BEFORE: Two days off in the middle of the week so it's a great chance to catch up and even get ahead of the count again. Gabrielle Union carries over from "Daddy's Little Girls", but I think it's easy to see the original plan here, which was to have Bill Murray carry over from "The Friend". But I was short for January, which is a long 31-day month, so I saw the opportunity to drop in those four Idris Elba movies, since one of them connected with "The Friend" and one of them connected here. And that's how you fill up a month, really, but now I can't take any more days off from movies in the next week if I want to hit my first love/romance film on time on Feb. 1. It's fine, sometimes I actually do know what I'm doing - not often, but sometimes.
Man, today's film is lit up with green names - that's my visual code for links to horror films, romance films and Christmas films. So I'm losing a lot of linking opportunities by watching this, but that was going to happen no matter when I did it. I'll just have to quickly check that I'm not stranding too many other films - with a pool of 625 movies to choose from, things will probably be OK. Even if I am stranding something, there are new films joining the list all the time that could rescue them.
The complete color-coding system, BTW, is: blue is a normal link to another film somewhere on the watchlist, red is a (temporary) direct link to a film that's stored NEXT to it on the watchlist, this is how I build two- or three-movie blocks that can be moved around, and green is a special link to one of the sub-categories, romance or horror or documentary or Christmas - so I know which films can get me into or out of those themed blocks. Well, it works, I just have to be constantly changing the color of actors' names.
THE PLOT: A former criminal's ordinary life is turned upside down when his old family shows up for a long-awaited reunion.
AFTER: An older man with a younger wife and a step-son living in Maine, that's a pretty good set-up, because it establishes a world that's perhaps a bit fragile and it's about to get rocked when Rocco, Vincent's son from his first marriage shows up, with a very pregnant girlfriend and also Vin's ex-wife, Rocco's mother, who Rocco apparently drugged and drove up from NYC with. OK, WTF is going on here? Just wait for it all...
At first it just seems like it's an innocent (but pretty effed up) attempt to get the family together for the holidays - this would seem to be set between Christmas and New Year's, so again, the chain kind of knows what it's doing here, it's still January so this film is seasonally appropriate. They apparently drove all night, so Rocco and his baby mama pass out in the guest room with the intent of sorting things out in the morning. Ruth, Rocco's mother, wakes up in the morning and doesn't know where she is, and pulls a knife on Vin's stepson, DJ - yeah, that's a New York woman, all right. Sandy, Vin's second and much younger wife, just wants to know who all these people are and what they're doing in her house. (This is their holiday cabin, not the main house, a fact which could be important later.)
Meanwhile another car's been driving north, containing two unsavory characters, Leftie and Lonnie. Leftie's clearly the boss, and Lonnie's the muscle, but even accidentally saying their names out loud at a gas station means they HAVE to kill the clerk. Well, obviously they're on Rocco's trail, as per the rules of parallel editing. Of course they're heading for the cabin in Yarmouth, the only question becomes what's going to happen when they get there. The blended and rather complicated family is getting ready for a New Year's dinner and celebration, but gradually the real reason for their hasty escape is revealed, Rocco apparently killed Leftie's son - now he may have had a very good reason for doing so, but Vin correctly determines that it's only a matter of time before Leftie shows up at the door. He gives his son access to his stash in a safe deposit box at the bank, provided he and his girlfriend beat it in the morning.
But Leftie's already on the way, and Vin's plan to have the cabin listed in his wife's name is a good one, but he didn't factor in the very helpful neighbors one might find in rural Maine giving out directions. At the cost of their own lives, unfortunately. So naturally this is all going to come to a head, and we're going to find out what happened between Rocco and the gangster's son - for that matter, we're going to learn about Vin's past association, and how he came to be in Maine himself, in the first place. Sure, you can run from your past but you can't hide forever, eventually it's going to catch up with you.
This plays out kind of like a Down-Easter version of "Fargo", maybe the "Fargo" TV series rather than the movie, but still, that's a good thing, especially when a season's worth of secrets from the past gets revealed in such a short, tight time-frame. You can't really see around the next corner to possibly guess what gets revealed next, or where this is all going to land, but those are good things, too. They tried to pull a "Tarantino" by starting with the most exciting, dramatic moment and then flashing back to explain how we got there, but that doesn't make this into "Pulp Fiction", unfortunately. I did like that the film started with a song titled "What Can Go Wrong", because I believe that's the genesis of many screenplays - start with a simple situation like a family reunion for a holiday and then start imagining how it can go wrong.
Directed by Dito Montiel (director of "Empire State" and "The Clapper")
Also starring Jennifer Coolidge (last seen in "A Minecraft Movie"), Ed Harris (last seen in "Places in the Heart"), Miles J. Harvey (last seen in "The Dinner"), Emanuela Postacchini (last seen in "Third Person"), Lewis Pullman (last seen in "Thunderbolts*"), Bill Murray (last seen in "The Friend"), Pete Davidson (last seen in "Martha"), Michael Angelo Covino (last seen in "News of the World"), Julius Sampson, Scott Michael Campbell (last seen in "Flight of the Phoenix" (2004)), Sage Spielman, Roger Guenveur Smith (last seen in "Eve's Bayou"), Lucinda Carr, Brooke Dillman (last seen in "Barbarian"), P.J. Byrne (last seen in "Dear Santa"), Eli Massillon, Angelic Zambrana (last seen in "Empire State"), Bob Leszczak,
RATING: 6 out of 10 New Year's fireworks (sparklers only)
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