Joker: Folie à Deux

Year 17, Day 16 - 1/16/25 - Movie #4,916

BEFORE: Here we go, another Oscar-eligible film tonight, though I'm getting the feeling that this one just doesn't have the same Oscar buzz that "Joker" did, which was what, four years ago?  Man, a lot can change in four years, one film gets an Oscar and a lot of praise and then the sequel gets NO buzz and people are left kind of scratching their heads over the decision to make a super-villain story as a jukebox musical.  Such decisions are way above my pay grade, all I can do is watch the movies and then write down my thoughts.  I'm still coming in hopeful, but the odds are not good here. 

Steve Coogan carries over again from "The Lost King". This one was in theatrical release last October, and I had already done a Joaquin Phoenix thing a few months previously - "Napoleon", "C'Mon C'Mon" and "Beau Is Afraid". So that explains why I didn't go to the movie theater to see this, I just couldn't link to it at the time, I figured (rightly so) that it would be on cable within a few months. Worth the wait? Let's find out...

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Joker" (Movie #3,421)

THE PLOT: Struggling with his dual identity, failed comedian Arthur Fleck meets the love of his life, Harley Quinn, while incarcerated at Arkham State Hospital. 

AFTER: Yeah, I can kind of see why the people who liked the first Todd Philips "Joker" movie don't really dig this one. Where's the action, where's the Joker being JOKER and killing people?  He killed six people in the first film, and ZERO in the second?  He sings a lot, sure, but that's not what we came here for.  I expected, at the very least, for him to gas everyone in the courtroom during his trial, because that's exactly what an insane Clown Prince of Crime would do, and I'm left very very disappointed.  He fell in love, great.  He tried to make some sense of his life and seek some form of forgiveness, well whoop-de-freaking-doo, but again, not why I tuned in. 

I'm also very confused about WHICH Joker this is supposed to be, like in the first film we saw Bruce Wayne as a young boy - not Arthur Fleck's half-brother, as suspected, but still, he's alive and his parents were alive and he wasn't on the road to being Batman yet.  OK, so that places this Joker a couple decades in the past, is he going to STAY Joker, is he going to inspire the NEXT Joker, is he going to be the next Joker's father, uncle, second cousin once removed, what is the freakin' deal here?  The movie defiantly doesn't even get around to ASKING these questions, let alone come close to answering them. So yeah, more disappointment there. 

Same question for Harley Quinn, annoying referred to as "Lee" here, and again, it's some kind of proto- or pre-Batman version of the character.  To be honest, we're not even sure what corner of the DC multiverse this takes place in, is it the SAME universe as "Justice League" or is this a pre-cursor to the Robert Pattinson "The Batman"-verse, or does this exist in its own little universe by itself?  Again, we don't know, it's all very unclear and what is reality, anyway?  Once you introduce the multiverse there's the small possibility that this takes place in a pocket reality created when The Flash went time-traveling, and then negated out of existence just as easily once he set things straight. The whole show "Gotham" is now pretty much retconned out of existence, and they're just about to scrap the whole DC Movie Universe and start it over again, so bad news if you liked the "Shazam!" movies or Justice League, because half the cast got cancelled or replaced and probably won't carry over to the NEW DCU, which I think starts when the new "Superman" movie comes out.  Well, it does explain why Batman looks like Michael Keaton in some movies and like Ben Affleck in others - I'm used to it, I'm a comic book fan and I've seen at least four DC Universes come and go in my time, I started reading "Batman" and "Superman" right after the Crisis on Infinite Earths, and I've learned to not get too attached.

Most people don't even seem to care, I guess they're just casual fans with short attention spans, and that's why I maintain they didn't need to depict three different Spider-Man-verses in the Sony films, because really, who gives a crap?  We just want to see a good story with a lot of action, nasty villains and some cool web-slinging, and we'll work out the continuity later, or not at all. 

This is my way of justifying "Joker: Folie à Deux", they could have gone anywhere with it, but no, they chose to kind of just go nowhere with it. Cardinal rule #1, at the very least, please be interesting, and this just isn't interesting at all. Trial scenes are BORING, the latest proof of that was "Anatomy of a Fall" which spent WAY too much time in the courtroom, and worse, it was a French courtroom with nine judges and seventeen lawyers and they all had something to say. Which is great if you want to watch a movie that will help you fall asleep.  But hey, we've got Harvey Dent here working for the prosecution, so that's something. Finally, a character we recognize as a future Bat-villain, and a hint of where the story's going to go.  Gee, you don't suppose he'll be in an accident in this movie that will damage half of his face, do you?  I'm surprised there wasn't someone here accusing him of being a two-faced attorney.  

But the rest of this is really junk - Joker's not in prison, but also frequently gets treated at the Arkham Hospital, and the movie has to bend itself over backwards here to get him into a music therapy class, where he can fall in love and also learn to express himself through song.  This also explains the apparent NITPICK POINT that men and women are not supposed to be held in the same prison, but you know, "Despicable Me 4" made this exact same mistake in its ending, and nobody really cared about that, either. It's fine. I'm the only one complaining, but nobody listens to me, do they?  So it's kind of set in both a prison AND a hospital, which is a bit confusing, to say the least. Would a man accused of killing 6 people be left alone and unsupervised in a somewhat-public place like a hospital?  Probably not. So it's still a NP, just a different kind. 

I can't really fault the song selections, except that format-wise it's kind of everything I hated about "Moulin Rouge" without anything that I liked about "Joker".  And it kind of drives my point, if someone in a Joker movie is singing, "Come on, Get happy, get ready for the judgement day" they really should be killing the person they're singing to at that moment. Am I right? I do kind of like the mix of fantasy and reality, like seeing Joker and Harley acting like Sonny & Cher hosting a variety TV show, that is unusual and out there, I'll give you that. But they really missed an opportunity to have Lady Gaga sing her famous song "Poker Face" but retitled as "Joker Face".  I can't be the first person to have thought of that. 

I'm just going to move on, because even the current DC comic book continuity has acknowledged the fact that there could be multiple Jokers, there was even a miniseries called "Batman: Three Jokers" where Batman & Robin finally noticed that Joker often looks different during their encounters (because he's drawn by different artists, duh) and after some investigating, they determine that over time, they'd encountered at least three different men in the Joker make-up and acting psychotically. Now if you ask me, this kind of takes some of the strength away from the character, however it does explain why they keep putting him in jail or Arkham Asylum and a few comic book issues later, he's back committing crimes, or rather another guy who looks almost exactly like him is.  Whatever, man, I mean, you run your comic book company the way you want, whatever sells more comic books is fine, but it's also a cheap move to cover up the fact that multiple artists and writers work on these stories, and they DON'T talk to each other, and editors are doing very little to maintain continuity and consistency across the DC line. 

Well, for the linking, I kind of painted myself into a corner here, but it's not really my fault. Wikipedia told me that there was archive footage of Robert De Niro in this film, as deceased talk-show host Murray Franklin. It makes sense, Joker is on trial for his murder, so you would naturally think that in the courtroom, they MIGHT show footage of Joker appearing on his show, on that fateful night.  Umm, it didn't happen - perhaps everyone is SO familiar with that infamous footage that there was no need to show it again, and doing so might prejudice the jury.  Nope, still doesn't make sense. But we're not really here tonight for legal procedures, such is the nature of this jukebox musical. I was planning to follow this with "Killers of the Flower Moon", and now I can't. Oh, you'd better believe I went back and LOOKED for De Niro footage, there was just a still photo of him during the opening animation and another one on a book cover - guys, I need more than that. (I do, don't I?)

Luckily I can drop a film and still get back to the rest of the chain, it's just going to take me an extra step... I promised I wouldn't overload my January this year, but that's exactly what I need to do to get myself out of this jam.  I'm going to try to watch an extra film over the coming weekend and then I think I'll be back on track, for sure I can still get to "Civil War" and proceed with the rest of the plan, and then still be where I need to be on February 1. It's not a problem, just, you know, a little heads-up would have been nice, and getting Wikipedia and IMDB on the same page would also have helped me out. Honestly, it's a bit of a relief, because I don't have AppleTV so I'd have to watch "Killers of the Flower Moon" on that pirate site, and it's 3 1/2 hours long - if I watch it on that pirate site and the connection's not good, it will just keep re-buffering every minute or so, and then the whole process will take like forever. 

Also starring Joaquin Phoenix (last seen in "C'mon C'mon"), Lady Gaga (last seen in "Little Richard: I Am Everything"), Brendan Gleeson (last seen in "The Company You Keep"), Catherine Keener (last seen in "Begin Again"), Zazie Beetz (last seen in "Bullet Train"), Harry Lawtey (last seen in "The Pale Blue Eye"), Leigh Gill (last seen in "Joker"), Ken Leung (last seen in "The Family Man"), Jacob Lofland (last seen in "Free State of Jones"), Bill Smitrovich (last seen in "The November Man"), Sharon Washington (last seen in "Malcolm X"), Alfred Rubin Thompson (last seen in "Hemingway & Gellhorn"), Connor Storrie, Gregg Daniel (last seen in "Clockwatchers"), Mac Brandt (last seen in "To Leslie"), George Carroll (last seen in "Central Intelligence"), John Lacy (last seen in "Just Mercy"), Tim Dillon, June Carryl (last seen in "Fool's Paradise"), Don McManus (last seen in "Senior Moment"), G.L. McQueary, Angela D. Watson, Murphy Guyer (last seen in "Wonderstruck"), Carson Higgins (last seen in "Babylon"), Gattlin Griffith (last seen in "Labor Day"), Hudson Oz, Stephen Stanton, Martin Kildare (last seen in "Palm Springs"), 

with archive footage of Frances Conroy (last seen in "Ira & Abby"), Fred Astaire (last seen in "Sid & Judy"), Jack Buchanan (last seen in "The Band Wagon"), Nanette Fabray (last seen in "Being Mary Tyler Moore"), Oscar Levant (last seen in "The Barkleys of Broadway"). 

RATING: 4 out of 10 pieces of burning sheet music 

The Lost King

Year 17, Day 15 - 1/15/25 - Movie #4,915

BEFORE: Before I get started, an almost-but-one-day-off Birthday SHOUT-out to actor Mark Addy, born January 14, 1964. Well, I could say that I started watching this film late on January 14, so of course that counts. Being just one day off is pretty good, too. 

I remember when this story made the news a few years ago, if you remember that too then that's a pretty big SPOILER ALERT for this film, namely whether the remains of King Richard III were found or not.  Hmm, I don't think reporters would write a news story about them NOT being found, hint hint. 

Steve Coogan carries over from "Despicable Me 4". I'll admit I was way off again, going in to this one, I naturally assumed that Coogan would play King Richard, either in flashbacks or on stage, but no, he's too old.  Richard III apparently died at the age of 32, and plus I saw a trailer for this film, I should have noticed that it wasn't him playing the king. Still, my brain wanted to remember it that way, stupid brain. 

THE PLOT: An amateur historian defies the stodgy academic establishment in her efforts to find King Richard III's remains, which were lost for over 500 years. 

AFTER: Steve Coogan plays John, the ex-husband of Philippa Langley, but he's always over at the house because they're co-parenting two boys, so they maintain an amicable relationship while he dates someone new, and money's tight because together they have to pay for two residences. Clearly there's a story there about why they're no longer married, but the film doesn't really get into it, whether it's him or her or both of them or they fought over money or one was unfaithful, so I guess it doesn't really matter, does it?  Typical British movie, trying too hard to respect the privacy of its main characters. Discussing what went wrong in their marriage just wouldn't be proper, I suppose. Well, we don't want to be vulgar. But hey, good for them for putting their sons first and both being a daily presence in their lives, it's important. Also awkward at times. 

Things get worse when Philippa gets passed over for a promotion, and kind of just stops showing up for work after that.  John is not happy, did she forget the part about them needing two incomes to maintain the two residences?  But she's caught "the bug" of being an amateur historian, and after seeing a staging of Shakespeare's play "Richard III" she gets it in her head that history may have given Richard an unwarranted bad reputation, after all, Billy Shakes didn't write his play until over 100 years after Richard III died. So really, what were his sources?  Did he just tow the party line about how Richard was a usurper to the throne, and had his two young nephews killed because they were ahead of him in the line of succession?  

Philippa buys a bunch of (non-Shakespeare) history books and then tracks down the Richard III society, a bunch of like-minded people who frequent a pub and discuss their truths about Richard III - the prevailing theory among his fans was that lies and propaganda about him was spread by his successor, Henry VII in order to discredit him, and to prove that the Tudor House was superior to the Plantagenets, of which Richard III was the last male heir. It turns out that partisan politics ruled even back then, only they didn't have social media to spread lies about other royals, so they did it through paintings and rumours and claims that this person was born out of wedlock, or that one committed adultery, but you know probably they all did bad stuff and whoever was best at spreading rumors and lies came out on top.  A bit like today, and we've seen how once a story gets going about liberals drinking the blood of the babies in the basement of a D.C. pizza place or Hunter Biden's laptop containing the truth about Benghazi, those stories become very hard to dispute, because how do you prove things DIDN'T happen?  

If only someone could find the remains of King Richard III - the Tudors made sure that there's no grave containing his body or monuments dedicated to him - then maybe we could learn a few things. Was he really a hunchback, as Shakespeare depicted him?  Even if he was, would a deformed body naturally mean that he had a twisted, evil soul?  Did he, you know, have any hobbies or good qualities that we should know about, instead of just believing the party line, which dictates that the current Royal Family had to declare that they don't really acknowledge him as one of England's rightful sovereigns?  Ouch, that kind of stings, doesn't it?  You claw your way up to the throne by doing so much work, waiting for your older relatives to die, and then you end up with your remains thrown in a river, no grave, no monuments, and no legacy, all your deeds and accomplishments just added up to nothing in the end. Poor Richard. 

So Philippa sets out to find out what really happened to Richard, after he died following injuries sustained at Bosworth Field, the last battle of the War of the Roses, between the houses of Lancaster and York. (I looked it up, I'll admit.). Richard still put in the work, he was made the Duke of Gloucester in 1461 when his older brother, Edward IV, became king.  22 years later, when Edward died, his son (also Edward) was only 12 so Richard was named Protector of the Realm, essentially ruling England until Edward V got old enough to do so. However Edward IV's marriage was declared invalid, therefore young Edward V couldn't be king, nor could HIS younger brother, Richard of Shrewsbury, so Richard III became king by default.  Those two young nephew-princes were taken to the Tower of London and disappeared a month after Richard's coronation, that's what led to Shakespeare's depiction of Richard III ordering his nephews to be killed, apparently.  But, nobody really knows what happened to them?

Philippa finds a lot of information about King Richard's body being taken to Leicester (pronounced "Lester") and buried near a church, however whatever tomb or monument might have been made is long gone, and once he got all that bad press, somebody allegedly dug him up and threw him in the River Soar, but did they?  What if he's still buried somewhere, only nobody has yet superimposed the old map from the Middle Ages over the map of today, to see where that monument WOULD BE, if it were still standing, which it is not.  Philippa pretends to go to a work-related seminar in Leicester, but really it's a seminar about Richard III, and she's allowed some time after to explore the city and see if she can figure out where he might be buried based on whatever landmarks still remain.  Others have apparently tried this and failed, but she's read all of those books!  And she's asked questions of the other members of the club in the pub AND she knows a guy who's been tracing descendents of the royals using DNA, so if she COULD find a body, there would now (2012) be a way to use DNA to prove it's him.

Oh, if only it were that easy.  She's got to apply for funding from the city of Leicester, and the University of Leicester (Go, Fighting Pine Martens!) and then she's got to hire a whole team of archaeologists, get approvals to dig from the city council, and then there's the matter of closing down that car park (what we in America would call a parking lot) and even harder, finding other parking spaces for those 12 cars!  Parking's pretty scarce in Leicester already, there's like one multi-storey (garage) and it's always full. So while the team starts digging, Philippa's got to keep driving cars around the block so they don't get ticketed. 

Oh, and Philippa at some point begins seeing (and talking to) an apparition of Richard III, who's got some great life advice for her, but unfortunately he's not very helpful in remembering where he got buried.  Well, to be fair, who would?  I mean, he was kind of busy being dead at the time, so really, he's no help except maybe he is, in the broader sense.  Wisely she does not tell anyone that she's getting advice from a King who happens to look JUST like the actor she saw portray him in that Shakespeare play.  Well, maybe it turns out Shakespeare was a total tool, we really have no way to know.  Maybe Shakespeare had a little something going on the side with that hot actress, and maybe he would have been cancelled if there were social media back then and people weren't comfortable with men dressed up in drag on the stage, or women weren't happy that they were forbidden to act in his plays. Just saying. 

When nothing is found under the ground using radar, the funding drops out.  BUT, Philippa taps the resources members of the Richard III society, and also starts crowd-funding, because there are plenty of people out there who, thanks to the internet, become fascinated by the search for a King's body, even a supposedly evil, non-legitimate hunchback king.  Also, wouldn't it be really cool if she FOUND him?  

Also starring Sally Hawkins (last seen in "All Is Bright"), Harry Lloyd (last seen in "The Wife"), Mark Addy (last heard in "Mary Poppins Returns"), Lee Ingleby (last seen in "Ever After: A Cinderella Story"), James Fleet (last seen in "Blithe Spirit"), Bruce Fummey, Amanda Abbington, John-Paul Hurley, Shonagh Price, Helen Katamba, Lewis Macleod, Jenny Douglas, Benjamin Scanlan, Adam Robb, Robert Jack, Sarah MacGillivray, James Rottger, Jessica Hardwick, David Ireland, Glenna Morrison, Allison Peebles, Kern Falconer (last seen in "Slow West"), Nomaan Khan, Harvey Reid, Annie Griffin, Simon Donaldson, Julian Firth (last seen in "The Last Duel"), Iman Akhtar, Alasdair Hankinson, Sharon Osdin, Ian Dunn, Phoebe Pryce, Leigh Biagi, Violet Hughes, Josie O'Brien (last seen in "Outlaw King"), Katharine Edwards, Sinead MacInnes, Robert Maloney, Mahesh Patel, with archive footage of Charlie Rose (last seen in "Marvin Hamlisch: What He Did for Love") and a cameo from Philippa Langley.

RATING: 6 out of 10 press conferences

Despicable Me 4

Year 17, Day 14 - 1/14/25 - Movie #4,914

BEFORE: You can see here why I moved "Will & Harper" out of the Doc Block and into January, this put THREE movies in a row that are all eligible for Oscar nominations, though I think it's probably a lot more likely that "Inside Out 2" will get one over "Despicable Me 4", the idea is the same. After all, it's not up to me which films get nominations, right now I can only work with what is Oscar-eligible, which is, umm, nearly everything. But for animated features, there aren't that many of them each year, so I should probably do what I can do, and cross another one off the list tonight. Even if I end up seeing two or three movies that win Oscars in any category, I'll feel like I'm ahead of the game. 

Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig carry over from "Will & Harper". 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Despicable Me 3" (Movie #2,720), "Minions: The Rise of Gru" (Movie #4,246)

THE PLOT: Gru, Lucy, Margo, Edith and Agnes welcome a new member to the family, Gru Jr., who is intent on tormenting his dad. Gru faces a new nemesis in Maxime Le Mal and his girlfriend Valentina, and the family is forced to go on the run.

AFTER: This is certainly not a franchise that thinks that "Less is More" - no way, more is more.  More villains, more children in the family, more minions, more more more!  Only sometimes more isn't better, it's just more. They added four new emotions in Riley's brain in "Inside Out 2" and the story justified it, because puberty, but then it all added up to something meaningful, it was more but it was also so much more than more.  This franchise doesn't really have a purpose, maybe it never did, except to entertain, but then I'm left kind of scratching my head, wondering why they're choosing to go about doing that in such an odd fashion.  Just me?  

Gru was a villain, he stole the moon, they made sure we understood where he was coming from, he likes to steal things because that's what villains do. The fourth installment in the direct storyline of the franchise (and sixth overall if you count the "Minions" prequels) takes pains to remind us that Gru once stole the moon - but he put it back, the numbskull and oh yeah, was he just bad at being a villain, because that seems almost like it's ironic, but it's not.  He joined the Anti-Villain League, which seems like maybe a bunch of self-hating heroes who can't bring themselves to use that word, or that we're being tricked into still liking these movies even though we're all suffering from superhero burn-out after watching 87 Marvel movies and a few more from DC.  

So there's no capes in the "Despicable Me" movies, and the villains greatly outnumber the, umm, anti-villains, but you know, that's OK because there's only one Spider-Man (OK, actually there's two now, three if you count the one from 2099, more if you count the Peter Parker clones, and like a zillion if you count the whole multiverse) but there are like 100 villains for that one hero.  Ah, so THAT's why they created the other-dimensional Spider-Mans, so the original wouldn't be outnumbered and he'd have a fighting chance. Just kidding, he's still that guy who can't get to his aunt's house for dinner or get his photos to the Daily Bugle before deadline. 

Gru keeps on doing what he does, too, and so they have to keep thinking up weirder and weirder villains for him to secretly take down. There was that one voiced by Trey Parker in "Despicable Me 3", Balthazar Bratt, but honestly he wasn't that remarkable, or memorable. Really there hasn't been a GREAT villain in the franchise since Scarlet Overkill in the "Minions" prequel. And the second "Minions" film had too MANY villains, which is the same problem but in reverse, and it was similarly out of balance. There, I said it. 

The villain here has cockroach-based hybrid powers, which is not only very weird but a bit disgusting, also you don't really think about roaches as being strong or durable, not unless there's a nuclear war and we've been told, perhaps incorrectly, that they're the only creatures who will survive it.  Also they're not smart, not attractive, they're just nasty.  Why would Gru's rival want to turn himself into a cockroach, and then why would any of us in the audience want to see that?  Just because "kids like bugs"?  Sorry, but parents and other adults have to watch these movies, too, and you're grossing us out. 

Also he hates Gru because Gru sang "Karma Chameleon" in a high-school talent show before he could?  That's stupid. Why not hate Gru because he trained to be a villain and he's not fulfilling that, he betrayed all villains everywhere by working for the AVL, or is that a secret?  It's still a much better reason to hate Gru. Or Maxime could hate Gru because he's got a family and Maxime doesn't, that would make a bit more sense than this whole Boy George thing. Come on, be honest, was this plot based around which 80's songs the production company could get the rights to?  The use of "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" at the end fits in this film a LOT better than "Karma Chameleon" does - but for both songs, the question's the same, are today's kids even going to KNOW either of those songs? 

When Maxime escapes from prison, he vows to take revenge on Gru and Gru's family, so the agency moves them to a safe house in another city, while the Minions are housed at the AVL and five of them are turned into super-hero Minions, which is sure to be both a terrible idea and also very important when the storylines intersect near the end.  Sure enough, the Mega Minions cause a great deal of collateral damage and they are retired, because who knew giving super powers to creatures that can't talk or think and just want to prank everyone would be a bad idea?  Umm, pretty much everyone could have seen that coming. 

But meanwhile in the quiet, upscale town of Mayflower, the Gru family becomes the Cunninghams and tries to blend in, with their three daughters and the three minions they were able to keep for some reason, despite the fact that nobody else in town has three yellow chattering non-definable creatures in their house. Umm, so how is that "blending in" if they still have three disastrous minions living with them?  Their neighbors are the Prescotts, who are not any kind of heroes or villains, they're just white people who go to a country club. But their DAUGHTER recognizes Gru and she has aspirations to be a super-villain herself, so she blackmails Gru into stealing his old high-school's mascot, which is a live honey badger. (What could POSSIBLY go wrong there?)

I guess the plan is for her to steal the mascot, and then use that as proof that she should attend school there?  That doesn't really make sense, because stealing the mascot will piss off the headmaster, and then she'll be LESS inclined to let Penny Prescott in, not more. They manage to steal the vicious creature somehow, but who brings a BABY to a heist?  That's ill-advised and dangerous, and the baby's almost as stupid as the Minions.  They get the honey badger and escape in a flying car, but the headmaster has a tracker in the animal's collar, and she alerts Maxime (her favorite ex-student) about where Gru's living with his family.  OK, then, that was really a waste of everybody's time putting them in the safe house, wasn't it?  This storyline just wants to turn itself around and keeps contradicting itself at every possible opportunity. Guys, we could have gotten somewhere a lot faster if you'd just stopped adding more, more, more to it. 

There's a big battle with the flying roach ship and also the headmaster in her super-enhanced wheelchair, and there's a construction site that gets destroyed before the Mega Minions get called out of retirement and they show up with all manner of creatures in tow to run over the bad guy.  All because "more is better", but it just isn't so. Finally Gru visits his old rival in prison and they reconcile with karaoke, sort of, and pretty much every character from the whole series of films is there at the prison, so you know, that feels like a pretty good note to end the franchise on, everything's wrapped up. No more kids, no more weird pets, no more outrageous villains, just realize there's a law about diminishing returns and really, we're very, very far now from where this whole thing started. 

But I know they won't end it, because this film alone made almost a billion dollars, and so they're only going to make more, aren't they?  It's just never going to end.

Also starring the voices of Steve Carell (last heard in "IF"), Joey King (last seen in "Bullet Train"), Sofia Vergara (last heard in "Strays"), Stephen Colbert (last seen in "Mike Wallace Is Here"), Chloe Fineman (last seen in "Babylon"), Miranda Cosgrove (last seen in "Yours, Mine & Ours"), Steve Coogan (last seen in "The Trip to Greece"), Pierre Coffin (last heard in "Minions: The Rise of Gru"), Dana Gaier (last heard in "Despicable Me 3"), Madison Polan, Tara Strong (last heard in "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3"), Chris Renaud (last heard in "The Secret Life of Pets 2"), John DiMaggio (last heard in "The Super Mario Bros. Movie"), Laraine Newman (last seen in "Jim Henson: Idea Man"), Brad Ableson, Romesh Ranganathan (last heard in "Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget").

RATING: 5 out of 10 security laser beams

Will & Harper

Year 17, Day 13 - 1/13/25 - Movie #4,913

BEFORE: I know what you're probably wondering, why have I programmed a documentary for January?  Don't docs usually have their own block, after Father's Day, or sometimes in the summer?  Why now?  Well, I am working on linking up that Doc Block right now, and that's part of the reason for breaking this one off from the herd and watching it today.  I don't have the same line-up planned as last year, when I watched films about John Belushi, Chris Farley and the Muppets that were chock FULL of SNL stars from different eras.  As of this writing, unless some uncredited extra people pop up in this film, it's only linking to one other Doc, that one about the Yacht Rock. Not a terrible problem, because I could end the Doc chain with it, or another documentary could pop up between now and June that would link off from this one and then another doc or back to the main chain, it's cool. Maybe. But if I move this one AWAY from the doc chain, a couple things can happen - I can link to another animated film from last year tomorrow AND I can see how the "Yacht Rock" doc links back to form that other circle, and I can now include the documentary about the South Park guys buying that Mexican restaurant, which my wife's been bugging me to watch.  I didn't see HOW I was going to work it in, not until now. 

I'm also moving it up because this is a CURRENT release - this film could be a contender for the Best Documentary Oscar, now I'm not saying its chances are great, but it was released in 2024, so it's eligible, and it's probably the only doc released last year that I would want to watch, and root for, that fits that bill.  Usually there are five docs nominated and I have no interest in any of them, or I watch them SO far down the road that they're no longer relevant or something like that.  So let's carpe the diem here. 

Paula Pell carries over from "Inside Out 2". 

THE PLOT: Will Ferrell and his close friend of thirty years decide to go on a cross-country road trip to explore a new chapter in their relationship. 

AFTER: In so many ways, this is the film we need right now, with so much prejudice out there against trans people, and sure, it comes from fear and ignorance and an unwillingess to understand others, I get it, the world's a scary place even without people transitioning, but can we all just maybe grow up and try acceptance for a change?  Look, I don't really have a dog in this fight, except I know two people who changed their gender, and I supported at least one of them (more on that later, maybe) and absolutely NOBODY is transitioning because they want to prey on your kids in bathrooms or get special privileges of any kind, they're doing it because they feel out of place, something in them has felt off or broken for a very long time, and they just want that feeling to stop.  If your foot was broken, you would go to the doctor and say, "Please, fix my foot."  But if you felt broken in your soul, what would you do?  How far would you be willing to go to feel right again?  

If you want to stop reading my blog because I support trans rights to, honestly, the minor degree that I do, well, fine, I'm glad we had some time together, but there's the door, try not to slam it on your way out.  Since I'm not directly affected by another person transitioning, how does it possibly hurt me?  Get out there, buy some new clothes, live as the other gender for a while, feel free to report back, or don't, and seek your truth. I'll still be here, doing what I do, and just hoping that some day soon you feel as comfortable in your own skin as I am. What more possibly is there to say?  We live in a country that is based on freedom, although that was somewhat narrowly defined at first, people on both sides of the political aisle have been working very hard to expand those freedoms.  Freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom to eat a cheeseburger at 3 am if we want to, god damn it, because our forefathers died for that, they just didn't know it at the time. 

And so eventually we got to the freedom to love whomever we want, it took a while, sure, there were some bumps in the road, but finally the Marriage Equality Act took place, and hey, funny story, it came about because the Far Right tried to pass laws that were anti-gay and those laws were declared un-constitutional.  So, umm, what do you think's going to happen, geniuses, when you push for anti-trans laws like "You can only use the bathroom intended for the sex you were born at" or "You can only play sports as the gender that we think you look the most like."  Those are all going to be similarly struck down as un-constitutional, and that's ultimately going to back-fire, and create a country where everyone can be free again. Maybe.

But those of us who know someone who transitions gender-wise might have a lot of questions, so that's really what this film is about. Someone who just happens to be a big famous movie-star re-connecting with that old friend, to check in, see what's up, and oh, what's your life like now that you identify as a woman?  Is that even the right term?  Transvestite, transexual, or is that none of my business?  Probably the latter, right?  And what did YOU do during the pandemic to pass the time? Did you learn to play guitar, or bake a lot of sourdough bread?  Andrew Steele spent time dressing as a woman and coming out and all that entails, from hormone treatments to changing her name to Harper Steele.  And then at the tail end of that whole process is (apparently) writing letters or e-mails to your friends and letting them know what your new name and situation is, because if you just bumped into them on the street, that might be even more awkward than this letter-writing process is. 

Harper is up for the new challenge, of figuring out who she wants to be as a person now, can she still drive across the country like she used to, living on bad coffee and sleeping in sketchy motels.  Can she still go to a sports game like she used to?  Even if her heart wasn't in it before, and she was just going to see sports to try to be "one of the guys"?  Does she even still drink basic beer, or should she consider switching over to wine?  Probably over-thinking it there, I know plenty of women who drink beer - just try better beers than Natty Light, that's all.

Harper figures there's room for two on this road-trip, and spending a couple weeks in a car with her old friend Will Ferrell will give them a chance to discover if they can still BE friends, answering any questions either one might have, and darn it, just get out on the road and try to have some fun.  Being out in public with Ferrell proves to be something of a double-edged sword, however, because people are going to notice him, he's wild, loud, and very funny, so he may attract a lot of attention and perhaps his companion can fly under the radar.  Well, yes and no.  At the NBA game and that steak restaurant in Texas, people take photos and make nasty comments on social media, so apparently, we still have a long way to go.  Again, people, this is the land of the free, freedom is not just for the people you like or the values that you've been brainwashed into following, and just like Rosa Parks had the right to sit where she wanted on the bus, a movie star has the right to take a trans friend out to dinner without you being a complete buzzkill about it. 

Their agenda is simple, after they have lunch with some past and present SNL stars near Rock Center, they drive from NYC to L.A. and try to hit some key points in-between - Washington DC, a Pacers game in Indianapolis, some kind of weird truck race down in Oklahoma, that restaurant in Texas where you try and eat the giant steak, and some kind of ballooning trip with Will Forte at an undisclosed location (New Mexico? I know there's a big balloon festival there...) and then after the Grand Canyon and a few days in Las Vegas, they meet Molly Shannon for pedicures in L.A. before reaching the Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica.  Honestly, I'm quite jealous, because I'd love to drive completely across the country sometimes, but my wife and I have taken long car-based vacations called BBQ Crawls, the longest was probably from Dallas to Austin to San Antonio to Houston to New Orleans.  I know the drill, you want to program the activities but not totally lock yourself in, some of the most fun things we did without planning them, like finding that giant artist's warehouse with the giant U.S. President heads, just off the highway outside Houston.

But damn it, this is what you do when a friend is going through something big, and making changes to their life.  You listen to their problems, try to be supportive, try to understand what they're going through (even if it seems weird to you) and just be there for them, encourage them and listen and ask questions if you have to.  It's called being a good human, and maybe give it a try, you might like it.  If this friend of yours asks for support and you don't give it, well, you risk them finding their inner peace and then always regarding you as the thing that was standing in their way - the screen door in their submarine, if you will.  It may not even be easy, and I speak from some personal experience here.  I remember when my first wife came out, and I called my parents to tell them I was going to stay with them for a week while she moved out, and before we ended the call, they asked me if I needed any help, and then they asked if SHE needed any help. Well, they were just trying to be the better people, I suppose, I was too wrapped up in the separation to support her new identity, but I guess that's to be expected. Time went by, we moved past the stigma of divorce, I got a new wife, SHE got a new wife, and I guess that's that. 

Bottom line, it's about freedom - if you want to live in a U.S.A. where nobody tells YOU what religion to practice, what you can or can't wear, who you can or can't marry, then you simply HAVE to extend those freedoms to other people, or else you're a hypocrite.  Freedom is a two-way street, it covers the other people whose belief system might be different from yours, and you can't put limits on what those people want to do just because you don't understand it or you don't like it. We are in this age of gender-fluidity now, and you just can't unring that bell.  Some people may live in-between, or switch on a daily basis, or switch all at once, it's for everybody to figure out at their own pace, if they're so inclined. But you know what you don't hear a lot about?  Gender transition regret. If it wasn't some kind of answer for the people who aren't comfortable being who they are, then there would be a lot more regret among the people who undergo gender-changing operations, and I just looked it up, the regret rate is under one percent.  That means more people regret the tattoos they get than regret their gender re-assignment surgery.  Doesn't this suggest that they're somehow on the right path?  

Who knows, maybe this will get an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary (I'm not actively campaigning for it, Academy, I swear...) and more people will see it and maybe a few attitudes can change.  Back here at the home office, I'm nominating this one in a few categories for my year-end breakdown, like "Best LGBTQ+ Film" and "Best Road Trip Film".  Hey, it's got great odds in either category. 

Also starring Will Ferrell (last heard in "Strays"), Harper Steele, Fred Armisen (last heard in "The Super Mario Bros. Movie"), Tina Fey (last seen in "A Haunting in Venice"), Will Forte (last heard in Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken"), Eric Holcomb, Colin Jost (last seen in "Tom & Jerry"), Tim Meadows (last seen in "I Am Chris Farley"), Seth Meyers (last seen in "Bros"), Lorne Michaels (last heard in "Belushi"), Tracy Morgan (last seen in "Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me"), Molly Shannon (last seen in "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl"), Kristen Wiig (last seen in "Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar")

with archive footage of Dana Carvey (also last seen in "I Am Chris Farley"), Rachel Dratch (last seen in "I Love My Dad"), Ana Gasteyer (last seen in "That's My Boy"), Darrell Hammond (last seen in "Unfrosted"), Adrian Martinez (ditto), Chris Kattan (last heard in "Leo"), Diego Luna (last heard in "DC League of Super-Pets"), Rachel McAdams (last seen in "Disobedience"), Amy Poehler (also carrying over from "Inside Out 2"), Ryan Reynolds (last seen in "IF"), Maya Rudolph (ditto)

RATING: 7 out of 10 cans of Pringles (who knew there were so MANY flavors?)

Inside Out 2

Year 17, Day 12 - 1/12/25 - Movie #4,912

BEFORE: Paul Walter Hauser carries over from "Queenpins" and this is the first of three animated films I've got scheduled for the month. Really, they're all carryovers from last year, as I wasn't able to get to them, the reasons really aren't important. Too much Jason Stathem, too many documentaries, who can really say?  I'm not going to start second-guessing the linking now, I've come too far and given too much of my time over to that process.  The chain knows what's best, I can nudge it a little this way or that, I can make choices, follow THIS actor or THAT one, but when I've got a specific destination in mind, like Mother's Day or Christmas, really, that takes precedence.  Besides, last year was another perfect year, that made six in a row, so even if an animated film or three falls between the cracks, that's OK, I'll just try to get to it next year, and it all works out. 

So now that I know the romance chain is solid, and I'm programmed to St. Patrick's Day, I've got some time to think about the Doc Block. Cutting to it after Father's Day worked out pretty well last year, so that's the plan again, unless I see a need to get to it sooner. Sometimes the IMDB listings don't show me the way to go, so then I have to cheat - I call up each doc that's streaming and scan through it really quickly, because those cast lists aren't always very complete, and I may need as many options as possible to link all the docs I want to link. Like I didn't see a way to link to "Casa Bonita Mi Amor", the doc my wife recommended to me, about the "South Park" creators renovating a Mexican restaurant in Denver - jeez, it sounds right up my alley, but how to get there?  When in doubt, scan through the film and see if there's a link - took me about 10 minutes, but I saw there was some archive footage used in the film of a particular 1950's music legend, and that makes things easy-peasy, so that's on the docket now. 

What I have right now are basically two circles, one list of five docs that forms a ring, and another list of thirteen docs that forms a second ring - one ring is really about movie stars, and the longer one is mostly about musicians.  But there's SO much overlap, because so many docs use footage of the same famous people, talk show hosts and newscasters and Presidents.  I just need to choose one of the dozens of shared links to put the two circles together, and make sure that gives me a good entry point and exit point to the whole mini-chain.  It's as simple as that, so simple that I don't even need to worry about it now, I can just keep adding cast lists to one ring or the other and figure out later how to assemble the Block.  It's going to be fine, and if it's not, I'll fix it then. So this is me not stressing about it AT ALL, since there's nothing I can do about it until Father's Day.  Maybe if I want to think about which is the most American doc I have, I can try to land that one on July 4 - would that be the one about Richard Nixon and Johnny Cash, or the one about Bruce Springsteen, who sang "Born in the U.S.A."?  Maybe that one. 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Inside Out" (Movie #2,324)

THE PLOT: A sequel that features Riley entering puberty and experiencing brand new, more complex emotions as a result. As Riley tries to adapt to her teenage years, her old emotions try to adapt to the possibility of being replaced.  

AFTER: Man, this is SO smart!  Showing what's going on inside a teenage girl's head, only using avatar-like characters to represent the different emotions as we understand them, because of course it's just neurons firing in there and cells that store memories somehow, but nobody REALLY understands how it works or would get it if you showed what it REALLY looks like, so just animate it in a way that we can all understand!  Why hasn't anybody done this before?  Oh, right, they did. This is the sequel film so they have to up the stakes and introduce new characters, but they timed this with her turning 13 and having a "puberty alarm" go off. Not a real thing, but it might as well be, because something happens when a girl turns 13, and I'm not talking about the physical changes, that was kind of covered in "Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret." and also kind of metaphorically in "Turning Red". Umm, all girls gain the ability to turn into giant red pandas when they get their periods, right? 

Look, I don't know, I don't have kids (that I know of...), and if I don't have them by now, it's probably not going to happen.  The last time I dealt with any girls turning 13 I was probably 13 myself, and well, I didn't have the mental software to talk with them yet.  It turns out girls are just people, and over time I've spoken with some of them and learned how to get by in a conversation with them. It only took a few decades of practice and a couple marriages, but it turns out they're just people, and they have wants and needs and processes of their own for getting through life, and so, well, some kind of understanding comes into play, and ideally it goes both ways, in a perfect world that is rarely, if ever, perfect.  Sometimes the hardest thing to imagine is outside yourself, coming to understand that whatever's going on in your head might be going on in someone else's head, too, only it's a bit different for them because they come from a different place and they've had different experiences and memories and outlooks.  Even your parents have emotions and fears and concerns, unless of course they're totally detached from life or have given up, which happens to some of the olds. 

They gave Riley a Nostalgia emotion in this one, only somehow it got released way too early, it looks and sounds like a senior citizen lady, and the other characters keep telling her to go away and come back in maybe 40 years or so.  But you can have nostalgia when you're 13, you can miss those days when you totally rocked first grade because you were reading at like a fourth-grade level and doing crossword puzzles and killing it on the Missile Command video game. Just me? Maybe life doesn't get better than that, when you're not expected to DO anything all summer except for maybe a few chores around the house and you can spend nights hanging out with the neighborhood kids riding bikes and playing flashlight tag at night.  

But, sooner or later we all have to move up (and eventually move out) and start taking on more responsibilities, whether that's math homework or figuring out how to apply for jobs or colleges, or being responsible for our own work-out routines at hockey camp. Let's stick with that last one for now, because it's where "Inside Out 2" goes, with hockey camp as a great metaphor for life, you play as part of a team and sometimes it's about excelling as an individual, and sometimes it's about passing the little round pucky thing to someone who's in a better position to score. And sometimes your teammates are your friends and sometimes your friends are on the other team, and you have to work with the people wearing the same uniform as you. This is a great metaphor for a job, if you consider your workmates are the ones wearing the same uniform. You all win if the company does well, and then you can say, "Hey, I was on this winning team, if I come play for YOUR team, maybe that can be a winning team, too."

But that's all the framework in the outside world, as Riley spends that weekend at hockey camp. (What her parents do for the weekend while she's away, well, that probably can't be shown in a movie for kids. Let's just say some other emotions take over.). What's important is what happens INSIDE Riley's head as four new key emoticharacters are introduced - Anxiety, Envy, Embarrassment and Ennui.  Yeah, that tracks, it's clear someone worked with psychologists here to understand the new emotional challenges that come along when you hit those teen years. With the help of the other three newbies, Anxiety takes over, and all the characters we know from the first film - Joy, Anger, Fear, Disgust and Sadness - are literally sealed up in a jar and placed in a memory vault. Riley becomes a different person when the old emotions are gone and new emotions are in control, her previous symbolic Sense of Self is jettisoned to the back of her mind, and the other emotions have to free themselves and go on a quest to get it back.

To be fair, Joy is partially responsible for the situation, she's been finding all the recent memories of Riley's mistakes and sending them away, which has kept Riley happy, but Joy forgot that we have to remember our mistakes, too, or we won't learn from them.  We can't just walk around all day thinking good thoughts, because then we're fooling ourselves that everything is 100% OK, which it rarely is.  We all have Fear and Anger and Anxiety, sometimes for good reasons, we just can't let them take over and run the show, but they're all handy for keeping us safe sometimes, or thinking about all the possible things that could happen to us, or, I don't know, maybe the consequences of our actions?  As you might expect, some kind of balance needs to be achieved here, all nine (so far) emotions need to work together to create Riley's new sense of self, and yes, her mistakes need to be acknowledged and remembered, to keep her from making those mistakes all over again.  Duh, she needs to move past them and go out in the world and make NEW mistakes, that's just how life works. This is obvious for adults, but maybe some kids need to learn all this, so I approve.   

The five old emotions have to travel down a river to the back of her mind, and as soon as I saw it, I knew it was the Stream of Consciousness.  Nice touch - and then when Riley got in a tricky conversation with her old friends and her new friends, she was forced to only PRETEND to like that boy band, and that created an earthquake in her brain, and as a result, a big canyon called a Sar-chasm. Damn, that's good. Later in the film when she's desperately seeking solutions to her problems, there's also a devastating Brain-Storm, which is fine, but it's just not on the same pun-worthy level as a Sar-Chasm.  The Fab Five Emotions end up creating an avalanche of Bad Memories that they can ride back to the control center, and those Bad Memories end up in the Belief System, which is where Joy had been trying to keep them away from, but it turns out OK, because everyone needs to remember their mistakes and down moments, too, they're part of life, and you can't let either your Joy or your Anxiety take control.  

I worked for four years on another animated feature that detailed what goes on inside a young woman's body, not a 13-year old but someone from like 16 to 30.  That film was more literal and more science-based, and there were sections that detail what effect events have in the real world on hormones and neurons in your body, and then what effect those physical changes have on relationships. A more literal interpretation of the same idea, perhaps - I think I have a way to link to this film in early March, as I wrap up the romance chain, so I won't say more about it now, we'll talk about it then. But in some ways it's "Inside Out 2" but for adults. 

It's been 9 years since the first film, during which Riley only aged two years.  Whatever, but I wouldn't mind if there were more films in this franchise, if we check in with Riley when she turns 15 or 16, it could be a whole new ballgame.  The original pitch for this franchise involved 27 different emotions, and they've only shown nine so far, so perhaps in the next film it's going to get even more crowded in Riley's brain - I'm not saying they should add Lust or Horniness or anything, because then it really wouldn't be a movie for kids, but surely there must be more directions to go in the future. But again, I'm not really an expert on teenage girls, I've aged out of that demographic long ago.  But maybe the emotion team could unite to fight Angst or Wokeness or something, or maybe they could finally give Nostalgia something to do?  Or how about a quest for Empathy or Self-Awareness?

Or, if "Inside Out 3" goes the way I think it's gonna go, when Riley turns 16 she's going to be WAY more into dating girls than dating guys.  I don't know if Disney/Pixar is even able and/or willing to there, but come on, she's really into sports, all her friends are girls, boys are stupid and icky, I get it - plus it's very in fashion now to be gay and proud, why not just put the "OUT" into "Inside Out"?  And if you think things are complicated NOW up in Riley's brain control center, just wait... And if they take nine years to make another sequel, who knows, that could be even more in vogue than it is now, there could be more gay kids in high school than straights, at that point.  Sorry, I meant gender non-preferential, non-cis polyamorous non-binary kids.  Sorry about that. 

Also starring the voices of Amy Poehler (last heard in "Free Birds"), Maya Hawke (last seen in "Maestro"), Kensington Tallman, Liza Lapira (last seen in "All I Wish"), Tony Hale (last seen in "Unfrosted"), Lewis Black (last seen in "The Night We Never Met"), Phyllis Smith (last seen in "Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar"), Ayo Edebiri (last heard in "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse"), Lilimar (last seen in "Hubie Halloween"), June Squibb (ditto), Grace Lu (last seen in "Dear Evan Hansen"), Sumayyah Nuriddin-Green, Adele Exarchopoulos, Diane Lane (last seen in "A Walk on the Moon"), Kyle MacLachlan (last seen in "Nothing Compares"), Yvette Nicole Brown (last seen in "Butterfly in the Sky"), Ron Funches (last heard in "Trolls Band Together"), James Austin Johnson (last heard in "She Said"), Yong Yea, Steve Purcell (last heard in "Toy Story 4"), Dave Goelz (last seen in "Jim Henson: Idea Man"), Frank Oz (ditto), Kirk Thatcher (last seen in "For the Love of Spock"), Paula Pell (last seen in "Wine Country"), Pete Docter (last heard in "Inside Out"), Paula Poundstone (ditto), John Ratzenberger (last heard in "Mr. Warmth - The Don Rickles Project"), Sarayu Blue (last seen in "Blockers"), Flea (last seen in "Little Richard: I Am Everything"), Bobby Moynihan (last heard in "IF"), Kendall Coyne Schofield.

RATING: 7 out of 10 cubicles at Fort Pillowton

Queenpins

Year 17, Day 11 - 1/11/25 - Movie #4,911

BEFORE: Well, if I had to euthanize my old DVR and start training a new one, at least it happened during a week when most of my programming is coming from Netflix and AmazonPrime, so my viewing schedule was unaffected. I won't really feel the loss until I go to watch "Say It Isn't So" in February and I realize I don't have it, and I have to pay iTunes $2.99 for the privilege of watching it.  Am I the only person still using iTunes?  I bet I'm the only person who wants to watch movies that aren't streaming anywhere, and most other people will watch whatever their streaming service HAS, which is a different approach to movies, I'm a professional and a connoisseur.  

I got a message that this one's leaving Netflix January 17, so that means I'm hitting it at the right moment - it hasn't been a priority to get to this one, but if it's leaving the service, well the time is now, so I won't have to go looking for it somewhere else - or does leaving Netflix mean it's going to be on cable next week?  There's a pattern but I just haven't figured it all out yet.  Anyway, if you're playing along at home you have 6 more days to catch this one on the Netflix. Stephen Root carries over from "To Leslie", Allison Janney will be back in February if all goes well. 

THE PLOT: A pair of housewives create a $40 million coupon scam.  

AFTER:  When is this movie set?  Sometimes a film will give references or clues, like "Sun Dogs" was set in the years after 2001, when people were suspicious and fearful of Islamic immigrants, before they were suspicious and fearful of Mexican immigrants. That deck of cards with wanted terrorists on them is a very specific timing reference. "To Leslie" was a little harder to pin down, topics like alcoholism and winning a lottery are evergreen, and there wasn't much else to go on, no key music from the 70's or 80's, so it was kind of timeless, but with a definite 70's vibe. Maybe? Leslie was seen using a payphone, so it just can't be the 2020's. 

The Extreme Couponing trend was all over TV about 2011-2012, so that's my best guess here. I don't know if it's still a thing, I know there were some controversies about it, like some stores banned the extreme couponers because they were combining half-off coupons with double-coupon promotions, and that meant everything was basically free, and, umm, well, you can't do that. How is a grocery store supposed to stay in business?  If you read the fine print on any grocery's promotion, it will probably tell you that you can't combine offers - sure, it says that NOW, because somebody played around with the rules, which usually I support when it means that I'm the one saving money. We stayed away from our local Stop & Shop for a few years, and when we came back, not only had they changed the whole layout but there was a robot patrolling the aisles (looking for spills, they said, but COME ON) and also, coupons were digital and you needed to use a phone app. The app is quite buggy, as apps tend to be, and I was "clipping" coupons virtually, but they weren't going to my virtual wallet, so for a while I wasn't getting credit for them at the check-out. Why do I have to "clip" it if it's digital and there's nothing to be clipped? Here's a crazy idea, why not just lower the prices by 10 cents? Doesn't this phone-app system favor the people who can afford smart phones and unfairly penalize the people who can't? I guess you can still use the paper coupons if you're old or BASIC.  

My wife and I go back and forth on the grocery shopping issue, she sometimes joins one of those wholesale clubs, but then after a few times stocking up on things, there's no need to go BACK because you just bought 3 giant packs of those items you like, so the membership's about to expire and you have to wonder if it's worth another $25 to continue your account for another year. I'll go along with her and buy some apple juice and a big box of Cheez-Its, but if I really bought what I wanted there, I'd go broke. Yes, I realize that the food is cheaper overall (MAYBE) if you buy in bulk, but making me buy THREE mustards instead of one makes the whole bill more than I feel I can afford. I'd rather go grocery shopping every 2 weeks and make a list, which I feel keeps the overall expense within my price range - sure, I might be paying a little more for each individual item by not buying in bulk, but the total bill seems less at the end, plus I haven't created a storage problem at home. 

We bicker over meal planning, too, because a trip to a regular grocery store allows me to plan 6 or 7 meals and buy all the things I need to make those meals, as opposed to buying a giant pack of something I like and then hoping that I'm in the mood to eat THAT at least five times in the next month. I can get tired of anything, yes, even corn dogs. Either way, we're probably going to be too tired to cook three times next week so we'll order pizza or the good Chinese and/or go out to the diner, so I don't really have to plan 7 meals a week, probably three is enough since I work a few nights a week, during which I'll just go to Popeye's or Taco Bell. Still, she believes in the savings offered by the wholesale club, arguing that you have to spend money to save money, while I maintain I can save even MORE money by not shopping there at all. I think CostCo is probably a great boon if you have 5 kids and you don't allow them any choice at all over what they're going to eat. "Here, kids, I bought a 30-pack of frozen pizzas, so that's what's for dinner. Eat it or not, I don't care."

(EDIT: Do NOT even get me started on hotel breakfast. She treats the "free" continental breakfast as beneath her, and says we need to go out to Waffle House or IHOP for a proper breakfast, while I maintain that they've worked the cost of the breakfast into the room rate, so then if we're not taking advantage of what we've already paid for, we're double-paying for brekkies if we go out. I would rather use the hotel breakfast as incentive to get my ass up earlier and eat as much of it as possible, whatever happens to be there. After that, if she wants to hit up a real breakfast joint, I'll just get coffee or something small.)

Connie Kaminski is a former Olympic medalist (in a rather obscure is-it-even-a-sport event) who's married but unsatisfied, and deep in debt after a number of unsuccessful IVF attempts. Her best friend runs a cosmetics company that caters to people of color and makes promotional YouTube videos, however her business is cash-only because someone stole her identity years ago and ruined her credit score. (NITPICK POINT: Paying with a credit card and taking credit cards as payment are two different things.). Together they share a love of collecting, sorting and properly using their coupons, sometimes reducing that $150 grocery bill down to under 20 bucks, however this means often buying in bulk and storing the excess, and carefully buying whatever's on sale or what they have coupons for, rather than buying what they want. The "high" that they get from saving money is addictive, so they take the process to its illogical conclusion.   

Connie finds out that if she writes a complaint letter to a corporation, they will often send a coupon for a FREE item, to make up for the issue and not lose a valued customer.  So she starts writing fake complaint letters in mass quantities, figuring if she can get a free coupon for a $20 item, she can sell the coupon for $10 to someone else and clear a profit (minus the cost of the envelope, postage and her time, of course).  All of this tracks, except for the deceptive part - I've bought used books that my boss illustrated on eBay for $4 or $5 and then sold them on his web-site, signed, for $20 plus postage, and if I do that enough times, it starts to add up to real money.  

Connie and JoJo then decide to drive down to Mexico, where the coupons are printed, and get someone who works there to ship them the excess, unused FREE coupons in bulk, instead of burning them, for a cut of the profits when they sell the coupons on their web-site.  

So this is stealing, smuggling and then re-selling stolen items, and probably a few other crimes as well, but they really go through some intense mental gymnastics to convince themselves they're not doing anything wrong. This is what Robin Hood would have done, right, diverting money from the rich corporations to give to the poor, or themselves. Once JoJo's YouTube promo video skills are applied, SavvySuperSaver.com gets a ton of traffic and they're mailing coupons all over the country, and their clients get free groceries, and really, what's the harm?  Oh, right, the grocery stores. 

The loss prevention officer for one Southwest grocery chain knows that these coupons are fake, but he can't prove it, because he didn't know you could steal the REAL coupons straight off the printing press. He brings his findings to the FBI, who are, you know, a little busy what with homegrown militia groups, banking scandals, and Presidents who think it's OK to take work home from the office and store sensitive military secrets in their spare bathroom. They don't think fake grocery coupons are a threat to the nation, but once a mid-level clerk learns that the coupons are being sent through the MAIL, well, now a postal inspector gets involved, and while he might not be the FBI, he's super-serious and very efficient.  You mess with the mail, you're messing with America. 

NITPICK POINT #2: I kind of doubt that the news of over-use of the "FREE" coupons across the country would filter back to the corporations so quickly.  Most grocery store managers would see the coupon, allow the customer one free item, and then forget about it, as long as they didn't see multiple uses of THAT coupon in their store over a short period.  So would the loss prevention officer from ONE grocery chain really get like 200 voicemail messages from various big conglomerates that had no other way to investigate this issue?  It's not like the grocery stores would demand money from Proctor & Gamble because too many people used coupons on toothpaste, so how would they even know?  I think it's much more likely that someone in the customer service departments would realize that all those complaint letters that Connie wrote to GET coupons were coming from the same address, printed on the same paper with the same toner, and written in the same voice.

Vince Vaughn and Paul Walter Hauser become the comic duo that we never knew we needed, the grocery store loss prevention officer and the U.S. postal inspector working together to locate and then take down the Queenpins of couponing.  First, of course, they have to decide on the pronunciation of "coupon" because some people say it like it's got a hard "C", like "koo-pon" while other people prefer the soft "C", like "cue-pon".  They're both kind of correct, like "ketchup" and "catsup" are both still legit, only "catsup" will eventually go the way of the dinosaur.  And the cheese named "mascarpone" and the cherries named "maraschino" can both be pronounced two ways, I think we really need some kind of national forum on these liguistic problems, only nobody else seems all that concerned. 

Meanwhile, Connie and JoJo have a terrible problem, they've made TOO much money.  PayPal has in issue with them proving they're a legit business (and this seems to be set before Venmo and Zelle, so there you go, it's maybe 2012 or 2013) so they have to create a few phony identities to fool PayPal (NITPICK POINT #3, how can a phony ID prove that they're legit?) and also there's concern over the money being dirty, so how do they clean it?  Their solution is to BUY a bunch of expensive stuff, sell that stuff, then the money is laundered. They are absolutely 100% wrong on this point, because they're only creating more cash transactions that the IRS could look into for non-reported sales tax, luxury tax, etc.  Connie's husband is an IRS auditor, so you'd think she might know some of this, only clearly she wasn't paying attention, and that's played up here for comic purposes - when the pair is forced to lease an airport hangar to store their RVs and sports cars, the situation MIGHT be a little out of control.  

There's an easy way to tell if your own operation is illegal - namely, did you fill out a W-2 or 1099 form before making that money?  Or, are you currently reporting or planning to report that income on your tax return?  If not, then you're breaking the law.  For the moment, most transactions on eBay or Amazon 3rd party or payments made by Zelle are not part of the traceable income system, but eventually the IRS is going to catch up. Sure, you can make a lot of money from your YouTube channel, but if you get a document from them at the end of the year, you're going to have to report that.  The government might be behind the times, but at some point in time they'll get some people working there who maybe understand how Gen Alpha influencers make their millions, and then the party will be over, just like it will eventually end for any lottery winners who don't take steps to protect their prize.  And if you've got a secret stash of something somewhere that you don't want anyone to know about, I appreciate your moxie but come on, you know there's no way to beat the system. That's why we HAVE a system.

Also starring Kristen Bell (last seen in "The People We Hate at the Wedding"), Kirby Howell-Baptiste (last seen in "Cruella"), Paul Walter Hauser (ditto), Vince Vaughn (last seen in "Freaky"), Joel McHale (last seen in "Butterfly in the Sky"), Bebe Rexha, Dayo Okeniyi (last seen in "The Spectacular Now"), Greta Oglesby (last seen in "Wilson"), Jack McBrayer (last seen in "Unfrosted"), Michael Masini (last seen in "Blonde"), Annie Mumolo (last seen in "Barbie"), Paul Rust (last seen in "Paper Heart"), Timm Sharp (last seen in "Together Together"), Eduardo Franco (last seen in "Self Reliance"), Nick Cassavetes (last seen in "Prisoners of the Ghostland"), Lidia Porto (last seen in "Dope"), Nnoema Sampson, Todd Aaron Brotze, Robert Riechel Jr., Judith Drake (last seen in "Time Lapse"), Georgia Mischak, Paxton Carville, Francisco J. Rodriguez, Ilia Paulino (last seen in "Me Time"), Sebastian Schier, Bob Glouberman, Dan Sachoff, Jason Sims-Prewitt, Jamison Webb, Jeremy Shouldis, Marc Evan Jackson, Rosie Garcia, Timothy Davis-Reed, Tommy Do, Liz Eldridge, Christian Vunipola, Michael Sung Ho, Paul Jurewicz, Rooter Wareing, Dustan Costine, Farley Jackson, Ross Kimball, Stephen McFarlane, Bill Glass, James Moses Black, Albert Malafronte, Fred Cross, Ruben Avitia, Dave Perloff, Leonard Robinson, Garrett Wareing

RATING: 6 out of 10 postal service S.W.A.T. team members (who knew?)

To Leslie

Year 17, Day 10 - 1/10/25 - Movie #4,910

BEFORE: At this time last year, I was deep into Toni Collette movies, and she ended up making 6 appearences in 2024, which wasn't enough to win the year, but come on, that's a darn good attempt.  Allison Janney carries over again today from "Lou" and so far she's in the lead for 2025 with four movies, but she's equally unlikely to hold that lead.  Still, she's due to come back for two romance films in February, and if Father's Day goes the way I think then she'll be back for seven, it will be another darn good showing.  You've got to be diverse if you want to win this thing, appearing in romances and comedies and action films is really the way to go. It's the "Paul Rudd" plan for success, really. 

"To Leslie" feels like another one of those films that flew very under the radar - it did get one Oscar nomination a year ago, Andrea Riseborough for Best Actress, but so far I haven't met anyone who's seen this film or even heard of it.  

THE PLOT: A single mother tries to reclaim her life and connection with her son after winning the lottery and spending all her money on parties and alcohol.  

AFTER: Nobody ever tells you that there's a negative side to winning the lottery, do they?  Let's start with the taxes, if you hit for one of those mega-jackpots you don't get THAT amount, they pre-take 50% of it right off the bat, which is actually a good thing because if they gave you the whole $40 million, admit it, you'd start spending like crazy and you wouldn't be thinking about the $20 million you owe the IRS at the end of the year. And then where will you be when you file your return and you can't pay what you owe?  In some serious debt, that's where.  So I think for the big jackpots they take the estimated tax amount out right off the bat, then you have to worry about everyone you ever knew hitting you up for money to make THEIR dreams come true, instead of yours.  Even if you do the "smart" thing and invest your winnings, they're no guarantee that any investment's going to pay off, so you could also lose the whole thing if you invested it poorly, or the market takes a turn.  Honestly, it feels like the only way to win at the lottery might be to never play it in the first place. 

Leslie Rowlands didn't win a super-mega jackpot, she won $190,000 and that's perhaps a more dangerous amount, not necessarily a life-changing sum of money, OK maybe there are parts of Texas where that buys you a house, but then you're a homeowner and now you owe property taxes, plus repairs from time to time, electricity, gas, water, all that you have to pay for now, where those things might have been free if you'd just stayed in the apartment and kept paying rent.  So unless you plan to flip that house in a few years for four times what you paid, that's maybe not the best investment because your whole cost of living just went up, and you spent all the lottery winnings just buying the house in the first place.  Whatever dreams that Leslie had before winning this money, she forgot about them fairly quickly and just spent it all on liquor and drugs. Now that's crazy, because I would have spent it all on comic books, which at least have a chance or going up in value, but once the liquor passes through your system, it's practically worthless.  But now we know how long a lottery-fueled binge lasts, and it's six years.  

Leslie's getting kicked out of a residential motel for not paying rent when we first meet her, so yeah, maybe buying that house with the money would have put her on a different path.  She reunites with her 19-year old son, who lives with a roommate and has an actual job, but he lays down some ground rules, no drinking, no stealing, and no sleeping with his friends or neighbors.  Well, she starts right in breaking all of those rules, maybe it's a bit like taking a kid to an amusement park and telling them they can't go on any of the rides.  After he finds the liquor bottles under the mattress, her son kicks Leslie out and she moves in with her friends, Nancy and Dutch.  They have house rules, too, but they also have a friend who spots Leslie in a bar, so they lock her out as well.  Another friend also won't put her up for the night unless she puts out, so really, ass, cash or grass, nobody rides for free. 

She sleeps next to another motel, and accidentally leaves her suitcase behind.  Sweeney, the manager of the hotel, takes pity on her and pretends to mistake her for someone who called about a job, and puts her to work cleaning hotel rooms in exchange for $7 and hour and room and board.  Well, I guess if you've fucked up your life this would be one way to start to un-fuck it, but she doesn't really get that right off, she still sleeps late and goes out drinking at night.  Eventually she realizes that this is a path to something, she's got an opportunity to get clean and that drinking might be part of her problem, not a continual attempt at a solution. Going cold turkey after a six-year binge hits her hard, though. 

Marc Maron plays Sweeney, the motel manager, fellow addict and potential love interest who helps her get clean, and damn, show me the movie that Maron isn't great in. I love all his comedy specials, and, really, I'll watch any movie he's in, from "Respect" to "Frank and Cindy" to "Spenser Confidential" and "Worth". He even did a voice in that animated film "The Bad Guys", and what do you know, he was great at that too. I wish I could link to "Sword of Trust" from here, but it would take me too far away from the path I want to be on. Maybe I can get there one day soon. 

Sweeney plays an old VHS tape of her big lottery win, and somewhere in there her son mentions that she once talked about opening a diner.  But after watching the tape, Leslie quits her job at the motel and goes out drinking again, only this time she doesn't drink.  And when Sweeney comes looking for her she hides out in an abandoned ice-cream shop across from the motel, and then at some point she realizes her old dream and wants to turn that shop into a diner, only it's going to take a lot of money and a lot of time - but hey, good news, she gets back together with Sweeney and they work on it together.  I get it, this feels like a very American dream, to open a diner, work hard and maybe turn it into something successful while you're scrambling every day to try to keep it from closing. I've thought about this myself, since I love food and enjoy creating new sandwiches, the only thing holding me back is that I have no professional training in running a restaurant, no money to invest in one and all I ever see in NYC are diners and restaurants that are open for a couple years and then close down.  So probably it's a terrible idea and I should probably stick with what I'm doing now. 

This film is set in Texas, but it wasn't shot in Texas, it was filmed in L.A. in just 19 days during the COVID pandemic, on a budget of less than $1 million.  It grossed less than half of that in theaters, but got picked up by Netflix, and then Riseborough's Oscar nomination was probably the best thing to happen for the film.  There were some claims made about the promotions for her Oscar nomination might have violated Academy rules, because it featured known actors doing testimonials about the film on social media, and that's kind of a no-no. But in this day and age, how do you know that those actors just didn't really like the movie after seeing it, and were just giving their unsolicited personal opinions to their own fans? It's a fine line, sometimes.  Also one promotion said that Riseborough's performance was better than the one Cate Blanchett gave in "Tár", and you're not supposed to do that, either, compare the star of your film to another actor in another film. 

The word-of-mouth campaign worked, and Andrea Riseborough got an Oscar nomination, however the theory was that maybe Viola Davis didn't get one for "The Woman King" because Riseborough kind of came out of nowhere, the studio that made "To Leslie" couldn't really afford to do a big proper media campaign, so they kind of did what they could do.  Still, the Academy apparently looked into it and did not disqualify Riseborough, however there was concern over using social media as a nomination tactic, but I'm afraid there's no going back, social media is here to stay and it really can't be controlled, we're finding out. 

Starts as "Leaving Las Vegas" but ends as "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore" with maybe a touch of "Nomadland" thrown in for good measure. Does that make sense?  All I know is that it's Friday night and that means I get to have two beers after work, but not from a bar, from my beer fridge in the basement.  Bars are WAY too expensive, I can buy a whole six-pack for what a NYC bar might charge for two beers. 

Also starring Andrea Riseborough (last seen in "Amsterdam"), Marc Maron (last seen in "Worth"), Andre Royo (last seen in "Freelancers"), Owen Teague (last seen in "It: Chapter Two"), Stephen Root (last seen in "The Company You Keep"), James Landry Hebert (last seen in "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood"), Catfish Jean, Scott Subiono (last seenin "Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire"), Blake Robbins (last seen in "Wind River"), Matt Lauria (last seen in "80 for Brady"), Drew Youngblood, Tom Virtue (last seen in "The Wedding Ringer"), Lauren Letherer, Pramode Kumar (last seen in "Birds of Prey"), Brandee Steger, Chris Jones, Alan Wells (last seen in "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever"), Alan Trong (last seen in "The Tomorrow War"), Francisco Javier Gomez, Mac Brandt (last seen in "Barbie"), John Gilbert, Juan Francisco Villa, Arabella Grant, Kourtney Amanda, Micah Fitzgerald (last seen in "The Call of the Wild"), Clayton Hoff, Jeanette O'Connor, Marcelo Olivas, Stephanie Wong. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 late night underwear jogging runs