in theaters, it only made $24,000 so maybe keeping it on that shelf was actually the smarter idea. 

Directed by Dylan Kidd

Also starring Miles Teller (last seen in "That Awkward Moment"), Anna Kendrick (last heard in "Trolls Band Together"), Christopher Mintz-Plasse (ditto), Bryan Cranston (last seen in "Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary"), Nicholas Braun (last seen in "Saturday Night"), Brandon T. Jackson (last seen in "The Year of Spectacular Men"), Alison Brie (last seen in "The Rental"), Marcia Gay Harden (last seen in "The Daytrippers"), Jorge Garcia (last seen in "The Wedding Ringer"), Mimi Gianopulos (ditto), Bruce Davison (last seen in "Runaway Jury"), Parker Contreras, Megan Gallagher (last seen in "Mr. & Mrs. Smith"), Jay Pharoah (last seen in "Ride Along"), Ethan Dizon (last seen in "Avengers: Infinity War"), John C. McGinley (last seen in "A Midnight Clear"), Aaron Hill (last seen in "The Night Before"), Chester Tam (last seen in "Scream" (2022)), Ravi Patel (last seen in "Wonder Woman 1984"), Michael C. Mahon, Seth Morris (last seen in "The Dictator"), David Carey Foster, Marc Maron (last seen in "To Leslie"), Jeryl Prescott (last seen in "The Birth of a Nation"), Jackie Benoit (last seen in "Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2"), John Cho (last seen in "The Oath"), Cameron Richardson (last seen in "Alvin and the Chipmunks"), Murray Gershenz (last seen in "The Onion Movie"), Jamie Denbo (last seen in "Daddy's Home"), Nik Tyler (last seen in "batteries not included"), Jack Knight (last seen in "Ted 2"), Michael Mantell (last seen in "The Night We Never Met"), Sean O'Bryan (last seen in "Babylon"), Maximiliano Hernandez (last seen in "The Yards"), Oscar Magana Jr., Alizabeth Hamer

RATING: 3 out of 10 career tips from a stripper

Bigger than the Sky

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Varsity Blues

Year 17, Day 265 - 9/22/25 - Movie #5,149

BEFORE: I had to work Monday morning and get up early, so I couldn't start a movie on Sunday night, those are the breaks. So instead I had to watch this film Monday night, which is not technically behind, I'm right on schedule, but I just feel like I'm falling behind, so really I'm glad I still have that free day, I will definitely use it this week just to stay on track. The event on Monday was a narrative summit all about climate change, so that's an important topic and I'm glad I was there, just to be involved somehow even if indirectly, to make sure that event went well and stayed on track. 

As with "The Boys in the Boat", this film covers two September topics - school films and sports films. Jesse Plemons carries over from "Kinds of Kindness". 

THE PLOT: A back-up quarterback is chosen to lead a Texas football team to victory after the star quarterback is injured.

AFTER: I've said it many times, I don't know jack about football, except for watching the Super Bowl once a year. Time and experiences I've had and being busy in other areas of my life has ensured that just watching football movies as a way of learning about the sport has not worked, I have a limited knowledge. It's kind of like how I can order food in Spanish or Italian but I can't really have a conversation in either of those languages, I know the words for the different kinds of plantains, but how is that going to help me if I'm lost in Mexico or something?  Thank God for Google translate, am I right? I can give instructions to the porters who work at the theaters if I just use the translating functions of the browser on my phone. Very helpful. 

I remember high school, though it gets a little further away each day - I work at a college so I'm more in touch with college kids, kind of. But I must look like an elderly person to them and my co-workers, I'm sure. If I tell them I've been married for almost 25 years or put in 30 years working at an animation studio, both of those stretches are longer than they've been alive, so really that's why I joined Instagram, to start sorting through some of those memories and post pics on WaybackWednesday and ThrowbackThursday and Flashback Friday. Really I can justify posting any old photos as long as there's a hashtag for it. 

I don't know much about small-town Texas, I've only visited the big cities there, like Austin and Houston and San Antonio - but we've driven through Texas twice, and I believe in this depiction, where high-school football is a way of life, also pick-up trucks and drinking and strip clubs and, well, let's assume BBQ, because Billy Bob had to get that big somehow. There's a fair amount of "fat guy" humor here, most notably Mark Lester as the overweight offensive guard, the guy who drives his pick-up to school while dipping pancakes in butter and then chugging syrup while riding next to his pet pig. I'm trying to decide if I want to be offended here, because nobody eats like this (do they?) and also the fat guy is also the dumb guy, and that's NOT always the case. OK, maybe some Texas meatheads are also shaped like Texas meatballs, but more likely this is just cheap and easy stereotyping. 

By the same token, we have the handsome but also conceited quarterback, his sexually loose girlfriend who drops the QB in a minute after he gets injured to pursue the back-up QB, and the parents of both QBs for whom football isn't just a way of life, it's a religion and it's how they're going to be able to pay for their kids' college. Scholarships are assured as long as the team keeps winning district championships, thanks to the leadership of the also-stereotypical tyrannical coach, who won't let the ball get thrown to black players, apparently, as long as there are white receivers who are more deserving of glory. Yeah, I don't know about how things were in 1999 but these days if a coach wasn't playing team members of color he would be cancelled in a heartbeat. Does this really make sense, though, I mean could you imagine a basketball coach only putting white players in his starting line-up? The team would never win a game and the fans would be non-existent. I would think the same issues would apply for football. 

But this is really about the back-up quarterback, Jonathan Moxon, who gets into the starting line-up when Billy Bob, the fat guy stereotype, faints or something (you know, because he's fat) and doesn't protect Lance, the handsome QB stereotype, so Lance gets injured and is sidelined. So now Mox is on a collision course with Bud Kilmer, the racist tyrannical coach stereotype. Bud claims that the Coyotes are a running team, but Mox just wants to throw long passes, and he's damn good at it, this is demonstrated early on in the film. But no, the successful Coach Kilmer doesn't want to throw a long pass unless it's absolutely necessary, because games are won by running plays, I guess. Can't they BOTH be right? I mean, the same team ideally would be able to do both, running plays and passing plays, depending on the situation, like what team they're playing against or whether it's raining and the field is muddy or, I don't know, just to shake things up once in a while. Because if the Coyotes are a "running team", won't the other teams figure that out over time and develop defensive strategies to counter-act the plays they keep relying on? Mox has a good point, maybe it's time to shake things up and play a different game once in a while and keep the opposition on their toes. 

It should be noted that Mox is a strong academic student, he wants to go to Brown University, do they even have a football team? That's an Ivy League school in Providence, Rhode Island, now admittedly he applied before he became quarterback, but clearly he's on a different track, probably just wants to get far away from his parents. But it's hard to get into, so he must be smart. However, he's also a rebel, which is why he doesn't want to run the plays that Coach Kilmer wants him to. BUT he's also smart enough to not cheat on his girlfriend the minute that Darcy tries to seduce him by wearing a whipped-cream bikini. I just looked it up, Brown is NCAA Division I (formerly known as Division I-AA) which is the second-highest level of college football out there (I know, the numbering doesn't really make sense). This division has a championship, but the teams can't play in any bowl games, those are just for Division I-FBS. What a weird system.

Something like this happened in my high school, not with the football team, though. In tenth grade we had a U.S. History teacher who was old as dirt and very boring, I guess he'd been teaching so long that people kind of just forgot about him and let him be. I had a particular problem with him because I was part of this choral group that got to perform concerts for special occasions and sometimes that meant getting excused from class, and he didn't quite understand this - I sang bass, and not many tenth graders had such a low singing voice, so that meant few tenth graders were part of this group. Also when I was in his class, I kept falling asleep because he spoke in a monotone that made my eyes close. So for a few months my life was hell and I thought maybe I'd fail history class. But other kids apparently had their problems with him, too, because U.S. History should be exciting and with him teaching it, it just wasn't. I guess some kids told their parents and the parents got together and did something, because the teacher went on "medical leave", maybe to get a personality transplant, and our principal took over the class and decided to get back into teaching, and he had a loud, booming voice and suddenly I could stay awake and pay attention again. 

But also, this can be seen a political film - if you don't like the plays that the coach is calling, change it up, play your own game. So your leader is an old, racist, vindictive lunatic, and it's past time that somebody stood up to him and removed him from power or at least said "Hey, what you're doing is wrong and I don't have to be a part of it." You still have to follow the rules on the field, of course, I'm not saying break the law or start shooting people, but you don't have to keep playing the coach's game. Try a quarterback sneak, or pass to a non-designated receiver. Do a dive on 25, whatever that is for you. Change the play, change your job, change your gender, be the quarterback of your own life, while you can, because the game is on the line and your life is calling and you may never be back HERE to have this level of control of things again. If you get the rest of the team to agree with you, collectively you are more powerful than the coach. He can't keep winning (so much winning, you may get tired of winning) without the players supporting him, let's all remember that. 

Directed by Brian Robbins (director of "A Thousand Words" and "The Perfect Score")

James Van der Beek (last seen in "The Rules of Attraction"), Jon Voight (last seen in "I Am Burt Reynolds"), Paul Walker (last seen in "She's All That"), Ron Lester (last seen in "Not Another Teen Movie"), Scott Caan (last seen in "Rock the Kasbah"), Richard Lineback (last seen in "The Ring"), Tiffany C. Love, Amy Smart (last seen in "Crank: High Voltage"), Eliel Swinton, Thomas F. Duffy (last seen in "Super 8"), Jill Parker-Jones (last seen in "Just Married"), Joe Pichler (last seen in "The Fan"), Mark Walters, Brady Coleman (last seen in "October Sky"), James N. Harrell (last seen in "Paper Moon"), Ali Larter (last "Legally Blonde"), Tonie Perensky, Sam Pleasant, Timothy F. Crowley (last seen in "The New Guy"), Joe Stevens (last seen in "Bernie"), Don Cass, James Michael O'Brien, Mark Robert Ellis (last seen in "Hardball"), Robert Lott (last seen in "Sin City: A Dame to Kill For"), Barry Switzer (last seen in "The Turkey Bowl"), Mona Lee Fultz (last seen in "Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood"), Kevin Reid (A), Eric Jungmann (last seen in "Not Another Teen Movie"), Bristi Havins, Jon Hyrns, Rome Azzaro, Marco Perella (last seen in "A Scanner Darkly"), Doyle Carter, Tony Frank (last seen in "Sweet Dreams"), Sue Rock (last seen in "Mr. Right"), John Gatins (last seen in "A Thousand Words"), Damian Tamburro (last seen in "The New Guy")

RATING: 5 out of 10 torn ligaments

Kinds of Kindness

Year 17, Day 264 - 9/21/25 - Movie #5,148

BEFORE: After tonight there will be just 8 films until the start of October, and thus the horror chain begins. BEWARE, for it may curdle your blood and give you the shivers! Seriously, there are Halloween decorations up on my block already, and it's not even fall yet. Candy is in the stores and so yeah, it looks like this is happening again, Halloween deja vu, right? I'm seriously considering lowering the number of horror films from 25 to 24, I know, big deal but then I'll have to find another film to add down the road, maybe even after Christmas. I've got some options built into the chain, but I know if I drop one of the droppable films then I also have to add one of the addable films. There's just one horror film that I can drop that seems like it MIGHT be needed for the linking next year, or even the year after that - so I have to think that far ahead, maybe. Dropping a film for a reason like that could also be a bad idea, like I may then never get to it, so I have to be sure that I'm OK with that possibility, and I think I am. It's going to be a tough month, I'll be out of town for 8 days, so right there, mathematically I should only watch 23 movies, but of course I've cheated and watched one already, so maybe I'll be OK. Anyway if horror flicks are your jam be sure to swing back here starting October 1. 

Emma Stone and at least FOUR other actors carry over from "Poor Things". Well, you can expect this sort of thing when the director carries over as well. People tend to keep on working with the people they like, after all.

THE PLOT: A man seeks to break free from his predetermined path, a cop questions his wife's demeanor after her return from a supposed drowning, and a woman searches for an extraordinary individual prophesied to become a renowned spiritual guide. 

AFTER: Again, it's amazing - what a difference a day makes. Two films from the same director, with a lot of the same actors, and one piece is a metaphorical masterpiece, while the other one, I just can't make heads nor tails of it, I have no idea what exactly the director was going for here, what was he trying to say, to get me to understand? I suppose this might be consistent with two films presented in an absurdist style, perhaps the problem here is me expecting things to make sense, and well, that's not guaranteed with absurdism, now, is it?  Let me get some thoughts down and then read the reviews to see if other people were just as confused as I was. 

This film is really three short stories put together, and let me be clear, there IS a through line, the title of each short is a very big clue as to where you should put your attention if you want to try to understand what connects the three stories. And many of the same actors appear in three (or at least two) of the stories. Beyond that, man, you're really on your own, I can't help you because I'm still trying to understand what took place here. Of course, I can't take any of this at face value, not any more that I could take a story about a dead woman getting a brain transplant and being re-animated at face value. Last night's film was about relationships, though, and so I took it all as a metaphor - not just "don't get into a relationship with someone who got a brain transplant and got re-animated", but, you know, recognize that some people are psychopaths and will break up with you for no reason to date someone else. So be wary. 

But what's the message, or advice HERE? I can't quite wrap my brain around it. The first story is about Robert, a man who's in a weird relationship with his male boss, Raymond - like, it's implied that they're lovers but they never state that explicitly. His boss has told him over the years how to dress, who to marry, when to have sex with his wife, when to drink alcohol, etc. and given him a high-paying job and a bunch of extravagant gifts, mostly sports collectibles. And it seems like this has all been a multi-year set-up for asking Robert to do one specific thing for him, to crash his car into the car of a man with the initials R.M.F., I guess essentially to kill that man. Yeah, that's a big ask, sure, but it's also hard to believe that anyone would pay a man for years in an attempt to obsessively control that man's life JUST to have someone on the payroll used to following his instructions JUST so he'd have a trained killer when he needed one. And there are so many questions, like why does Raymond want R.M.F. dead? And what are the odds that Robert would NOT kill R.M.F., get fired for that, have his whole life collapse and then start dating a woman who is ALSO... well, I don't want to spoil things. Let me just consider this short story some kind of metaphor for any boss-employee relationship, and move on for now. 

I guess "control" is the sort of running theme here, because the second short story is about marriage - Daniel is a police officer whose Liz, a marine biologist, disappeared at sea and is believed dead. Daniel goes about his life and tries to grieve, but then one day he gets a phone call to tell him his wife has been rescued, and will be returning to shore soon. (The mysterious figure R.M.F. is the helicopter pilot who flew her back from wherever...). However, his wife acts unusual after being rescued from that island where many of her co-workers (?) died, and there's a flashback that suggests that maybe cannibalism was involved, but again, absurdist comedy so it's unclear if that's just a fantasy or actually part of the story. That might explain why Liz is acting so weird, but also she didn't remember what Daniel's favorite song is, and also her shoes don't fit - so Daniel starts to suspect that this is NOT actually his wife, but some kind of impostor. A twin, a look-alike, an alien? It's unclear, because it's entirely possible that the time they spent apart has caused Liz to act differently or caused Daniel to be paranoid. Things kind of spiral out of control from there, again no spoilers, but Daniel puts his wife to the test. Again there's a weird vibe that maybe nobody anywhere can be faithful to their spouse, there seems to be an implied history of Daniel and Liz wife-swapping with another couple. 

The third story is also about control in that it involves a cult of sorts, and two cult members, Emily and Andrew, are going from town to town searching for their prophesied Messiah, who will be able to raise the dead (another common Lanthimos theme?) and she will be a certain age, a certain weight and have a twin sister who is deceased. Emily and Andrew stay at motels, are only allowed to drink water they brought with them, and believe that most people are somehow "unclean", and when they get back to the compound, if they have remained pure, they get to have sex with either the cult leader or his wife. (There sure are a lot of open relationships in these stories...) On their next trip, a woman approaches them in a diner and says that her sister is the person they've been looking for, and feels they should check her out. Emily has been having prophetic dreams about finding their healer, however when she visits her ex-husband and daughter, something happens and again, no spoilers here. But it kicks her search into overdrive, and...well, it doesn't end well. 

None of this really ends well, or does it, kind of? I mean, story #1 kind of ends on a positive note, but it's not positive for everyone. Is that the point to all this, that nobody can be happy unless there is another person somewhere who is sad, or disappointed, or dead? Is that the engine that drives the universe, equal parts success and failure, misery and happiness, life and death?  I was reading recently about something called the "burnt toast" theory, that if you look at things big picture-wise, everything that happens in sequence happens for a reason, even if you were to burn your toast one morning, that might seem like a small disaster, but maybe that made you leave the house five minutes later and maybe that helped you avoid a car crash or running over somebody. We'll never know because only what happened happened and we can't see all the different things that didn't happen, but if you want to think of the burnt toast as an event that somehow saved somebody's life, who's to say that's not correct?  A minor setback could lead to positive outcomes, for all we know - and this assumes that life is linear, which it usually is, although sometimes it's not all cause and effect. If you have a career path in mind, like a long-term goal, of course you may expect progress to occur if you fill out job applications, answer classified ads, search for job openings, and one little setback may not prevent you from getting a job long-term, so it would be hard to say that success didn't come from that setback, especially from burning the toast. 

But characters here certainly encounter some setbacks, little ones and big ones, and sure, I can see how everything in a movie is sequential so therefore we can trace any character's path to disaster and note all the little steps along the way that brought them there. Still, I think it's easier to say that people tend to make the best decisions they can at any given time, but since nobody can see the future, they are unaware of how those seemingly good decisions manage to put them in places where they are forced to endure terrible things. Like maybe you join a cult because it seems like this cult leader is making some sense, he seems to be very sure about the way the world works and the fact that the UFO is hidden behind the comet, and will be arriving soon to take the chosen people to a better life, however this puts you in the position where you have to wear the white robe of salvation and drink the juice of clarity, and well, you've stepped in it now, haven't you? 

I will admit that the whole piece has a sort of "Magnolia" or "Pulp Fiction" quality to it, especially since the three stories would seem to be slightly out of order based on what happens to R.M.F., and I can't help thinking about John Travolta's character in that Tarantino film where he was killed in one segment and then seen alive in a later segment, which really therefore occurred first. So is this Mr. Lanthimos' attempt at making an homage to "Pulp Fiction"? 

Jerskin Fendrix, however, is my new favorite name seen in any credits, it's way better than any of my old favorites, like Fonsworth Bentley or Izzy Skenazy. 

Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos (director of "Poor Things")

Also starring Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Yorgos Stefanakos, Jerskin Fendrix (all FIVE last seen in "Poor Things"), Hong Chau (last seen in "The Whale"), Tessa Bourgeois, Kencil Mejia, Mamoudou Athie (last heard in "Elemental"), Joe Alwyn (last seen in "The Brutalist"), Thaddeus Burbank, Suzanne Stone, Nikki Chamberlin, Lawrence Johnson, Ja'Quan Monroe-Henderson (last seen in "Nickel Boys"), Ivy Ray, Nathan Mulligan, Dominique Shy, Hunter Schafer (last seen in "The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes"), Harold Gervais (last seen in "The Big Short"), Merah Benoit (last seen in "We Have a Ghost"), Kien Michael Spiller, Krystal Alayne Chambers, Jeffrey Riseden, Julianne Binard, Emily Brady

RATING: 4 out of 10 bodies in the morgue