BEFORE: Here we go again, new month and the start of this year's Romance and Relationship chain - I'm giving the whole month of February and half of March over to this topic, by choice - you might think this is limiting, and it is to some degree, however keeping the romance films (mostly) separate from the main list creates some unique linking opportunities, as there are actors out there who specialize in this genre, not just rom-coms of course but also romantic dramas, and maybe there will be one or two films in this chain that seem off-topic, but there are relationships in every film, so pretty much anything COULD fit in here, the challenge is in figuring out what SHOULD qualify a film for inclusion and which films might be considered tangential.
Jesse Eisenberg carries over again from "A Real Pain" and here are the links that should get me to the end of February: Isabella Rossellini, Dolores Drake, Marc Gaudet, Anna Kendrick, Rafael Sardina, Paul Dano, Michelle Williams, Laura Dern, Frances Conroy, Renee Zellweger, Dolly Wells, Maxwell Whittington-Cooper, Lil Rel Howery, Ayden Mayeri, Zac Efron, Liza Koshy, Geraldine Viswanathan, Nick Jonas, Celia Imrie, Emma Thompson, Gerard Horan, Ben Miles, Elizabeth McGovern and Terry Kinney. That's 24 people and 28 films, so some actors will be doing three films in a row.
I'll be honest, this was a tough romance chain to put together, I had to think a bit outside the usual box because the number of romance-based films that I have NOT YET seen is dwindling - and as the list gets a bit smaller I find I have to do more with less, linking-wise. I don't have the luxury of moving from film to film in a carefree fashion any more, this all has to be planned out months in advance. I have to think about leaving enough films to work with next year, should I be able to continue this process, and that means sometimes not watching ALL of the Anna Kendrick films on the list, for example - there's a benefit to saving a film like, say, "Another Simple Favor" if there's a slot for it next year, to link another film with Blake Lively to something else.
There's also the temptation to put the Nicole Kidman films together, or all the films with Isabella Rossellini in a mini-chain, but that may make the overall linking harder, instead of easier - splitting one of her films off from the herd could provide a linking opportunity that I accidentally ignored, and that could allow the romance chain to be longer than if I just took the easy way out every time. So it's a delicate balance, and sometimes I have to consider the bigger picture. Since I've got 47 films queued up and ready to go, I would like to think this is the maximum number I can link together before I mentally will need to move on to another topic. We'll see, I could always cut bait earlier if I really can't stand it - but seeing as I've built up a tolerance from years of doing this, I'm going to go for it. There's a chance to make some real progress on this part of the list, and then I can re-assess what's possible for next year from what remains.
THE PLOT: After breaking up with his lover and boss, a smooth-talking man takes his teenaged nephew out on the town in search of sex.
AFTER: This was initially supposed to be the last film in January instead of the first film in February, but those few empty days I left in January, well, I filled those up and then some, as I tend to do. I added one more film than I had empty slots for, so that pushed "Roger Dodger" into February - it's fine, there's enough on the "romance" topic here for this one to qualify, so once again I state that the chain knows what needs to happen, even if I don't completely understand. With a bit of luck, this will all make sense once the month is over and I look back on it.
This is also a movie I meant to watch, umm, I think, like 20 years ago and then I never got around to it and basically forgot about it for the next 15 or so. Mea culpa, I was a little busy. I think one day maybe I saw it in the cable listings again and thought, "Oh, yeah, I was going to watch that movie and maybe I never got around to it..." and then I promptly forgot about it AGAIN and maybe 2 years after that, I remembered that I'm keeping a watchlist with a section called "Someday/maybe" so why not add it to that? Then two or three times I was maybe close to watching it - or perhaps I could have programmed it, but then it wasn't on cable any more and I didn't feel like paying $2.99 to rent it, because it would have been a middle film out of 3 and the chain could just continue on without it. FINALLY, maybe 20 years after the fact, it's come up again, kind of as the perfect lead-in to the whole romance chain, and it's on Tubi for FREE, umm, with ads but who cares about that. I can at long last move it from the "Movies to watch - streaming" list to the "Movies watched - but I don't have on DVD" list. Really, it's the small victories that make life worth living.
My point is that it's almost 25 years now since this film won an award at Tribeca and was nominated for several Independent Spirit awards, and a lot has changed. When we look at the subject matter we're forced to say, "Well, it was a different time..." only, was it? There were no smart phones, no text messages, no SnapGrams or InstaChats and yet people still found a way to meet each other and come together. I know it sounds weird now, but people used to go to bars or clubs, get each other's attention and somehow have sex and propagate the species - we look back now on a time where nobody went to a bar or club for maybe two or three years, every human interaction was by Zoom or FaceTime and if you didn't have someone to shelter in place with, well, then you had to provide proof of vaccination before you could even start a conversation about maybe interacting remotely with the option of someday meeting face-to-face, just please let me check your forehead temperature first, you just can't be too careful about this.
But it's the old world we want to talk about tonight, the pre-COVID world of Manhattan bars and lounges, the men who went out on the prowl every night, and the women who for some reason let them. Even back then this was not really a good idea because the odds of finding a diamond in the rough were really low, the kind of person you want to settle down with and marry is not the same kind of person who goes to bars every night looking for a good time. Right? Those are two distinctly different groups of people. Maybe the guy you're looking for is at the library or the opera tonight, but he is probably NOT at the bar. Just saying. Hey, it's 2002 and this internet thing is really blowing up, maybe the potentially most successful person who you might want to think about as a long-term partner is teaching a class on HTML or he's working in the IT department, and maybe he's too socially awkward to ask anybody out. Nah, that's crazy, let's just go to the bar where all the sleazy drunks are.
Roger is forced back into this world when his boss/girlfriend breaks up with him - he maybe has a hard time dealing with this because clearly he invested some time in choosing the lover who could help him advance in the company - sure, most successful long-term relationships probably began as an HR violation. Well, it worked for Walt Disney, but again, that was a different time. Roger invested a lot of time into that relationship, we assume, and now SHE wants to end it. Well, it happens, and maybe he has to take that hit because making any fuss over this would probably just highlight that he used sex to get ahead, maybe he got a promotion or a corner office out of it, so I don't know, just take the win and don't draw too much attention to yourself, since nobody knows you were sleeping with the boss - but everybody probably has their suspicions.
Meanwhile, Roger's nephew Nick turns up in his office, unexpected, he says he had a college interview at Columbia and his mother said he should look up Uncle Roger while in town. They haven't seen each other since Roger's mother's funeral, so things are a bit awkward, but Roger uses this opportunity to teach Nick some of the finer points of hitting on women - it's basically a numbers game and you miss 100% of the shots you don't take, and other sports analogies are also applicable, like Michael Jordan used to save some of his energy for "winning time" late in the game, he was apparently the G.O.A.T. because of his endurance, not his ability to score baskets or the fact that he was taller than 99% of the other people in the world. But as a 16-year old Nick knows very little of the world and also has an appalling lack of tolerance for alcohol, don't worry we'll get working on that straight away.
After teaching Nick a few things about how to use the late-day Manhattan sunset to see through women's dresses (umm, ick, but again, remember there was very little internet porn back then) and how looking up women's dresses is all about finding a low position and the right angle (umm, ick again but he's not really wrong here) Roger stresses the importance of having a great opening line, you score more often when you score early. And lying is fine, because the most important thing is having a hook, because you can't catch fish without a hook. Roger picks the hottest woman in the bar and loads the dice, telling her that his nephew has something really important to tell her, as soon as he can think of something. Nick makes up a story about having a $1,000 bet with his uncle that he can make a woman fall in love with him before the end of the night. OK, it's not great but maybe it is original.
Andrea and her friend Sophie spend the evening with Nick and Roger, and after the bar they drink privately in a park (illegal in NYC, but whatever) and Roger tries to set Nick up for success, only he can't close the deal - come on, he's 16! Roger even tries being horrible to the women to make Nick look better by comparison, or you know, maybe he's just horrible naturally, it's tough to say. Still, Nick can't wrangle going home with the girls, but hey, at least he took a swing, right? Remember when you said it was more important to take the shot because you miss 100% of the shots you don't take? I guess you only miss 50% of the shots you DO take, and somehow that's better, but a strike-out is still a strike-out. Hey, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and sometimes it rains.
Roger's not done, though, because he knows his ex-lover/boss is having a party that night, one which he was NOT invited to, obviously. But Roger knows how to sneak past the doorman, so he and Nick are now in a party full of drunk, desperate women and this is now "winning time". Roger sets Nick up with Donna, who's about to pass out, and also tries with Joyce's bestie Patricia, saying she'd be a good fit for Nick because a teenage boy and an older woman have roughly the same sex drive. Classy to the end, right? But Nick's already in the bedroom with Donna and since she's passed out, he's finally got an opportunity to score - however he does NOT have sex with her because he's a decent human being, and those seem to be in really short supply, don't they? But rather than congratulate Nick for doing the right thing, Nick instead takes him to his "fail safe", an underground brothel, and sets him up for success with a prostitute. Right, winning time, this one's a slam dunk, sure, but Nick still isn't ready and instead gets very angry with his uncle, because this was NOT what he had in mind when he asked for advice about how to score with women. Roger changes his mind at the last minute and they get out of there, but that's probably as close to redemption as Roger is going to get.
What this calls to mind for me, personally, is my freshman-level class in film school, which was all the basics of Super 8 film production. I've told this story before, how I was on a rotating crew of 4 people, each person would take a turn at being the director, or crew member, or editor over a 4-day span, so after a day directing you would spend 2 days on crew and then a day in the editing suite, working on your own footage. I was on a crew with my Norwegian friend Hakon, someone else who would later become very famous, and a girl whose name I can't remember, however she was a great help to me when I was directing, because that was the day Hakon was in editing and my crew was supposed to be her and the famous guy. She always showed up, the famous guy NEVER did, so I learned to make films with a crew of two people, not three. I won't give his name here but he's back in the news for making a propaganda documentary about the First Lady.
While he was directing and I was crewing for him, he was CONSTANTLY on the prowl, trying to pick up women. We walked around Washington Square Park together so he could approach women and offer them gum and ask them if they wanted to be in a movie. Yes, that was the move. Again, when he was supposed to crew for ME, he never showed up, not once. OK, I knew who I was dealing with at least, somebody who would prioritize trying to get laid over his responsibility to my projects. Once you know, you can adjust and count on the fact that you can't count on him. I saw him once a few years after NYU, chatting outside a steakhouse, and honestly I should have just decked him then, I regret not doing so. But that's petty - and anyway he got cancelled a few years after that, I'm sure he had money saved up but suddenly nobody would hire him because there were at least six charges against him of violence toward women or using his position of power to ask for sex. Allegedly. The #metoo movement hurt him bad, and as of 2023 he had to move to Israel, where he now makes propaganda films for that country as well as for the U.S. I'm sure part of his salary for making "Melania" will be a presidential pardon, because if he's not all over the Epstein Files, I'll eat my shoe.
The director of "Roger Dodger" graduated from NYU in 1991, which was two years after me, and I got paroled a year early, so it's POSSIBLE that maybe the main character here was also based on my nemesis, however I can't find any conclusive proof that the two men knew each other or crossed paths ever. Dylan Kidd has said that he based the character on someone he knew in college who had the ability to go up to strangers and take their psychology apart in minute detail, which was disturbing but also compelling. He works in advertising because that's a business designed to create insecurity in other people, as a way of trying to sell product, or himself.
I just know that Roger's moves here feel very familiar and sparked a memory of film school class - I'm a very petty person, it turns out, and if someone crosses me I'm not above enjoying their misery, even if that takes 10 or 20 years. Sure, I languished in independent film production for three decades, and I don't have a lot of money on hand, but you know, I've still got a house. I've been married for 24 years (29 if you count both times) to somebody I care about. I also wasn't forced to leave the country to become a puppet of two fascist regimes AND there are no outstanding charges against me for harassment or assault. So, you know, life is good, and I can't wait for he-who-shall-not-be-named to get cancelled a second or third time.
"Roger Dodger" got his name because he was always able to talk his way out of trouble. Yeah, that tracks, so come on, I think I know who this film is really about. The film hasn't really aged well, or at least the parts of it that encourage underage drinking and hostility and mistreatment of women, up to and almost including date rape. But hey, there are people like that in the world, it's part of this complex relationship salad that I'll be exploring over the next month and a half.
Directed by Dylan Kidd (director of "Get a Job")
Also starring Campbell Scott (last seen in "Manhattan Night"), Jennifer Beals (ditto), Isabella Rossellini (last seen in "Conclave"), Elizabeth Berkley (last seen in "The Curse of the Jade Scorpion"), Ben Shenkman (last seen in "The Trial of the Chicago 7"), Mina Badie (last seen in "The Anniversary Party"), Chris Stack, Morena Baccarin (last seen in "Deadpool & Wolverine"), Lisa Emery (last seen in "Margot at the Wedding"), Flora Diaz, Stephanie Gatschet, Colin Fickes (last seen in "Over Her Dead Body"), Tommy Savas, Gabriel Millman (last seen in "Being Flynn"), Libby Larson, Courtney Simon, Peter Appel (last seen in "Bad Education"), Ato Essandoh (last seen in "Reptile"), Michelle Six, Juliet Morgan
RATING: 5 out of 10 cigarettes smoked inside (boy, those were the days, huh?)
