The Love Punch

Year 18, Day 54 - 2/23/26 - Movie #5,254

BEFORE: Well, I was going to record "Das Boot" but then of course I went downstairs to record it on the DVR, and I promptly forgot. So I'll have to catch it next time around - I'm a little more focused right now on scanning through some documentaries so that when it comes time to put that chain together, I'll know exactly what order to put all the films in. I guess my brain can only handle one thing at a time these days. Celia Imrie carries over from "Love Again".

Here's the line-up for Day 12 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar", and we'll be at the halfway point very soon - the themes for tomorrow, Tuesday 2/24 are "Oscar Goes Down in History" and "Oscar Goes Back for More (Remakes)":

5:00 am "Disraeli" (1929)

6:30 am "Viva Villa!" (1934)

8:30 am "Rasputin and the Empress" (1932)

10:45 am "The Private Life of Henry VIII" (1933)
12:30 pm "Marie Antoinette" (1938)

3:15 pm "Julius Caesar" (1953)

5:30 pm "Sunrise at Campobello" (1960)

8:00 pm "Gaslight" (1944)

10:00 pm "Imitation of Life" (1959)

12:15 am "The Magnificent Seven" (1960)
2:30 am "A Star Is Born" (1976)

5:00 am "Showboat" (1951)

I've seen the movies about Henry VIII and Julius Caesar, plus I've seen "Gaslight" and the final three here, so that's 6 seen out of 12, which I think counts as a "push" - so that brings me up to 55 seen out of 133, which still raises me up a bit to 41.3%.

THE PLOT: A divorced couple scheme to recover the retirement money that was stolen from them. 

AFTER: Well, this wanted to be both a romance film and a heist film AND a comedy, and just maybe that's a few too many things to try to be at once, if you know what I mean. The lead characters are a divorced couple, so they already know each other a bit TOO well, and it kind of feels like they come together both for the heist and because all of their other options with other lovers have come to naught, but is that really enough of a reason to get back together? Don't get me wrong, I like both of them and they're very cute together, but they're already in the post-marriage era of familiarity, so lying to each other is sort of like the default position, and well, that's not cool.  Part of the reason that Kate agrees to go with her ex-husband Richard to the south of France is that she's been texting with a Frenchman, a potential suitor who just happens to live near where they're going. 

The other reasons for her to go include the fact that she speaks a little French (very little, it turns out...) and also it's HER retirement money too that's at risk, her husband's pension is one of many that got stolen, but his income pays for their house, where she lives, so she's got a vested interest there in terms of not being homeless. The pension thing I don't really understand - hell, I don't understand my own pension, and I've got like three retirement accounts from companies I worked for over the years, and overall I don't know how much money is in them or how to access them when I need to. I should probably look into that at some point. But Richard's company got bought and shut down, and therefore he and his co-workers lose their pensions? I'm not sure how that worked, I figure the pension funds are usually held by a separate company that everyone invested in, and even if they company changed hands those pension funds should still be safe, right?  

But I guess they pointed out here that the French businessman who bought the company may have been corrupt and stolen the funds somehow, along with closing down the company legally and liquidizing all of the assets for himself. It seems like it all should be illegal, but according to him, it's not. Then again, the Supreme Court just told our President that he has no rights to levy tariffs on international business at 10% across the board, and his response was to increase all the tariffs to 15%. Well, I guess it's all in the wording, if SCOTUS said that his tariff rate was illegal, he did change the rate, so he's in the clear?  Anyway, we're all going to find out at some point that Trump and Musk stole all the money set aside for Social Security, plus all the gold from Fort Knox, so really, none of us are going to be able to retire, we'll all be in the same boat as Richard and Kate here. 

But while they're in France, they learn that this corrupt businessman, Vincent, is about to get married to his girlfriend, Manon AND they figure he's also the mystery buyer who just bought this giant diamond at an auction as a wedding gift. So they put aside the fact that they're not criminal masterminds of any kind and they hatch a plan to attend the wedding, steal the diamond and either ransom it back for the retirement fund money, or just fence it on the black market for a possible greater value.  They enlist the help of another couple, Penelope and Jerry, and together they're going to kidnap these two businessmen from Texas who are guests at the wedding and impersonate them - all you really need to look like a Texan is a cowboy hat, right? And so now we're talking about possible kidnapping charges, on top of diamond theft, breaking and entering, in addition to crashing the wedding, which is probably some form of trespassing. It's a lot of crime for four normal people to do, even if one of them used to be James Bond. 

Even with their son doing some "hacking" for them (probably best not to dive too deep into this) is this believable? Not in the slightest. These are regular older people who probably have trouble charging their phones, or figuring out Zoom calls, really what chance do they have of pulling this off? Kate first infiltrates the bride's "hen party", pretending to be a second cousin of the groom who she's never met - and she learns a lot about how the reception is going to work, especially when Manon is going to change clothes and put the big diamond on for the reception.  Things go south when Manon enters the room and breaks down crying before they can steal the diamond and replace it with the fake one (Umm, how and when did they get a copy of the world's biggest diamond? NITPICK POINT.) 

It's a chance for the couple to confide in the bride about why they're really there, and what kind of a terrible man she's about to marry. Really all they want is the diamond, but in addition the bride calls off the wedding, and Vincent is so upset that he shuts down the affair and has security search everyone for the missing diamond before they're allowed to leave. This is where the other couple comes in, because Jerry's ability to smuggle contraband out inside his body turned out to be really handy (no, not like THAT, he swallows it) and the evil businessman sends Richard and Kate away in a van to be killed, but the bride again comes to their rescue before the van can be driven off a cliff. 

It's just a bit of fun tonight, the film's not going to win any Best Screenplay Awards, but a heist is always a great example of the "What Can Possibly Go Wrong?" writing mantra, with the answer being absolutely everything. And it's being allowed to stay in the romance chain because of the possible re-kindling of the romance between the divorced people. But it's definitely "save the pension funds" first and then worry about the rekindled romance later. Still, getting back together wouldn't be the worst thing in the world for these two people.

Directed by Joel Hopkins (director of "Hampstead" and "Last Chance Harvey")

Also starring Emma Thompson (last seen in "Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy"), Pierce Brosnan (last seen in "Black Bag"), Timothy Spall (last seen in "The Pale Blue Eye"), Louise Bourgoin, Laurent Lafitte (last heard in "The Little Prince"), Marisa Berenson (last seen in "Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story"), Olivier Chantreau, Ellen Thomas (last seen in "Johnny English Reborn"), Tuppence Middleton (last seen in "Cleanskin"), Jack Wilkinson, Adam Byron, John Ramm (last seen in "6 Days"), Eleanor Matsuura (last seen in "The Lady in the Van"), Bruce MacEwen (last seen in "The Brothers Grimm"), Christophe Prevost (last seen in "Life" (1999)), Sabine Crossen (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald"), Liz Coke, Max Hayter, Anna Brooke, Linda Hardy, Tom Morton, Sinan Bertrand, Jordan Jones, Spencer Kayden, Samantha Kelly

RATING: 5 out of 10 cans of champagne

Love Again

Year 18, Day 53 - 2/22/26 - Movie #5,253

BEFORE: It's Sunday and the blizzard has hit, so I'm housebound again - but this allows me to watch a rare DAYTIME movie and then catch up again, as Nick Jonas carries over from "You're Cordially Invited". 

Over on TCM, it's day 10 of "31 Days of Oscar", but let's look at the line-up for Day 11, Monday, 2/23, and the two themes are "Oscar Goes to the Islands" and then "Oscar Goes to the Dogs": 

7:30 am "White Shadows in the South Seas" (1928)

9:15 am "All the Brothers Were Valiant" (1953)

11:15 am "Gulliver's Travels" (1939)

12:45 pm "Robinson Crusoe" (1954)

2:30 pm "Hawaii" (1966)

5:15 pm "South Pacific" (1958)

8:00 pm "Lassie Come Home" (1943)

9:45 pm "Come Back, Little Sheba" (1952)

11:30 pm "The Awful Truth" (1937)

1:15 am "Umberto D." (1952)

3:00 am "Sounder" (1972)

OK, I suppose if you get snowed in tomorrow you can do a lot worse than watch a few films set in Hawaii or the South Pacific. But really, who picked these movies, because most of them are ones I wouldn't even want to watch. That means I'm only hitting with one today, I've seen "South Pacific" and now my stats will drop again. 1 seen out of 11 brings me to 49 seen out of 121, and that's just over 40%. I should do a bit better on Tuesday. I have not recorded any of TCM's films yet, but I think I will record "Das Boot", one of the "Oscar Goes to War" films, because I've never been able to cross that film off my list, and maybe this is my chance. 

THE PLOT: A young woman tries to ease the pain of her fiancé's death by sending texts to his old cell phone number, and forms a connection with the man the number has been reassigned to.

AFTER: It's a new world out there, technologically speaking, and I think in the last couple of weeks I've seen a lot of that reflected in the romance films that are only a year or two old - the bar pick-up scene of "Roger Dodger" is essentially gone, replaced by the online dating and text flirting seen in "Puppy Love" and "Cat Person". Man, and things are SO easy for screenwriters now, if they want to get two people to meet all they have to do is have them join an app, or have another character who is their friend do that for them, and boom, we're off to the races. No more writer's block over questions like "How are these two characters going to meet?"  Well, duh, they just joined the same app and one swiped right on the other one's picture, or the software's parameters said they'd be a good match. By comparison, yesterday's chance meeting that came about through an accidental double-booking at a wedding venue seems like such a total stretch - to say nothing of meeting somebody when he's the union rep at the Minnesota yogurt factory that you just got put in charge of...

But in that vein, I now have to take a look at "Love Again", which allows two people who no longer believe in romantic love meet by chance when he's assigned a new company cell phone, and right after that, the girlfriend of the dead boyfriend who USED to have that phone number starts texting it as a form of therapy. Right. Mira didn't do this for two whole years, and then as soon as Rob gets that phone number, she starts texting it? I have to call B.S. on this - if she'd done this before, texting a "dead" number the texts wouldn't have gone through - but this leads me to a NITPICK POINT, wouldn't she see that the texts are being marked as "delivered" or "read", and wouldn't that seem a little odd, that the texts sent to a dead person are being read? 

Mira's obviously still grieving, after two years, but come on, she did watch as her boyfriend was hit by a car, two years doesn't even seem like enough time to get over that, which it clearly isn't. But Rob's been through another kind of grief, where he was engaged and his fiancée called off the wedding, very publicly, and so he's also determined that love is a delusion that is shared by two people who are using it so they don't have to face the reality that everyone dies and every relationship ends at some point. Well, he's not exactly wrong, but this is a rather bleak way to view the world of the hoo-mans. Rob gleans enough information from Mira's texts about her upcoming date to determine where she's going to be, and he even GOES there so he can figure out who's been sending him these texts, and find out if they're just spam or a catfishing exercise or what. To his credit, he never answered any of her texts, but maybe he should have?  You know, just say, "Excuse me, wrong number, clearly you're hurting and trying to talk to your dead boyfriend, but I'm not him, so please update your list of contacts. 

Instead, he's intrigued and also he finds Mira beautiful, so when he learns that one of her texts is a reference to the opera about Orpheus, he goes to that opera every night in the hopes that she will show up, and eventually he does. This is very stalker-y, sure, but he does at least gain an appreciation for opera from doing this, and he DOES meet Mira in the real world, and they do form a connection, however it all goes back to that phone and those texts, and him not telling her about that is still a lie of omission, so their whole relationship is kind of based on a lie. But of course he waits too long to tell her, and then when they seem to have a good thing going, it's kind of too late to tell her, because he doesn't want to spoil it. There really shouldn't be a window on telling the truth, but sure, I get it. In the case of "Fake it 'till you make it", once somebody makes it, it's very rare for them to admit that they faked it.  Why would they? 

In the meantime, Rob's career as a music journalist puts him in a position to interview Celine Dion, who's got a concert coming up at the Barclay's Center (hey, I know that place) in Brooklyn. Celine Dion, of course, in addition to being a known popular recording artist, is also apparently an expert on all things romantic - and I don't know how I feel about that. My wife watched that documentary about her, and I'm sure that maybe she thinks this about herself, but she did marry her manager, who was a few years older than her, and their relationship was completely professional until it wasn't, and well, no judgments here but I don't think any of that makes her an expert on finding love or maintaining relationships. I probably need some more information - but in addition to being a recording artist AND a love expert, Ms. Dion is also an executive producer on this film. There's a conflict of interest in there somewhere, I'm sure. 

So I really should HATE this film because it feels so manipulative - the storyline feels very forced, the way that Celine Dion is written into the film feels very contrived, and then there's the dialogue, which is often horrible. Every single plot point is belabored and mentioned at least three times, so it feels like the director thought the audience was full of idiots, and if we don't make this extremely simple for everyone to follow, we're going to be in serious trouble. But then naturally it takes three times longer to GET anywhere, and each time it's the emotional state of Mira that seems to be to blame. Everytime there's a new milestone in her new relationship with Rob, she pushes him away and he's got to find another way to try and reach her. Sure, she's fragile, sure, she's been through some bad stuff, but also she's A LOT and that's going to be a hard shell to crack.  

And then once she spends the night and "accidentally" sees her own text chain to her dead boyfriend on his computer, well, geez, the whole thing blows up, as it inevitably had to. She breaks things off and Rob's back to square one, but still he thinks this relationship can be fixed, if he could just explain himself a little better and then have another private conversation with Celine Dion, then everything will be fine. Ugh, again I should hate that Celine Dion is the "deux es machina" who can improve Mira's outlook on life just by offering her a job designing the poster for her current tour. (Sorry, another NITPICK POINT here, Ms. Dion is already out on tour, and she started her tour without a poster? No way, this is definitely something that her record company would have taken care of before she'd be doing her sound-check at Barclay's. Prove me wrong, I dare you.)

I want to root for these crazy kids, I want them to build on the fact that they both put their fries in their cheeseburgers and they both like basketball and build on that, and I know you don't have to like all the same things to be in a relationship, but they've got the opera and they've got Central Park and neither one can cook worth a darn, isn't that enough?  Anyway, Rob has to do a publishing "Hail Mary" play and make the Celine Dion article all about himself, how he got love advice from her and how he believes that "It's All Coming Back to Me Now" is his new mantra, because he didn't believe he'd find love again until he got Mira's texts and then got to know her after cyber-stalking her. I know that sounds wrong and so maybe this relationship can't be saved, unless he takes this whole dilemma public and writes about it in the newspaper, where millions of people can then weigh in on it.  

You might remember a couple of weeks ago, there was this Norwegian skier who got a bronze medal in the Olympics - when the news interviewed him after he got his medal, all he could talk about was what a mess he made out of his life, because he met this great girlfriend four months ago, but cheated on her two months ago. Now he's filled with regret, and this had basically ruined his whole Olympic Games - so he used the interview to go public, thinking that if millions of people could just hear his story, this would somehow put pressure on the ex-girlfriend and then solve his little romantic problem, umm, which he caused. Well, the journalists tracked down his ex, and basically asked her if she would take him back, and she replied with a "HELL, no." Her reasoning was that he did what he did, and then added insult to injury by telling the whole world about it during the Olympic broadcast. 

Realistically, this is what maybe SHOULD have happened to Rob here - I would imagine that presenting his situation with Mira to the public could easily have had a negative effect. Mira was already a noted author of children's books, and now Rob basically embarrassed her in print by telling a story about her grief, and sending texts to her dead boyfriend's phone, and then his own misdeeds by not telling her about the phone thing, using the texts to stalk her in real life and then going to the opera obsessively (sorry, another quick NITPICK POINT, a journalist would probably not be able to afford opera tickets in NYC for 30 days straight, or however long it took) until she showed up. But, you know, this is a rom-com movie so it needs to have a happy ending of sorts, and so somehow his article breaks through and Mira forgives him, and they get back together, with conditions, of course. 

I don't hate the ending, it's just that this film is very clunky and also has no basis in reality, in addition to relying on Celine Dion, relationship expert, to fix everyone's problems everywhere. Jeez, if Rob had to interview a therapist or a counselor it might have made sense. I do appreciate the casting of Nick Jonas as one of Mira's "bad dates", which is only funny because the actress is married to him in real life. He probably wasn't a good enough actor to play the lead here, and it might have killed the film if he had - but a smaller part and a comedic role was probably better. 

Directed by Jim Strouse (director of "People Places Things")

Also starring Priyanka Chopra Jonas (last seen in "Heads of State"), Sam Heughan (last seen in "Bloodshot"), Celine Dion (last seen in "Little Richard: I Am Everything"), Sofia Barclay (last heard in "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse"), Russell Tovey (last seen in "The Lady in the Van"), Lydia West, Steve Oram (last seen in "Man Up"), Omid Djalili (last seen in "Deep Cover"), Celia Imrie (last seen in "Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy"), Arinzé Kene (last seen in "How to Build a Girl"), Tom Blake, Laurence Varda, Harry Attwell (last seen in "Breathe"), Amanda Blake, Daniel Barry, Camille Hatcher, Nisha Chadha with archive footage of Julia Roberts (last seen in "Blake Edwards: A Love Story in 24 Frames"). 

RATING: 5 out of 10 "Would you rather?" questions (it's great that they connect over these, but can you really base a whole podcast on them?)

You're Cordially Invited

Year 18, Day 52 - 2/21/26 - Movie #5,252

BEFORE: If I'm posting late, it's because I was working at the theater ALL DAY Saturday, two events, and that means a double-shift, more than 12 hours, which is great because I need the money. One was an animation event that was showcasing work from the teachers at SVA, their recent films shown to the students. Well, I know a lot of animators but only one friend who had her work showcased - still, that's always nice when a friend drops by while I'm working. Yes, I made it about me, that's what all the films this week have had in common, characters who made everything about themselves. So there, and Geraldine Viswanathan carries over from "Cat Person". 

Now here's the line-up of films from Day 10 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, for Sunday, February 22. So after this day I'll be about 1/3 of the way through that chain, and meanwhile in my own Feb. romance chain I'm approaching the halfway point - they SHOULD both end at about the same time. Sunday's theme is "Oscar Goes to War": 

6:30 am "Captains of the Clouds" (1942)

8:30 am "Battleground" (1949)

10:30 am "Sergeant York" (1941)

1:00 pm "Story of G.I. Joe" (1945)

3:00 pm "Sands of Iwo Jima" (1949)

5:00 pm "The Bridge on the River Kwai" (1957
8:00 pm "Patton" (1970)

11:00 pm "The Deer Hunter" (1978)

2:15 am "Das Boot" (1981)

5:00 am "They Were Expendable" (1945)

Well, I know I've seen "Sergeant York" and of course "The Bridge on the River Kwai", then I can claim both "Patton" and "The Deer Hunter" so that's another 4 out of 10, which brings me up to 48 seen out of 110, and that's 43.6% - I'm still moving in the wrong direction. Just wait until they get to "Oscar Goes to Space" or "Oscar Goes to a Boxing Ring", that's when I might be able to gain some ground.

THE PLOT: When two weddings are double-booked at the same venue, the father of one bride and the sister of the other try to preserve the wedding weekend. 

AFTER: How is this not just "Bride Wars" re-packaged? I mean I guess the whole point of "Bride Wars" was a rivalry between two families that had known each other for a long time and therefore hated each other.  This film has the same starting point - two families book the same venue for their weddings, and things spiral out of control from there, only the two families do NOT know each other here.  They are very different families, so there may be some biases due to income level and state of origin, which are both all too common in the U.S. these days, sad to say. The location of the wedding venue is Palmetto Island, Georgia which is weird because when I hear "palmetto" I naturally think of South Carolina first, don't you? But I guess Will Ferrell's "Father of the Bride" character lives in Atlanta, so OK, I guess Georgia works. Ferrell's character got married on Palmetto Island years ago, but he's a widower now.  Meanwhile, the older sister of the other bride chooses that venue because her grandmother used to live on that island, and Margot remembers spending good times with her grandmother. 

The whole mishap comes about because Jim Caldwell calls to book the resort first, and they can only handle ONE wedding per weekend, the owner of the resort is very clear about that - unfortunately the owner is also elderly, and she forgot to write the name down. Just kidding, that would be very ageist - instead her pen has run out of ink, and as she goes to get another one, she dies of a heart attack. So she never added the name on the reservation IN INK, and even though there are scratches of the Caldwell name made with that inkless pen, the booking goes to the one made by Margot Buckley, the TV producer. Also Margot put down the deposit, and Caldwell gave money to the maid of honor, who did NOT remit the money to the resort. Probably because there was nothing on their books that told them who to bill, but still, that's another story. 

Margot has misgivings about turning away the Caldwell wedding, I mean, the father's wife is dead and he's a legacy, so Margot agrees to share the resort's grounds for a double wedding, only the two parties will not intersect, this won't be a joint wedding, they're just going to SHARE the sunset and the other amenities, so one wedding will be in a holding pattern while the other one wraps up its sunset ceremony on the docks, and then the second ceremony can happen when the first party is having their reception, and so on.  Everything might have worked out fine if Jim didn't happen to overhear Margot talking smack about his daughter, I mean you just don't GO THERE, at least not until the entire weekend is in the rear-view and you're back home in L.A. or producing the show "Is It Dead?" or however you spend your time.

I can't really say that people act here in predictable ways, or in ways that accurately reflect how people might act in real life. There are a number of instances where two characters simply hate each other and then they might be working together or at least having a friendly conversation in the next scene - so sometimes it feels like this movie's scenes are in the wrong order, or at least were edited together at random, more or less. Like Jim Campbell repays the generosity of the Buckley family (who was willing to SHARE the resort on Neve's big wedding day) by asking the local boat driver to swing by the Buckley wedding and splash the dock with their wake, which ends up putting the entire Buckley wedding party into the drink.  Then in the very next scene, he admits what he did just to clear his conscience, but come on, who DOES THAT? 

This film shares a number of other things with yesterday's film - both movies have their main female character singing at a party (birthday party in one, wedding party in the other) performing a duet that implies some kind of sexual connection with her father or stepfather. Ooh, classy. Stepfather porn is VERY in right now.  Seriously, this is an odd coincidence and is also very gross, in "Cat Person" Margot had to sing "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" in a duet with her mother, but directed at her step-father on his birthday. Ewwww...... And in tonight's film, Jenni Caldwell performs "Islands in the Stream" as a duet with her father, and they talk about being lovers and such. Double ewwww.....

Ooh, ooh, another weird connection, both "Cat Person" and today's film have characters named Margot, and that is just NOT a common name - in America, anyway. But since they introduce one lead character from one family who is single and then in the other family, the father of the bride is a widower, well if you can't tell who's going to get matched up together at the end of this film, well then you just ain't paying attention. I saw this coming from like a MILE away. 

And of course, the big one - both films follow that principle of "reductio ad absurdium", which means that first the screenwriters envisioned the set-up scenario, namely two couples get booked for the same wedding venue, and then started listing all of the things that COULD go wrong after that, from losing the sunset to a sudden downpour to the groom being accused of cheating with a bridesmaid, and it all gets thrown into the pot, so ideally what we'll end up with here is a whole stew full of mistaken identities, misspoken thoughts and just blind blunders done in spite to complete the required menu full of "Things That Can Go Wrong".  When the bride's sister gets bitten by an alligator, which was brought into the hotel by her nemesis/fremeny/future lover who was mad at her at first, but is also falling for her at the same time, well then that's when you know this scenario has gone just COMPLETELY off the rails. Sure, there are miscommunications that will happen at a wedding, often because someone is too embarrassed to mention the elephant in the room or they're trying to be polite or to not re-hash their childhood traumas as an adult, but come on, it's all inevitable.  We need to create the ultimate "everything goes wrong at the wedding" storyline because the last film that did this, years ago, just didn't take things far enough.  

I'd love to see the suggestions that the writers made which got turned down, like were they proposing "OK, and then terrorists invade Georgia" or "And then thermonuclear war breaks out" or were they struggling to keep things within the realm of possibility, for dramatic purposes if for now other reason? I guess we'll never know.

Directed by Nicholas Stoller (director of "Bros" and "Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising")

Also starring Will Ferrell (last seen in "Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary"), Reese Witherspoon (last heard in "Being Mary Tyler Moore"), Meredith Hagner (last seen in "Ingrid Goes West"), Jimmy Tatro (last heard in Strays"), Stony Blyden, Leanne Morgan, Rory Scovel (last seen in "Old Dads"), Keyla Monterroso Mejia, Ramona Young (last seen in "Blockers"), Jack McBrayer (last seen in "Cooties"), Fortune Feimster (last seen in "Family Switch"), Celia Weston (last seen in "The Extra Man"), Martha B. Knighton (last seen in "Civil War"), Bobby Moynihan (last heard in "Fixed"), Ava Hill (last seen in "Captain America: Brave New World"), Wyatt Russell (last seen in "Thunderbolts"), Vinny Thomas, Peyton Manning (last heard in "Ferdinand"), Josué Charles, Matt Mercurio (last seen in "Hangman"), Lauren Holt (last seen in "Barbie"), Zamani Wilder (last seen in "Bottoms"), Kermit Rolison (last seen in "First Man"), Wesley Mann (last seen in "The Shadow"), Lion Way, Wyatt Hunt, Krishna Sistia Ward, Sydney Wease, Samantha Binkerd (last seen in "Brothers"), Jack Caron, Lauren Halperin (last seen in "Senior Year"), Nick Jonas (last seen in "Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road"), Ginny MacColl, Sofia Palmero, Marc Inniss, Art Newkirk

RATING: 5 out of 10 white Chevy Suburbans 

Cat Person

Year 18, Day 51 - 2/20/26 - Movie #5,251

BEFORE: Originally this film was going to be much closer to the start of the romance chain, as it was just one more film with Isabella Rossellini in it - but I moved some things around to get that Bridget Jones film to land on Valentine's Day, and that meant I had to move THIS film to link things together once I flipped a section of the chain around. The original plan was to link from "The Last Five Years" to "A Family Affair" via Lily LaGravenese, which would have made "The Tale" the 14th film, and geez but that would be a terrible film to use as a V-day centerpiece. Maybe with "Roger Dodger" moving into February then the 14th film would have been "New in Town", and that's a bit better, but still... I stand by the decision to flip that section around, it just felt right - and by tomorrow I'll be back on the path as originally planned. It's fine, because there's so much crossover among this year's films because the same people tend to appear in rom-coms and such. There still might be some tweaking I need to do along the way, there's one film I may want to add and one I may want to drop and save for next year. 

So Liza Koshy carries over from "A Family Affair" and Ms. Rossellini is back for one night only and now it's a five-way tie for the most appearances for the year. Still such a long way to go, given what usually happens in the Doc Block it wouldn't be weird if Johnny Carson or Paul McCartney won the year again. 

Let's check in again with TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, this will be the line-up for Day 9, Saturday 2/21, the theme is "Oscar Goes Big (Epics)":

7:30 am "Ben-Hur" (1959)

11:30 am "Lawrence of Arabia" (1962)

3:30 pm "Cleopatra" (1963)

8:00 pm "Gone With the Wind" (1939)

12:00 am "Doctor Zhivago" (1965)

3:30 am "Quo Vadis" (1951)

So this is what it comes down to, we're just putting movies together because they're super long? I mean, I know you guys have a lot of space to fill and time to kill, but "long" is not a theme. Can we go back to linking films by actors? It's so much more fun. Anyway, I've seen 5 out of 6, I never got around to "Quo Vadis", but this has GOT to improve my stats. Now I've seen 44 out of 100, so duh, that's 44%. An improvement, yes, but only by a few points. C'est la vie, and if you haven't seen "Lawrence of Arabia" or "Doctor Zhivago" then go for it, just have a bunch of snacks and drinks standing by, it's going to be a very LONG Saturday if you're playing catch-up on TCM. 

THE PLOT: When a college sophomore goes on a date with an older man, she finds that he doesn't live up to the guy she has been flirting with over texts. 

AFTER: I've got another tough one tonight, because it's all about the perils of dating again, in this modern, post-Epstein world and this one ends up making the same point about relationships as "Woman of the Hour", namely that a man's biggest fear is that a woman will laugh at him, while a woman's biggest fear is that a man will kill her. It's not right, it's not fair, but it's where we find ourselves. Look, dating in general is a bit like that sign that hangs in a factory that says "X number of days since the last workplace accident". You can date someone for a week or a month or a year, but when things don't work out or you get your heart broken, that sign resets to zero and you start counting again. Really the only way to avoid this is to never date at all, it's the "Wargames" method, which one character here actually uses - Margot's ex-boyfriend reveals that he's not gay at all, he's asexual. He tried gay and it was even weirder for him than being straight, so he just stopped. 

But Margot feels the need to keep going, despite her feminist friend Taylor's efforts to get her to stop, too. (Taylor gives Margot so much anti-relationship advice, one has to wonder here if Taylor would prefer to be dating Margot herself, but this plot thread is not followed.) Together they represent the two schools of thought - continue to meet people and date and put yourself at risk, or become so careful and paranoid about relationships that you basically shut the whole system down and make no progress at all. Experience creates wisdom, however creating experience can be hazardous - so it just comes down to whether you're more comfortable being alone or trying to make progress in finding a partner. Maybe that's more like job hunting, because you constantly have to decide if you're comfortable with your job or if you need to take steps to find a new job, which would mean leaving the job you have. Yes, of course some people moonlight on the side, especially if their main job isn't giving them everything they need or want. 

Margot attends college and seems to be majoring in some kind of anthropology or applied science, and she also works in a movie theater. Well, that's something I know about, the movie theater thing - she works concessions and so there's some interaction with the film geeks, and she notices Robert because he orders both popcorn and Red Vines, an unusual combo. Hell, I've seen people pour their m&m's over their popcorn, but you know, that makes some sense. Anyone who eats red licorice must be a psychopath. Anyway, Robert doesn't really ask for her phone number, he kind of demands it - that's probably red flag #2, and there are really a LOT more to come. This is pretty much a movie filled with red flags - Robert is 33 and dating a 20-year old, that's another one. He also claims to be a "cat person", which is not a red flag if it's true, but if it's something he's saying about himself just to gain someone's trust, then it's a definite red flag. 

He also invites Margot out to see a movie in the same theater where she works, but that's very inconsiderate. If you work in a movie theater, you just don't want to go there on a date or on your day off, you want to be far away from there. Just saying. But why can't Margot SAY, "Hey, I don't want to go to my workplace as a customer..." or "Hey, sorry I'm not into Star Wars" or "Hey, I don't want to see the fifth movie in a 11-movie series" or she could even say, "Hey, let's see one of the other movies playing at the same cinema, BLANK would be a more romantic film even..." But I recognize the difficulties of being in a relationship and not wanting to impose your will on the other person, if you think it's tough to pick a movie to watch together try figuring out what to have for dinner, that's another nightmare minefield, eating in, take-out, it doesn't matter - it's just hard for two people to land on the same thing. Eventually one person has to drive that bus, and one person has to be the passenger and eat something they're not crazy about or you just both decide to eat what you want, even if that's two different things. What I'm saying is, in the interest of not driving each other crazy, have a lot of solo meals on hand, and don't take it personally if the other person doesn't want to eat the same thing as you that night. 

Sex can also be a very awkward thing - and Margot continues to "imagine" things going different ways before they really happen. This keeps the audience here kind of on their toes, because we never really know if something is happening for real or just in her imagination. So is THIS the scene where we find out that Robert is a serial killer, or is it just another intrusive thought? Jesus, is this what it's like to be a woman dating someone, just always waiting for the other shoe to drop and the truth about this weird guy to reveal itself? It's exhausting. But Margot continues to ignore all the red flags and eventually there's an awkward kiss, so she of course texts Taylor to ask if you can teach somebody to be a better kisser. Well, sure you CAN but that would involve having an awkward conversation about the awkward kiss, and that's so awkward that she never gets around to doing it, so the awkward kisses continue. And then because she can't have the similar conversation about sex, you guessed it, there's sex that's so awkward and clumsy that Margot is forced to have an imagined conversation with another version of herself who is standing in the room and watching the awkward sex happen.  

Harrison Ford is apparently to blame for this, along with social media. Ford because he played two of the coolest movie characters of all time, Han Solo and Indiana Jones, and neither one is very good with women. Were you surprised in Episode VII that Han and Leia were no longer together? Really, you shouldn't have been because he's not a character who's good at commitment, and honestly neither is Harrison Ford - Indiana Jones also had a different girl in every film and probably cheated on each one, too. And yet THIS is who film geeks have chosen as their idol, their role model where relationships are concerned. Umm, choose better? Social media is thrown into the blame blender because we all act differently when we text or post than we do in person. Humblebragging when we post is a common enough thing, because we all just don't want to be known, we want to be envied. And you can't really express tone in an e-mail or in a text, so things can easily be mis-interpreted or confused. Therefore we could read texts with the tone or meaning that we want, rather than the one that was intended. 

So yeah, a lot of things go wrong here just because Margot doesn't want to hurt Robert's feelings. Taylor then sends a break-up text for her because she couldn't bring herself to do it. Everything seems OK until Robert then demands some kind of closure, or at least an explanation regarding what went wrong or what he could have done better. STILL she can't bring herself to give him any constructive criticism, even though that may be exactly what he might need to hear. He's not going to get BETTER with her or with someone else unless he understands that he was inconsiderate on some level, personally or sexually. But, to be fair, Margot is just as guilty when it came to being self-centered, like she never asked Robert what he did for a living and she took a long time to ask him how old he was, stuff like that. Instead she was distracted by the lack of cats in his house, after he said he was a "cat person". Her friend Taylor's experience with a man in her feminist online group pretending to be a woman led her to doubt everything that Robert said about his own life, and if he's lying about something small, what else is he lying about? 

There is a perfectly reasonable explanation for everything - like that stray dog that Margot finds at the beginning of the film and tries to bring into her dorm. Later she sees the same dog at Robert's house, and this leads her to conclude that Robert has been stalking her for weeks. But is it the same dog, or just the same breed? How closely did she examine the dog, at either time? A lot of dogs look alike, and the second time she was in a more panicked situation. Also even if it WERE the same dog, and I'm not saying it was, what would that mean? How would Robert sending a stray dog into her life bring them together? What was supposed to happen, she would find a dog tag or electronic chip or something that would lead her to bring the dog to his house? And then what, she would just start dating the guy who lost his dog? None of that really makes sense, but then again, him having a dog and calling himself a "cat person" doesn't really makes sense either, but neither does that make him a serial killer or bad person. Maybe that really was his dog and maybe the dog was really lost for a while and then found its way back home, but we'll never know, and that doesn't make him a bad person either.  

So everything is kind of doubled here, because we see Margot's imagined and intrusive thoughts, there are scenes where she imagines him as a serial killer and other scenes where she imagines him as a perfectly normal guy. It's worth noting that the actor who plays Robert appeared in the movie "Saturday Night" playing two roles, Jim Henson and Andy Kaufman. Sure, two tall guys with kind of the same face, and one of them was crazy in a good way and the other was maybe crazy in a crazy way. Scratch that, they were both pretty crazy because I worked with animators for thirty years and I can tell you that the only people more demented and messed up are puppeteers. I wouldn't date a puppet person, that's all I'm saying, I don't think they're right in the head. Same goes for movies, you don't HAVE to watch the same thing all the time, I can't even tell you the last movie my wife and I watched together, but it might be "The Greatest Night in Pop". No, probably it was the "Yacht Rock" doc. 

Anyway, this is another example of "reductio ad absurdum", where a story starts with a simple premise and then keeps asking, "what else could possibly go wrong?" until the entire situation is a hopeless and ridiculous disaster from which there is no recovery. If either character had been able to walk away from the situation, and there were ample opportunities to do so, then things just wouldn't have gotten so out of control. It's something to think about the next time you get your heart broken, how much worse it could have been - sometimes, if you can walk away from it with your dignity intact, then you're ahead of the game, even if it doesn't feel like it. 

Directed by Susanna Fogel (director of "Life Partners" and "The Spy Who Dumped Me")

Also starring Emilia Jones (last seen in "Youth"), Nicholas Braun (last seen in "Dream Scenario"), Geraldine Viswanathan (last seen in "Thunderbolts"), Isabella Rossellini (last seen in "Cousins"), Hope Davis (last seen in "The Phoenician Scheme"), Christopher Shyer (last seen in "The Core"), Josh Andres Rivera (last seen in "The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes"), Melissa Lehman, Isaac Cole Powell (last seen in "Dear Evan Hansen"), Jeremy Gill, Kyle Selig, Liza Colon-Zayas (last seen in "All Is Bright"), Donald Elise Watkins (last seen in "Fly Me to the Moon"), Fred Melamed (last seen in "Lying and Stealing"), Camille Umoff (last seen in "Mean Girls" (2024), Sammy Bronco, Max Jenkins, Zachary Mooren, Joanne Joella, John Scherer, Pearl Sun, Michael Gandolfini (last seen in "Landscape with Invisible Hand")

with archive footage of Carrie Fisher (last seen in "Music by John Williams"), Harrison Ford (ditto), Sean Young (last seen in "Cousins")

RATING: 5 out of 10 phone charging cords

A Family Affair

Year 18, Day 50 - 2/19/26 - Movie #5,250

BEFORE: I've reached the first half-century mark for the year, and really it feels like 2026 JUST started. My work on arranging this year's Doc Block is coming together, at least in some places. David Lynch appeared in a couple of the cast lists for the docs I'm adding, so I MIGHT be able to include "David Lynch: The Art Life", which is very tough to link to because he's really the only person in it. There are some other films I may NOT be able to include - even though I really want to watch "Secret Mall Apartment", it has zero famous people in it, so there's just no way. Maybe I can review it as an extra film, outside of the regular count, if it fits thematically. If not, it's just going to take up space on my watchlists beside a few other docs that can't be linked to, like "Made You Look" and "Jedi Junior High". At some point I may need to just delete the ones that don't fit, but that's a very difficult thing for me to do. Hey, I linked to "A Disturbance in the Force" last year, I didn't think I'd ever get THERE, and same goes for "Casa Bonita Mi Amor". Often the solution is just to add more films to the list and hope some connection will present itself. This also worked for "Claydream", "Animation Outlaws" and "Trainwreck: Poop Cruise" last year...

Zac Efron carries over from "We Are Your Friends". 

Here's the line-up for Friday, 2/20 - Day 8 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming. Tomorrow's themes are "Oscar Goes to the Laboratory" and "Oscar Goes for a Drive": 

6:45 am "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" (1931)

8:30 am "Dr. Cyclops" (1940)

10:00 am "The Time Machine" (1960)

12:00 pm "Dr. Erlich's Magic Bullet" (1940)

2:00 pm "The Story of Louis Pasteur" (1936)

3:45 pm "Madame Curie" (1943)

6:00 pm "Edison, the Man" (1940)

8:00 pm "Driving Miss Daisy" (1989)

10:00 pm "Rain Man" (1988)

12:30 am "Bullitt" (1968)

2:30 am "Grand Prix" (1966)

5:30 am "Wild Strawberries" (1957)

Of course I've seen "The Time Machine", plus "Driving Miss Daisy", "Rain Man", "Bullitt" and "Wild Strawberries", I kind of lucked out today with 5 seen out of 12, but I could be doing better. Now I'm up to. 39 seen out of 94, which is still only 41%. I'm in a holding pattern but I should kill on Saturday's movies. 

THE PLOT: A surprising romance kicks off comic consequences for a young woman, her mother and her movie-star boss as they face the complications of love, sex and identity.

AFTER: I had to start a new year-end category because of some of the films that made this year's romance chain, it's called "Best #MeToo or H.R. Violation Film. This covers films like "The Tale" and also the THREE films so far this year in which people have dated or slept with their bosses. Look, they KNEW it wasn't right, but they did it anyway - we should all know this is a terrible idea, whether you're the boss or the employee, it is just NOT going to end well. Even the big CEO's like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk know this is not the way we do things any more, not if you want to keep control of your companies. The power dynamic is just ALWAYS going to come into play, but this month I saw it happening in "Roger Dodger", "Babygirl" and "Spin Me Round". 

But in tonight's film, a personal assistant's mother dates her boss, and that's, well, legal I suppose. There's an age difference between them, sure, but that can be overcome if two people really care about each other. Still, the film is all about the impact on Zara when her famous actor boss starts dating her semi-famous writer mother. Why, it's almost like the two of them didn't take her feelings into consideration when they decided to act on their mutual attraction - but really that's only because they didn't. Zara spends the whole movie complaining about how selfish and self-indulgent Chris Cole is (weird, Zac Efron also played "Cole" in yesterday's film...) and how he doesn't think or care about anyone else. To be fair, he does date a lot of women and break up with a lot of women, and he makes Zara buy the same break-up gift for all of those women, which calls to mind the "gift baskets" that Derek Jeter used to send to women after they spent the night together. Well, love 'em and leave 'em, it's kind of nice that they get a parting gift when he's tired of them, right? 

But then, ironically, Zara realizes near the end of the film that she is guilty of the same crime, she's only complained for every single minute since her mother started dating her boss, and always it's been about the effect on HER, and how this makes HER feel, and that it's not fair to HER. She was so focused on herself that she didn't even notice when her best friend, Eugenie, broke up with Malcolm and she was RIGHT THERE in their house while they were being all awkward and stuff. Look, if two seemingly mismatched people manage to come together in this crazy world, we should always encourage that and not be haters, right? Zara's really upset because she's not the focus of her mother's attention any more, now that she's an adult she has to take care of herself, and her mother can do whatever she wants, she always could, except that she put parts of her life on hold to raise her daughter. Jeez, let her date a younger man, who cares, and also, don't just settle for that Associate Producer credit, get whatever else you can out of this situation! 

I say this as someone with several A.P. credits to his name - now, a producer credit can mean a lot of different things, it could mean you helped raise money, it could mean you donated money, it could mean you weighed in on some trivial matter you happen to be an expert on, like what computer a writer would use or how much a barista might earn. Or in my case, it means you did just about every little thing in the production of an animated film from typing up the script to booking the sound studio to hours and hours of promotion and entering festivals to then making sure the release of the film followed the Academy rules so it would be eligible for Oscar consideration. But you know, it's just an honorary title as a sort of catch-all, no big deal really.

For Zara it also means buying Cole's dogs special food for their birthdays, picking up whatever clothes or random items he might have left at a girlfriend's house, and of course doing his grocery shopping and tracking down the exact whey protein he thinks he needs to make smoothies with. But no, she's the entitled one, it turns out - after all he PAYS her to do all these things, by accepting the job and the money you would think she'd be giving up her rights to complain about it. But come on, that's not where we find ourselves. I have to believe that people like Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt and Chris Hemsworth all have teams of personal assistants, and then support staff for those assistants, in addition to trainers and meal planners and drivers and probably personal shoppers as well. And if those people don't feel properly compensated, well, they're free to quit and move on and take better gigs if they can find them, it's called the free market system. 

At one point Zara quits, which she has every right to do, and before long Chris shows up at her house to try and get her to come back, with the promise of that A.P. title, and that's when he meets her mother. AHA, it's all her fault, because if she hadn't quit, then they might never have met and begun their little romance. Zara can't even own up to that. It comes as no surprise to the audience, then, when Chris refuses to hire Zara's friend to do the rewrites on his next film, and he wants to hire Zara's mother, Brooke instead. Well, probably the codicil to not dating your employee should extend to not dating the writer you just hired, or rather not hiring the woman you just started dating, but I guess we're just going to have to let that one slide. 

Why? Because it's Christmas, and Zara goes over to complain to her grandmother (her dead father's mother) about her mother STILL dating Chris, even though she asked her not to. Grandma urges forgiveness at this special time of year, and reminds Zara that her mother is also a woman, and her dating again after so many years is a positive thing, and also that IT'S NOT ABOUT HER. Jeezus, the whole damn generation is so entitled, they all want to be stars on social media and tell everybody what they ate for lunch and where the best place to get a taco is and how they apply their make-up. We've not just created a monster, we've created a whole generation of them that thing the world revolves around them. Did you know there are like six billion people in the world and there's only ONE of you?  The world is big and you are really just very small and I'll pay you $5 if you would just SHUT UP for five minutes, and I make this offer because I know deep down in my heart that you just can't. 

Yes, I realize I'm part of the problem now, I want to post on Instagram about what movie I watched yesterday and what beer I drank on Friday and a really nice meal I had 15 years ago in Williamburg. But unlike those Gen Z'ers, I KNOW that I'm part of the problem, and I take responsibility for it. If you don't like what I'm putting out, then don't follow and don't like, I don't care. There should really be a "don't care" button on most social media apps, like not a thumbs up or a thumbs down, just something that says this is not relevant to me, and I don't want to see any more posts like this one, can we arrange that? 

Anyway, Zara eventually realizes how self-centered she is, and she manages to get Chris and her mother back together again. Sure, things might continue to be awkward, but at least her mother didn't move to the East Coast to teach and she still has her producing job. Now that she realizes other people have needs and feelings, maybe she can work on getting into a relationship herself. Or are we saving that for the sequel? Well, I can honestly say I've seen plenty of films worse than this one, including a few this month. I can afford to go a little easy on scoring this one. 

Directed by Richard LaGravenese (director of "The Last Five Years")

Also starring Nicole Kidman (last seen in "Babygirl"), Joey King (last seen in "The Kissing Booth 3"), Kathy Bates (last seen in "Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret."), Liza Koshy (last seen in "The Naked Gun"), Wes Jetton (last seen in "The Eyes of Tammy Faye"), Ian Gregg (last seen in "Term Life"), Sarah Baskin (last seen in "The Friend"), Zele Avradopoulos (last seen in "The Out-Laws"), Vince Pisani (last seen in "The Electric State"), Sherry Cola (last seen in "Freakier Friday"), Olivia Macklin, Vee Bhakta (last seen in "Senior Year"), Maxel Amador, Seoum Tylor Aun (last seen in "We Have a Ghost"), Gissette Valentin (last seen in "The Tomorrow War"), Brooks Ashmanskas (last seen in "Julie & Julia"), Lily LaGravenese (last seen in "The Last Five Years"), Robin Skye (last seen in "Beautiful Creatures"), Irene Kim, J. Boone Smith Jr., Sean Evans (last seen in "Happy Gilmore 2"), Kannon Omachi, Hannah Hleap, Carrie Solomon, Reno Reyes

RATING: 6 out of 10 bottles of hot sauce sampled on "Hot Ones" (it's a quick, easy way for a film to show how famous somebody is...)

We Are Your Friends

Year 18, Day 49 - 2/18/26 - Movie #5,249

BEFORE: I guess I'm in kind of a holding pattern here, I've got 30 more romance-based films to go, so unless I messed up the linking, nothing needs to change and I'm set for the next month. I've still got three days before my next shift so I guess it's a good time to get things ready for the Summer Doc Block, even though I don't know exactly when that will start. I suppose that's going to depend on how many films it turns out to be, and also I need to know a good starting point before I can figure out how to get there. Last year's Doc Block was a long one, 49 films in all, but I covered a LOT of ground and I cleared a bunch of films - the list of docs I did NOT watch dropped down to a dozen or so, which is now kind of making planning the next one difficult - I left myself only about 25 films to work with, and so they don't all link together yet. I need to add more films, and that means finding the docs, figuring who's in all of them, updating the IMDB cast lists if they're wrong, and I'll probably have to scan through 20 films this week just to get things rolling. Even if I can get everything to link up, it still might be a shorter Block this year. 

Speaking of documentaries, the TCM "31 Days of Oscar" line-up for tomorrow, 2/19, has a bunch of them. The themes for Thursday are "Oscar Goes for the Facts" and "Oscar Goes to Prison". I don't see what those two things have in common, so I'm not really a fan of this year's organizational format. But here are the films: 

10:30 am "The Secret Land" (1948)

12:00 pm "Festival" (1967)

2:00 pm "Freedom on My Mind" (1994)

4:00 pm "The Times of Harvey Milk" (1984)

6:00 pm "Inside Job" (2010)

8:00 pm "Papillon" (1973)

10:45 pm "The Longest Yard" (1974)

1:00 am "Midnight Express" (1978)

3:15 am "The Big House" (1930)

5:00 am "Weary River" (1929)

Well, I've seen ONE of those 5 docs, "Inside Job" - that helps, but it's still not great. I've also seen "Papillon" and "The Longest Yard", two classics that also had some popular appeal. So another 3 seen out of 10 brings my score up to 34 seen out of 82, I'm down to 41.4%.

Ayden Mayeri carries over from "Spin Me Round". 

THE PLOT: An aspiring disc jockey falls for his mentor's young girlfriend. 

AFTER: I'm definitely going to consider this film as mortar, it's only here to hold the bricks together and keep the wall from falling down. It's the second simplest romance film, which is a love triangle. The first simplest, of course, is just about two people coming together with no complications, and who the hell wants to see that? Even "Puppy Love" had complications... So the second simplest configuration is a three-point triangle, and one person has to be the focal point and make a decision between two lovers. That duty falls on Sophie tonight, who is dating James but then has feelings for Cole. Well, Cole is over at the house all the time, he's working with James on making better electronic music, so I suppose this was bound to happen. As soon as James' more difficult personality traits started to manifest themselves, Sophie chose Cole because, well, he was THERE. 

I mean, the heart wants what the heart wants, but this one doesn't really make much sense, I mean James at least owns a house and seems to have some money, but Cole is an aspiring DJ with no job at first. Oh, he's trying, he and his friends get jobs working for a real-estate financial company, but they're just cold-calling people with properties in default, to find people that Paige can then offer to represent, and there's a good chance that Paige is running a scam and is going to end up saying "There's nothing I can do" and offer to buy the houses dirt cheap and re-sell them all for ten or fifty times what he paid. Yeah, that's not really a good career, so Cole better hope this DJ thing takes off. Sophie, what the heck are you doing here? Are you sure you don't want to think this through? Bear in mind that Cole would never have even thought to use your voice on his tracks if not for James. 

Cole's friends are an even worse bunch of dirtbags than he is, so at some point he's going to realize those guys are dragging him down, and he'll never succeed or develop any kind of discipline if he keeps hanging around with them. Surprisingly, after they all work for a bit at Paige's real-estate scam company, Mason suggests they rent a house together, and of course he gets the biggest room. Guys, renting is for suckers, you pay every month and where does that money go, you're not building up any equity. If you guys came into some money you should try to put a down payment on owning a house, OK, maybe that's a bit out of your reach right now, but it makes more sense than renting in the long run, but you guys aren't really living long-term, now are you? You all just want to go to the club every Thursday night and party and do drugs and try to get laid.

Anyway, the first thing they do when they rent a house is throw a massive rager, and the house ends up getting trash - well, that's one more security deposit they won't be getting back - and worse, Squirrel ends up dead after an overdose, which really puts a bummer spin on everything. 

But remember, this one's here because of the love triangle, so let me just pick that one apart before I move on and forget all about this movie. Cole escorted Sophie to her college reunion party, I guess James was busy that night. James gets into a fight with two guys who were bad-mouthing her - I mean, that's pretty typical for James and his friends, it seems that every party in this film turns into a fight, sooner or later, but at least this time he was standing up for Sophie. Then later the gang of friends goes to an electronic music festival in Las Vegas, but Cole gets a call from Sophie because James ditched her. So he ditches his friends so he can hook up with Sophie in a hotel. Well, James, this was maybe bound to happen if you stood up your own girlfriend. Just saying. 

James cuts ties with Cole because of what happened, but then for some unknown reason once Cole finally has his track ready, James gives him another chance and gets him booked to play at another festival in L.A. - this does not logically work, it's like the plot points are in the wrong order or something. If somebody stole your girlfriend, why would you help them advance in their career, like the following week? That pain would still be fresh, so it would make more sense if James wanted nothing to do with Cole at all and it would be the easiest thing in the world to just NOT help him get the gig. 

We went to Las Vegas in October 2019, a few months before the pandemic - we took a break from our BBQ Crawls and did a casino buffet crawl instead. Final score was FIVE buffets in a week, although my wife was sick during the last few days and I hit one of those buffets on my own. We did other things, of course, like my birthday dinner and we went to the Mob Museum and the Neon Sign Museum. But we hadn't checked out what other events might be going on in the city, so our first night coincided with THREE big music festivals taking place across the city, one was called Las Rageous and was taking place right outside our first hotel - so yeah, bad planning there, it was very hard to get to sleep that first night. 

Directed by Max Joseph

Also starring Zac Efron (last seen in "The Iron Claw"), Wes Bentley (last seen in "The Four Feathers"), Emily Ratajkowski (last seen in "Lying and Stealing"), Jonny Weston (last seen in "About Cherry"), Shiloh Fernandez (last seen in "Cadillac Records"), Alex Shaffer (last seen in "Win Win"), Jon Bernthal (last seen in "The Accountant 2"), Alicia Coppola (last seen in "National Treasure: Book of Secrets"), Wiley M. Pickett (last seen in "Lakeview Terrace"), Jon Abrahams (last seen in "Boiler Room"), Molly Hagan (last seen in "Cinema Verite"), Brittany Furlan (last seen in "The Dirt"), Vanessa Lengies (last seen in "Still Waiting..."), Rebecca Forsythe, Joey Rudman, Kelsey Formost, Scarlett Benchley, Devon Barnes, Robbie Silverman, Timothy Granaderos, Raleigh Adams, Kerry Stein, Posso, Andrew Bachelor (last seen in "Family Switch"), Dillon Francis (last heard in "Trolls Band Together"), Casey James (last seen in "Elizabethtown"), Chiara Aurelia (last seen in "Luckiest Girl Alive"), Tara Beaulieu (last seen in "Think Like a Man"), Jan Broberg (last seen in "Darling Companion"), Shahine Ezell, Miranda Rae Mayo, Daniel Pinder, Korrina Rico (last seen in "Horrible Bosses 2"), Brittany Riley, Erika Wester with cameos from Nicky Romero, Nev Schulman.

RATING: 4 out of 10 pieces of birthday cake (consumed passive-aggressively)

Spin Me Round

Year 18, Day 48 - 2/17/26 - Movie #5,248

BEFORE: I've been on Instagram for almost 6 months now, and I'm trying not to get bogged down in it all - my main purpose has been to sort through my old photos and therefore my memories, starting in about 2005 and working forward. I got through about 5 years so far, that's a pretty good rate and gives me hope that I could catch up with maybe 2 years - but my feed is this weird jumble of new movies and old meals, road trips and cruises from the past, and also Comic-Cons. Plenty of Comic-Cons, but also things seen and beer floats consumed lately, so it's probably a good representation of what goes on in my head, where the past things still live even though they've been temporarily forgotten, I just need things to remind me, then I wonder how they were forgotten in the first place. Hey, at least I remember that I forgot things, as I get older I may lose that ability outright. Then someday I can maybe watch my favorite movies again, but it will feel like the first time, so I've got that to look forward to. 

But what I've also found is some people who think like I do, since I post each day about what movie I just watched, I now follow people who roll D&D dice to determine their sandwich, another person who does the same thing with recipes, and a third person who does that for cooking ribs. Maybe I should have come up with a similar system to randomly roll for my movie each day - but honestly I like the chain-linking system so much better, even if it's essentially kind of the same. Lil Rel Howery carries over from "The Photograph". 

Tomorrow is Day 8 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar programming", and my stats are already fading. The themes for February 18 are "Oscar Goes on Stage" and "Oscar Goes to England" - here's the line-up: 

4:15 am "The Great Ziegfeld" (1936)

7:15 am "Morning Glory" (1933)

8:30 am "Stage Door" (1937)

10:15 am "Gold Diggers of 1933" (1933)

12:00 pm "To Be or Not to Be" (1942)

1:45 pm "Kiss Me Kate" (1953)

3:45 pm "The Entertainer" (1960)
5:30 pm "The Boy Friend" (1971)

8:00 pm "My Fair Lady" (1964)

11:00 pm "The Remains of the Day" (1993)

1:30 am "Anne of the Thousand Days" (1969)

4:15 am "Young Bess" (1953)

6:15 am "Pride and Prejudice" (1940)

8:15 am "David Copperfield" (1935)

I've seen "Stage Door", "To Be or Not to Be", "Kiss Me Kate", "My Fair Lady", "The Remains of the Day", and "Anne of the Thousand Days", so another 6 out of these 14, that brings me up to 31 seen out of 72, still just 43%, no improvement today.

THE PLOT: A restaurant manager wins a trip to her company's gorgeous "institute" outside of Florence, and also the chance to meet the chain's wealthy and charismatic owner. She finds a different adventure than the one she imagined. 

AFTER: This has really been the most intense February chain in terms of sexual harassment, there was "Roger Dodger" first, and then "The Tale" (forget harassment, that one had statutory rape in it) and then of course "Babygirl". It's a very bad idea to sleep with your boss, or even someone else at the office, but I've seen it in movies again and again, and most people seem OK with it, like if they just managed to keep it quiet everything would be OK, only that's not how it works. The dynamic of power is always there, so there's really no scenario where sleeping with the boss could be a "good idea". Even in "New in Town" the plant manager falls in love with the labor union rep and in "The Last Five Years" I think Jamie slept with his editor, and both of those are still over the line, I think. 

Tonight we're presented with the head of an Italian restaurant chain, "Tuscan Grove", who uses this program of rewarding managers with free trips to Italy so that he can wine them and dine them and take them out on his boat, as a seduction technique. Not OK, there's no world in which all of that is OK, but since this film is a couple years old it's a bit tough to say whether this is presented in comic fashion or just as something like, "Well, this is the way the world works, this is just what CEOs do..."  I mean, why do you work to become a tech billionaire or the head of a large company, if not to sleep with whoever you want, and use your money to seduce the interns?" In other words, was this considered funny in a pre-Epstein world and now it's not so funny, but more horrific? I think the film recognizes this is not OK. 

Tuscany here stands in for Epstein Island, and Amber notices that even the men who were rewarded with free vacations are named Dana and Fran, so it's possible that they were awarded the trips by mistake, and the company CEO seemed disappointed when he learned they were dudes. To be fair, some of the other women showed up at the "institute" ready to party, either with drugs or alcohol or jokingly willing to cheat on their spouses. Meanwhile, Nick, the head of the company, is played by the same actor who ran the martial arts dojo in "The Art of Self-Defense", and he's essentially the same character - in-charge, overly confident, a proponent of meditation and self-empowerment, while also capable of being a ruthless dictator and willing to use his money and power to get exactly what he wants, all of the time. And maybe you feel like you want to admire him and follow him, but it also feels like he's full of secrets and can take you out at any time. (I guess this is why you cast Alessandro Nivola, right?)

This film is listed as a romantic comedy, and honestly I had my doubts when it started to look a bit more like a horror film, I thought maybe I was watching another version of "Blink Twice". But there was a fair amount of mistaken identity going on here, the characters all interpret what's going on at the villa in the worst possible way, and it turns out they've drawn many false conclusions. Mostly, because there IS something untoward happening in secret, it's just not as bad as you might initially think. So, OK, romantic comedy that's mostly not about romance, it's more of a black comedy BUT still relief to learn that there's a perfectly illogical reason for what's going down, and sure, I can see how things got mis-interpreted. But this still counts as a terrible vacation, hosted by a bunch of wrong-doers, even if nobody died or was kidnapped or sold into sexual slavery. 

And then, after it all, Nick STILL shows up at Amber's restaurant later on, with a terrible gift, trying to work his charming male masculine energy to whisk her away on a sailing trip. After everything that went down, he STILL thinks he's got a chance at wooing her. All that entitlement really shows, he can be called on the carpet for his misdeeds, he can be outed as a pervert and serial harasser and abuser, and still his go-to move is to use his money and power and charm to keep getting laid. Honestly, it's easy to draw a line from him to Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or anybody listed in the Epstein Files, no leopard ever changes their spots. 

I don't really like being "tricked" by a film, like here careful editing and some clever story-telling led us to think one sort of thing was happening at the mysterious villa in Tuscany, and it turned out to be something different, maybe a few different things. I appreciate the twist, but it also kind of feels like a bait-and-switch. The director/co-writer here came up with this plot after reading about a popular Italian restaurant chain (gee, which one?) that offered its managers a retreat in Italy where the amenities were well below their expectations. He then applied the principle of "reductio ad absurdum" to develop more ideas for the screenplay - that's a Latin phrase that roughly translates as "What could POSSIBLY go wrong?"

Directed by Jeff Baena (director of "Horse Girl" and "The Little Hours"

Also starring Alison Brie (last seen in "Get a Job"), Alessandro Nivola (last seen in "The Art of Self-Defense"), Aubrey Plaza (last seen in "10 Years"), Fred Armisen (last heard in "Fixed"), Tim Heidecker (last seen in "Nutcrackers"), Tricia Helfer (last seen in "Bombshell"), Ayden Mayeri (last seen in "Jackpot!"), Ego Nwodim (last seen in "Players"), Molly Shannon (last seen in "Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything"), Ben Sinclair (last seen in "Save Yourselves!"), Lauren Weedman (last seen in "Imagine That"), Zach Woods (last seen in "Downhill"), Debby Ryan (last seen in "Horse Girl"), Stella Chesnut (ditto), Jake Picking (last seen in "Blockers"), Andrea Bertucci, Valentina Chisci, Camillo Pardi, Valentina Oteri, Mileece I'Anson, Alessandro Bertolucci, Antonio Fazio

RATING: 6 out of 10 plates of fettucini alfredo