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

The Photograph

Year 18, Day 47 - 2/16/26 - Movie #5,247

BEFORE: The safe move here would be to follow Nicole Kidman over to another romance film, but then my month would be too short, so I'm going to get to that other Kidman film in a couple days, I just found a way to squeeze three more romances here in-between. So we're not going to take the safe and easy route, which is fine because romance is a long and twisty path sometimes, or something to that effect. Maxwell Whittington-Cooper carries over from "Babygirl" instead. 

Here's the TCM "31 Days of Oscar" lineup for tomorrow, Tuesday, 2/17, and the themes are "Oscar Goes to the Desert" and "Oscar Goes Nuclear": 

6:30 am "The Desert Song" (1943)

8:30 am "The Wind and the Lion" (1975)

10:45 am "Morocco" (1930)

12:30 pm "Road to Morocco" (1942)

2:00 pm "Sahara" (1943)

3:45 pm "Khartoum" (1966)

6:15 pm "Them!" (1954)

8:00 pm "On the Beach" (1959)

10:30 pm "The China Syndrome" (1979)

12:45 am "Dr. Strangelove" (1964)

2:30 am "Seven Days to Noon" (1950)

Another wash-out for me, I've only seen "Them!", "The China Syndrome" and "Dr. Strangelove" out of this set. So 3 out of 11 brings me up to 25 seen out of 58, or 43%. Hopefully better days lie ahead. 

THE PLOT: When famed photographer Christina Eames dies unexpectedly, she leaves her daughter Mae a safe-deposit box that contains a photograph. Mae's investigation into her mother's early life leads to an unexpected romance with a journalist. 

AFTER: This film was released on Valentine's Day in 2020, and "Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy" was released on February 13 last year - so I guess people still go to the movies to see romantic films on Valentine's weekend, it's kind of comforting that that's still a thing. "Hey, let's stay home on Feb. 14 and stream something..." doesn't really have the same effect, unless you're going to "Netflix and chill" maybe. Nobody talks about "Hulu and chill" or "Tubi and chill", do they? 

There is a simple romance at the heart of this film, but really it's not that simple at all, it never is. These two people are affected by the past in their present, their past trauma dictates their actions, even if they're not fully aware of it.  Michael just got out of a relationship with Tessa, a girl from New Orleans, so sure, he's a little gunshy. Mae is still dealing with the effects of her mother dying, and with her final letter she told Mae who her father is, so she's spent a lifetime not knowing that, which has to have some effect on her dating life as well. Jeez, it's a wonder that any two people get together these days when they're all dealing with so much. But we all have to deal with hardship and loss and we have to be willing to try again, or else we're just running out the clock. 

Michael is a reporter interviewing people in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and he asks a man named Isaac about his photographs, one in particular is a photo of a woman from his past, who left him to become a photographer. Back in New York, he visits Mae, the photographer's daughter, who works at the Queens Museum. By chance the photographer had passed away a month or so ago, and they swap numbers and agree to talk more in the future. But after some time passes and Michael doesn't hear from her, he goes to see a movie at the museum to set up a "chance meeting" with her again. They start dating but the timing isn't great, as Michael is applying for a job in London. 

Back in the past, we see Christina, Mae's mother, in a relationship with Isaac that her mother doesn't approve of. After living with Isaac for some time, she leaves to pursue a career in photography in New York. When she calls a friend in New Orleans to share the good news about getting a job, Mae learns her mother has died, and when she returns for the funeral, she finds out Isaac has married someone else. Bad timing all around, really.  Years later, when Christina returns with her young daughter, things are even more awkward and Isaac is afraid to even ask if Christina is his daughter, so we all just kind of have to wait while everyone figures things out. 

In the present, after Mae goes to New Orleans to meet her father for the first time, Michael comes back to finish his article and finds her there, so they re-connect and after another wonderful day together, he drops the bomb about moving to London, and they agree that a long-distance relationship isn't practical. But going through her mother's work again, Mae finds a video where her mother says she wished she had put more effort into loving people - so Mae meets up with Michael again and they vow to make things work out. 

It's really a simple story, made a bit more complicated by the jumping back and forth in time - but I suspect that without that, the film would have all been just a bit TOO simple. Some secrets have to be withheld from time to time, and sometimes we the audience figure things out before the characters do. Well, that's just the way these things go sometimes. The important thing is that we don't repeat our parents' mistakes and it's even more important that we don't repeat our own - so get out there and make some all new mistakes!

Directed by Stella Meghie

Also starring Issa Rae (last seen in "The Lovebirds"), LaKeith Stanfield (last seen in "Haunted Mansion"), Chanté Adams (last seen in "Voyagers"), Y'lan Noel (last seen in "Slice"), Kelvin Harrison Jr. (last seen in "Assassination Nation"), Lil Rel Howery (last seen in "The Out-Laws"), Teyonah Parris (last seen in "They Cloned Tyrone"), Jasmine Cephas Jones (last seen in "Honest Thief"), Rylee Gabrielle King, Phoenix Noelle, Marsha Stephanie Blake (last seen in "See You Yesterday"), Wakeema Hollis, Rob Morgan (last seen in "Smile"), Chelsea Peretti (last seen in "Friendsgiving"), Courtney B. Vance (last seen in "Ben Is Back"), Christopher Cassarino, Dakota Paradise, Roy Jackson,

RATING: 5 out of 10 debates over Drake or Kendrick

Babygirl

Year 18, Day 46 - 2/15/26 - Movie #5,246

BEFORE: Well, I hope you all had a lovely Valentine's Day, we just stayed in and ate leftovers, and had some nice desserts - we'll go out to a restaurant tonight, when it should be less crowded, theoretically anyway. I'm only about 1/3 of the way through the romance chain, so there's still a LONG way to go, and there may be some ebb and flow here, it looks like things might heat up a bit and get steamy tonight. Dolly Wells carries over from "Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy". 

Let me just catch up on TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming for today and tomorrow - previously I was at 12 seen out of 23. 

Today it's Day 3, February 15, and the programming is "Oscar Goes Bad (Crime)":

7:00 am "Little Caesar" (1931)

8:30 am "The Letter" (1940)

10:15 am "Key Largo" (1948)

12:00 pm "Double Indemnity" (1944)

2:00 pm "Strangers on a Train" (1951)

4:00 pm "Rear Window" (1954)

6:00 pm "Bonnie and Clyde" (1967)

8:00 pm "White Heat" (1949)

10:00 pm "In Cold Blood" (1967)

12:30 am "Dog Day Afternoon" (1975)

2:45 am "Shaft" (1971)

4:45 am "The Window" (1949)

I'm claiming the middle seven here, starting with "Double Indemnity" and ending with "Dog Day Afternoon". I've seen the "Shaft" remakes but not the original, I know, for shame. But another 7 out of 12 brings me up to 19 seen out of 35, which is 54.2%. 

I'm going to calculate one more day to get out ahead of this thing, so if there's anything I want or need to record, I'll have a day's notice, and you will too. The topics for Monday, 2/16 are "Oscar Goes to a Family Reunion" and "Oscar Goes to Class": 

6:00 am "Our Dancing Daughters" (1928)

7:30 am "Edward, My Son" (1949)

9:30 am "The Magnificent Ambersons" (1942)

11:00 am "The Brothers Karamazov" (1958)

1:30 pm "I Remember Mama" (1948)

3:45 pm "I Never Sang for My Father" (1970)

5:30 pm "Auntie Mame" (1958)

8:00 pm "The Children's Hour" (1961)

10:00 pm "The Corn Is Green" (1945)

12:00 am "Blackboard Jungle" (1955)

2:00 am "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" (1969)

4:45 am "Good News" (1947)

I can really only claim three here, "The Magnificent Ambersons", "The Children's Hour" and "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" (finally, they're running the 1969 remake, which I've seen!) so another 3 seen out of 12 brings me up to 22 seen out of 47, which means I'm down to 46.8%. Last year I finished with 42.4% seen, so I was hoping to do better, but maybe not. 

THE PLOT: A high-powered CEO puts her career and family on the line when she begins a torrid affair with her much-younger intern. 

AFTER: This film was getting a lot of buzz around this time last year, I want to say, but then it only got one Golden Globe nomination and zero Oscar noms, so after that it kind of cooled off very quickly. It's a bit weird, a gender-swap on the usual story of a male CEO having an affair with a female company intern, it almost feels like someone was trying to justify that by making it some kind of female empowerment story, but that effect was totally lost, like cheating is cheating and you can't really justify the unjustifiable. If the woman is in the position of power, that's not really an improvement, if the woman is just as self-serving and self-indulgent as the typical man, and having a male intern trying to get ahead by sleeping with the female CEO, same issue, if it's wrong for a woman to use sex to advance or to blackmail the boss, then it's just as wrong for a man to do that. Whatever novelty was gained here by swapping the usual gender roles is negated by this being just as sleazy of a story as it was before. 

I guess maybe there's some form of fantasy fulfillment here, like maybe some people are watching this JUST for the torridness and naughtiness of it all, so this is porn on some level for some people, maybe. If you just want to fantasize about an office romance that's cheap and tawdry and very, very down and dirty, sure, that's your right as a movie-viewer. But we already HAVE porn for that, we don't need to stoop so low in a regular Hollywood movie, do we? Although it's Nicole Kidman, and she was also in "Eyes Wide Shut" and "Billy Bathgate" and "Dead Calm" and "Hemingway & Gellhorn" and geez, are there any movies that she has NOT been naked in? Is there anyone out there who maybe has NOT seen her naked in a movie?  And I hate to be ageist, but she was 57 when this film came out, at what point is she maybe too old to do nude scenes? 

Look, I'm not going to say her penchant for nude scenes caused her most recent divorce, because there's no way to know that, but it couldn't have helped that she was frequently out making movies while Keith Urban was out on tour making music, and you know, two people grow apart if they're not spending that much time together. Nicole's character here in "Babygirl", of course, has a much different problem. She clearly wants something sexual that she's not getting from her husband, though the film opens with them having sex. So, umm, what exactly is the problem? It's got something to do with her wanting or needing to be told what to do, like OK, maybe I can understand that? But if you can't communicate that in bed with your husband, the person you're already closest to, how are you going to justify getting that from a relative stranger? More to the point, how did that stranger know that was what she wanted, that the boss wanted to be bossed around? 

I guess we have to assume that Samuel the intern is some kind of mind-reader, or human psychology expert? He's somehow an innate dog trainer, what does that mean, or is that part of the fantasy? He ends up telling CEO Romy to get down on all fours, so there's that. I have to think this is not a serious drama or even a think-piece on relationships, it's just like the next "50 Shades of Gray", women want to see a film about some man who's going to order them around sexually and it's going to touch some nerve, some secret desire to be dominated, when that's just NOT the energy they're giving off in the workplace, where they worked so hard to become the boss. How is this NOT a giant step backwards for women's rights? I don't think "equality in the workplace" should extend to women taking advantage of male interns, sorry - and this can't be anything but if she's in a position of power over him and they have sex. Even if she surrenders power in the bedroom and tries to retain it in the boardroom, it's still not OK.  

Samuel keeps working his way into Romy's life, finding excuses to deliver things to her from the office. OK, maybe she DID forget her laptop that day, but him turning up there because he was the one tasked with delivering it to her house, that's a pretty big coincidence. Maybe Samuel DOES hold some kind of power over her, because he can get her in trouble with just one phone call to HR, and she caves every time he threatens to transfer to another job in the company that's not directly under her. Well, file this one under "It's Complicated", I guess. 

And things get even more complicated when Samuel starts dating Romy's assistant, and that assistant is the one who wants to blackmail Romy to get ahead. Romy is forced to confess to her husband that she's been having an affair, though she's light on the details regarding who it's with, how long it's been going on, and what she's getting out of the affair that she can't get from her own husband. Perhaps it's better that way. Romy ends up learning a valuable lesson from her lesbian teenage daughter, who's in a committed relationship with one girl but is "having fun" with another one. OK, so maybe that's all this was, an older woman "having fun", sure, let's just sweep this all under the carpet, it's not like everyone involved has been psychologically damaged and probably needs to be in therapy. You know what, just to be on the safe side...

Really this is a throwback to the erotic thriller films of the 1980's and 1990's, like "Fatal Attraction" and "9 1/2 Weeks" and "Indecent Proposal" (which all came from the same director, Adrian Lyne). This theory is backed up by some of the songs used in the film, like George Michael's "Father Figure" and INXS's "Never Tear Us Apart". But bottom line while I applaud the depiction of older women still being interested in sex, I think that if they have to drink milk out of a saucer on the floor just to feel something, I'm not sure they're doing it right. 

Directed by Halina Reijn

Also starring Nicole Kidman (last seen in "Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story"), Harris Dickinson (last seen in "The Iron Claw"), Antonio Banderas (last seen in "Bullet Head"), Sophie Wilde, Esther McGregor, Vaughan Reilly (last seen in "The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes"), Victor Slezak (last seen in "That Awkward Moment"), Leslie Silva (last seen in "Vox Lux"), Gaite Jansen, Robert Farrior (last seen in "Stop-Loss"), Bartley Booz, Anoop Desai, Mary Ann Lamb (last seen in "Rock of Ages"), Gabrielle Policano, Michael Kirchmann, Mareau Hall, Tess McMillan, Molly Price (last seen in "The Life Before Her Eyes"), Maxwell Whittington-Cooper (last seen in "Rustin"), John Cenatiempo (last seen in "Mechanic: Resurrection")

RATING: 5 out of 10 Botox injections

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy

Year 18, Day 45 - 2/14/26 - Movie #5,245

BEFORE: Renee Zellweger carries over from "New in Town", and really, it was always going to be this one for Valentine's Day. My chain this year got re-structured and re-purposed a couple times, but this one was always the focal point, I think. Partially that's because it connects to so many other romance-based films on my list - I've got more films coming up with Emma Thompson, Jim Broadbent and Celia Imrie, that's just a few of the connections that were NOT needed as links. So I had some flexibility just by putting this one in the middle and then expanding out from there. Sure, I couldn't put all the Nicole Kidman films together - OK, so I'll have to split one Isabella Rossellini film off from the herd. It doesn't matter, as long as I can stick the right film on Valentine's Day - that's what it's all about, right? I mean, I'm not watching films about Christmas in April, unless one manages to sneak by me. By the same token, I'm not going to miss checking in with Bridget Jones on V-Day if there's an update on her life to be watched.

I'm getting a late start keeping track of Turner Classic Movies programming, since "31 Days of Oscar" started on February 13, in the middle of the month, which is very weird. I guess 31 days of something can start any time, but a month is still a month, right? I guess since the Oscars will be airing on March 15 they had to count back 31 days from that, but why not just celebrate the Oscars in March, if that's when the ceremony is? OK, let's play catch up, here are the movies TCM screened on February 13: 

The first theme is "Oscars Go to a Fantasy World":
6:00 am "Cabin in the Sky" (1943)

7:45 am "The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm" (1962)

10:15 am "The Thief of Bagdad" (1940)

12:15 pm "Juliet of the Spirits" (1965)
2:45 pm "Lili" (1953)

4:15 pm "7 Faces of Dr. Lao" (1964)

6:00 pm "Brigadoon" (1954)

followed by "Oscar Goes to a Wedding":

8:00 pm "Father of the Bride" (1950)
9:45 pm "Four Weddings and a Funeral" (1994)

12:00 am "The Graduate" (1967)

2:00 am "High Society" (1956)

4:00 am "Smilin' Through" (1932)

I think I've seen only 4 of these - "Father of the Bride", "Four Weddings and a Funeral", "The Graduate" and "High Society", so that's 4 out of 12, or 25%. Not a great start. 

Today, the big day, Valentine's Day, the theme is "Oscar Goes to Paris":

6:00 am "Roberta" (1935)

8:00 am "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" (1939)

10:00 am "Ninotchka" (1939)

12:00 pm "Casablanca" (1942)

2:00 pm "Midnight in Paris" (2011)

3:45 pm "Gigi" (1958)

6:00 pm "Charade" (1963)

8:00 pm "An American in Paris" (1951)

10:00 pm "Moulin Rouge!" (2001)

12:15 am "Amelie" (2001)

2:30 am "Irma La Douce" (1963)

I've done a little better on these, I've seen 8 of today's films - "Roberta", "Casablanca", "Midnight in Paris", "Gigi", "Charade", "An American in Paris", "Moulin Rouge!" and "Irma La Douce". So that brings me up to 12 seen out of 23, which is 52%, a lot better than yesterday. I'll keep track for the next month, unless this bores me. If you want to catch "An American in Paris" or "Moulin Rouge" tonight with your sweetie, well, you could do a lot worse. 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Bridget Jones's Baby" (Movie #2,859)

THE PLOT: After jumping back into the dating pool, widowed mother Bridget Jones finds herself caught between a younger man and her son's science teacher. 

AFTER: It's been nine years since the last "Bridget Jones" film, so long that I had to go back today and re-read the Wiki summary for "Bridget Jones's Baby" to remind myself about what happened. Bridget slept with two men and got pregnant, then while she was unsure of which one was the father we had kind of a love triangle thing going on. Bridget ended up marrying Mark, who I guess was the father, and had just split from his wife? And then suddenly Bridget's ex, Daniel, who was thought dead, was found alive - so it sure seemed like they were going to be setting up another boring love triangle for the next film. Yawn...

Well, thank God, that's not the way the story played out - whatever repercussions there were from Daniel being alive again didn't seem to affect Bridget's marriage to Mark, because they had a daughter in addition to that son, and things were apparently fine for a long while, until they weren't. We rejoin the story four years after Mark was killed on some kind of humanitarian mission to the Sudan, and Bridget's getting dressed up to attend some kind of anniversary memorial for Mark, with all of their friends. The weird thing is, Mark still seems to be hanging around, because the memories are that strong, Bridget sees him everywhere she goes, and so we see him too, just to drive that point home. Well, this isn't a movie about ghosts, except that it sort of is, I mean, how else can they depict a character's absence, outside of showing him? I mean, you can't really film him NOT being there, so we kind of have to allow this. Well, we have no choice. 

In another flashback with a dead person - Bridget's father - she remembers that she promised that she wouldn't just survive after he was gone, she would remember to live. Also, her doctor gives her the advice that she should return to work as a form of therapy, which doesn't really seem like a medical opinion, but whatever. The writing's on the wall, what with everyone giving Bridget advice from every direction, it's time to go back to work and maybe even start dating again. Also, her old boss keeps calling her for advice on how to do stuff, so yeah, maybe it's time. 

Bridget meets a park ranger who helps rescue her kids from a tree, and really, that's as good a place to start as any - Roxster is 29 and thinks that Bridget is 35 (I'm not sure how old the character is supposed to be, but Zellwever was like 54). Well, why should she correct him, OK, I guess we're going with 35. The contact with a younger man leads her to join Tinder and learn what sexting is, and how to send emojis of the Greek flag and a duck, whatever that means. (she wants to "duck" him?) Bridget's daughter is eager to call Roxster their "new daddy", and I bet Bridget's calling him "daddy" too, but her son is still coping with his father's death, so he's not really on board. However, eventually the age difference eventually becomes too much for Roxster to handle, and he "ghosts" her - I guess he finally figured out she wasn't 35? 

Meanwhile, Daniel has a health emergency, and had listed Bridget as his "next of kin", even though she's not. Daniel's in a situation-ship with one of his many younger girlfriends, so there's no chance of Bridget getting back together with him, however she urges him to get back in touch with his teenage son, now that he's alive again. It's, you know, not a terrible suggestion. 

An encounter on Career Day at school with her son's teacher, Mr. Walliker, leads her to consider him the next link in her chain, and a camping trip where she gets to see him without his shirt on kind of seals the deal, but there are still issues to work out. He's a pragmatic scientist, for one thing, who believes that when we die, that's it, there's no heaven, no soul left behind. Roxster comes back at one point, so we do have a love triangle here for like one brief moment, but it's too late, Bridget's moved on and doesn't think they can overcome the age difference. Can she finally be smart enough, for once, to only date one man at a time? So after a winter school concert, Bridget invites Mr. Walliker out to join them at the pub afterwards, and he almost doesn't, because he's socially awkward and more used to dealing with school children than other adults. 

Fast forward a whole year, and Bridget throws a New Year's Eve party for everyone, all family and friends, except maybe no ghosts this time? She's in a relationship with Mr. Walliker, now calling him "Scott", and Daniel has been re-united with his son, Enzo. Everything's seem pretty settled, at least until the next sequel. If they were going to stop making more entries in this franchise, this wouldn't be a bad place to call it. 

NITPICK POINT: Did we really need to check in with ALL of Bridget's friends, accumulated over the course of all three previous movies? That's like a LOT of people to keep track of, I certainly can't remember them all or recall what their back-stories are. OK, it's great that the actors are probably also friends and they get sandwiched into one of these films every few years when another one comes around, but who really cares about all 47 minor characters? Can't we assume that maybe over the years Bridget Jones was a busy mother and maybe lost touch with a few of them? Please? 

On the flip-side of that, what the heck was Isla Fisher doing in this film? She played some foil character who was also a mother, but one who threw her kids' video games out the window for some reason. Was her character some famous person that Bridget once interviewed or something? I'm just going off the fact that when her kids ask her who that is, Bridget says "Never meet your heroes..." and I just didn't get the joke. What was going on there? Who was this character supposed to be, because it was never explained? 

Directed by Michael Morris (director of "To Leslie")

Also starring Chiwetel Ejiofor (last seen in "Venom: The Last Dance"), Leo Woodall, Jim Broadbent (last seen in "The Lady in the Van"), Gemma Jones (last seen in "Ammonite"), Colin Firth (last seen in "Hope Springs"), Hugh Grant (last seen in "Unfrosted"), James Callis (last seen in "Bridget Jones's Baby"), Neil Pearson (ditto), Shirley Henderson (last seen in "See How They Run"), Sally Phillips (last seen in "Blinded by the Light"), Jeff Mirza (ditto), Sarah Solemani (last seen in 'How to Build a Girl"), Celia Imrie (last seen in "The Thursday Murder Club"), Leila Farzad (last seen in "The Marvels"), Josette Simon (last seen in "The Witches"), Nico Parker (last seen in "Reminiscence"), Dolly Wells (last seen in "I Do... Until I Don't"), Claire Skinner (last seen in "Bridget Jones's Diary"), Anat Dychtwald (ditto), Ben Illis (ditto), Toby Whithouse (ditto), Casper Knopf, Mila Jankovic, Ian Midlane, Emma Thompson (last seen in "Tom Hanks: The Nomad"), Isla Fisher (last seen in "The Present"), Joanna Scanlan (last seen in "Kinky Boots"), Alessandro Bedetti, Elena Rivers, Neil Edmond (last seen in "Johnny English Strikes Again"), Mark Lingwood (last seen in "Into the Storm"), Penny Stuttaford, James Rawlings (last seen in "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel"), Ruth Gibson, Jane Fowler (last seen in "The Dig"), Ellie White (last seen in "Wonka"), Marina Bye (ditto), Rohan Berry, Seb Cardinal, Harry Goldsmith, James Goldsmith, Isla Ashworth (last seen in "Here"), Laura Bailey, Lin Yap, Rosie Holt, Naveed Khan (last seen in "Death on the Nile"), Kath Hughes, Oli Green (last seen in "Lift"), Julie Bartlett, Paul Hunter (last seen in "Cyrano"), Daisy Duczmal (last seen in "Barbie"), Zheng Xi Yong (ditto), Maggie Livermore, Sebastian Dunn, Lucille Ferguson,

RATING: 6 out of 10 condom choices

New in Town

Year 18, Day 44 - 2/13/26 - Movie #5,244

BEFORE: Let's get back on track here, just a simple rom-com that will set me up for Valentine's Day. No heavy lifting here, I think, just a typical fish-out-of-water with a mismatched couple that turns out to be a better match over time. Frances Conroy carries over from "The Tale".

THE PLOT: A Miami businesswoman adjusts to her new life in a small Minnesota town.

AFTER: We've got the fish out of water in Lucy Hill, a Miami businesswoman who's trying to advance in her career, she gets sent to Minnesota to automate a food manufacturing plant and also "downsize" (aka fire) half of its workers. But first she needs to get them to install the new machinery before they're let go. Gee, you don't suppose she'll be won over by their folksy ways, do you? It's a bit hard to take her seriously because at first she's so dumb that she didn't realize it was going to be COLD in Minnesota in the winter? Come on, she brought 17 bags of luggage with her but she didn't pack a winter coat? How can someone so business-savvy (supposedly) be so stupid that she didn't check the weather in the city she was flying to? 

And similarly did she somehow expect a warm reception from the people that she's there to fire? She thought it was going to be easy to trick everyone into working themselves out of a job? What the hell, if you're going to make this character a smart businesswoman, you can't make her clueless at the same time, that's just not going to work, but yet it's where we're going to find out comedy tonight. The plant foreman tells her that "Gopher Day" is a state holiday and his crew needs to get the day off, and she FALLS FOR THAT? Give me a break...

Sure, it's a different world, one with ice fishing and potluck dinners, snow days and fish frys and sure, there are going to be some culture clashes.  Lucy starts making a list of the people who cross her path or seem weird to her, and those are going to be the first people fired. I'm sure that making that list and leaving it where people can find it won't have any possible repercussions at all... In the same fashion, she manages to bad-mouth country music, pick-up trucks and beer during her welcome dinner, and these are all the things held sacred by Ted, the guy she thought she was being set up with, only he turns out to be the union rep, somebody she needs to deal with on an almost daily basis at the planet. Whoopsie. Yeah, when you're "New in Town" you should probably not try to piss off so many people, especially the local waitress at the diner. 

It's a long turn-around for her to appreciate this town's people and their way of life, and things get worse when she swerves to avoid hitting a cow in the road during a snowstorm and getting her car stuck in a ravine. That union rep also happens to be the guy with the snowplow who rescues her, she kept warm by drinking alcohol (not recommended) and then said some more things about him while she was drunk. But she gets back in his good graces by giving his daughter a make-over before her first high-school dance. She and Ted start a romance, only it's probably a very bad idea for the plant executive to be dating the union rep, right? RIGHT? 

Christmas comes and goes, and so does Valentine's Day (seasonally appropriate!) but before the spring thaw, Lucy's corporate overlords want her to close the plant because the yogurt line is not selling well and is going to be discontinued. So now rather than laying off 50% of the staff (or perhaps because she sort of never got around to DOING that...) she's tasked with laying off 100% of the staff. But instead of doing that, she goes rogue and has the workers re-tool all the machines to make tapioca pudding instead, based on her assistant's family recipe, which they also somehow test-market and promote in just a matter of weeks, all without corporate's permission. Surprisingly, the new product is a hit and Lucy is somehow not fired outright for disobeying her bosses. Only in a movie, right? 

In a possible similar fashion, the director of this movie quit halfway through post-production. It sounds like he has just as many disputes with his producers as Lucy had with her company's executives. So you kind of have to wonder what sort of product he was trying to put out, and how that might have differed from the film that did get released. The end result isn't terrible, but it's hardly one of the best romance films out there either - still, it does conform to all of the standard rom-com techniques. 

Directed by Jonas Elmer

Also starring Renee Zellweger (last seen in "Bob Fosse: It's Showtime!"), Harry Connick Jr. (last seen in "Basic"), Siobhan Fallon Hogan (last seen in "Daddy Day Care"), J.K. Simmons (last seen in "The Accountant 2"), Mike O'Brien, Ferron Guerreiro, James Durham, Robert Small (last seen in "Transporter 2"), Wayne Nicklas, Hilary Carroll, Nancy Jane Drake, Stewart J. Zully (last seen in "Malcolm X"), Marilyn Boyle (last seen in "Elvis Meets Nixon"), Dan Augusta, Jimena Hoyos (last seen in "The Devil Wears Prada"), Suzanne Coy, Ordena Stephens-Thompson, Devin McCracken, Leif Lynch, Adam Cronan (last seen in "They Cloned Tyrone"), Tom Wahl, Christopher Read, Peter Jordan, Vanessa Kuzyk, Matt Kippen, Ben Beauchemin, Kristen Harris (last seen in "Nobody"), Blane Cypurda, Brett Sorensen

RATING: 6 out of 10 scrapbook photos

The Tale

Year 18, Day 43 - 2/12/26 - Movie #5,243

BEFORE: I've got a few days off in a row, it makes sense, I had five days working in a row, and now comes some down time - this is the peril in having two temp jobs, there are going to be times when neither place of operation is open. The Brooklyn Nets are away on a two-week road trip, and the circus is coming to the stadium, only I don't work concerts or circuses just yet. The theater's going to be closed for five days for some repair work, so I'm not schedule to work again until next weekend. I could go on-line and try to pick up some temp work somewhere, or I can just relax a bit and catch up on some streaming shows, log in some comic books, that sort of thing. Most likely I'll slack off and then wish I'd looked for another temp job. 

It's been a weird week already, it started with the Super Bowl and it's going to end with Valentine's Day, with a Friday the 13th in-between. And then the Olympics are going on at the same time, I'm tuning in occasionally, for like curling and ice dancing but I'm not going to make. a regular habit of it. And then next week is both Lunar New Year and Mardi Gras - we sometimes go to a Brazilian churrascaria on Ash Wednesday because it's a day some religions don't eat meat, therefore less competition. But we went once on Mardi Gras, which is also Carnivale, and regretted it because there were scantily-clad dancers shaking their stuff a little too close to the buffet, it was a real strip-club sort of atmosphere, and that will kind of kill Date Night. We may go out for meat night halfway between Valentine's Day and Carnivale, you know, just to avoid the crowds. But that would be Monday, which is President's Day. Damn, all the holidays are running together, but I don't think a lot of people go out to eat on President's Day, so we may be OK. 

Speaking of the Super Bowl, I just finally scanned through the Pre-Game show, which was itself four or five hours long. This is when you'll see the next level down of ads, companies that couldn't afford to advertise during the game itself, so there were just regular, non-FX heavy ads for Domino's Pizza and Chunky Soup, some medications I've never heard of that only cure ONE thing instead of two (like Skyrizi does) and some of the cheaper mobile plans - for some reason every other ad starred Zoe Saldana. And yes, there were some ads that promoted the more expensive ads that would air later in the day, during the big game. So those were ads that were ads for other ads, this is the world we live in now. 

Laura Dern carries over again from "Lonely Planet".

THE PLOT: A woman filming a documentary on childhood rape victims starts to question the nature of her childhood relationship with her riding instructor and running coach. 

AFTER: We've got another problematic film tonight, which kind of puts this one under the "relationship" heading rather than the "romance" one. The main character here recalls a complex relationship she had when she was a young girl, one she wrote a story about, and the relationship was between an older man and his girlfriend (who was married to a different man) and let me be completely clear here from the start - any sexual contact between anyone under the age of 18 and an adult is wrong wrong wrong. Honestly I don't even see why I have to mention this to proceed, but I guess I do, at the very least I'm not comfortable even discussing this film without this as a disclaimer. It's the MOVIE itself that seems to do some back-pedaling on this point, and it kind of doesn't help that the director here is telling her own story, this is based on her childhood, so she's the one who seems to have some ambivalence over whatever happened back in the 1970's. 

Which is weird, because if she just came out and started with how WRONG that all was, we the audience would already be on her side, like WE'RE not the ones who need convincing that something very wrong happened, that this relationship was rooted in deception and illegality from the start, it never should have happened, instead it feels like the director made the film to convince herself that some very nasty things went down, though they felt beautiful and honest at the time. If anybody needs to be brought into the light and made to understand that bad people do bad things and there are repercussions for bad actions, even if those people seemed like extremely charming, loving and nice enough people. Yes, yes, of course there was an era of free love and a sexual revolution, however in now way was the freedom ever extended to minors. OK, are we all clear on this point? Even the director? 

Well, at least I'm seasonally appropriate tonight, because this is another film that premiered at the Sundance Festival in 2018, and that's a January thing. And the real-life sexual abuser (referred to in this film by another name) was a two-time Olympic medalist and a nine-time Olympic coach - OK, in rowing, that's a summer sport and the winter Olympics are going on right now, but really, I'll take any tie-in right now to justify this film being exactly HERE, like 1/4 of the way through a chain devoted to love and romance. I did have a chance to watch this last year, it could have fit in-between "Trial By Fire" and "Citizen Ruth", but I held this one back because I needed to hit Mother's Day in time. This film isn't really about mothers, but you know, "Citizen Ruth" was about a pregnant woman, so I guess that one fit and this one didn't. 

The film is about Jennifer Fox, a director of documentary films and a college professor, who is contacted by her mother, who found an essay that Jennifer wrote when she was 13, one that discussed being in a relationship with an older boyfriend. Jennifer dismissed the relationship as just something she hid to keep from upsetting her mother, however her mother knows (as we do) that regardless how Jennifer felt about the relationship then, or how she feels about it now, that in all ways legal and social, this was a form of rape. There's no possible way a 13 year old girl can be considered mature enough to give her consent for sexual contact, society came up with this rule at some point, and it's a pretty good one. 

The relationship began when she attended a horse-training camp with three other girls, and the woman who ran the camp, Mrs. G, insisted that the girls all go running every morning with her and Bill, an athlete and coach. At the end of the summer, Mrs. G and Bill reveal to Jennifer that they are lovers, even though Mrs. G is married to someone else - but sure, it's the 1970's, remember. Jennifer kept visiting the camp because that's where her horse was, and over time she was sexually groomed and lured into a relationship with "Bill". It's very likely that Mrs. G was recruiting many girls for Bill, and this all sort of feels like a Jeffrey Epstein/Ghislaine Maxwell sort of situation. If you wonder how this all comes to be, you start with a couple of very charming people who know how to find young girls who hate their parents, and things kind of snowball from there. 

The adult Jennifer starts to recall her childhood experiences, perhaps with rose-colored glasses, as they say, but after re-meeting some of the other girls from camp as adults, as well as the older Mrs. G, she starts to realize that maybe she wasn't as in control of the whole situation back then as she thought, and that these very nice people were perhaps deceiving her about their intentions, though they just claimed at the time they were all about love and being honest and in favor of self-expression and personal growth. Well, a pair of serial child rapists really wouldn't be expected to present themselves as such, right? 

Jennifer refuses, on some level, to admit that she was groomed or raped, because she didn't want to think of herself as a victim. Through imaginary conversations with her younger self, however, she gradually starts to understand now what she didn't understand then. Her boyfriend and mother keep encouraging her to investigate the situation further and talk to more people, because perhaps if she realizes how many girls the couple was taking advantage of, she can finally think of herself as someone who was deceived and stop thinking of the events as something beautiful and wholesome. Again, we were all already there, it's just like waiting for the main character to catch up and join us. 

Finally, Jennifer remembers having anxiety attacks after every encounter with Bill, and she's able to put the pieces together - then she "broke up" with Bill right before the couple had planned a group encounter with her and another girl. From there things could have easily escalated to Jennifer being filmed, or trafficked or even sold into slavery, but at least she listened to her body's reactions and ended things before they went any further. Years of denial or intentional mis-remembering of the facts could then be counter-acted with therapy as an adult, perhaps. However it's just as likely that as an adult Jennifer would be incapable of having a normal relationship if she were unable to resolve or understand the events in her past. 

So yeah, we drew a tough one tonight, it's never easy when you learn that somebody you thought cared about you and said you were special was a complete liar, and that they were only interested in their own pleasure and took advantage of your innocence. The best I can offer up tonight is that we can gain a little bit of understanding about HOW this sort of thing comes to be, and we can extrapolate from here to maybe understand current events a bit, especially the Epstein Files. Understand, not forgive or explain away. OK, I'm going to move on now and try to get set up for all these holidays approaching. 

Directed by Jennifer Fox

Also starring Jason Ritter (last seen in "Swimfan"), Common (last seen in "Fool's Paradise"), Elizabeth Debicki (last seen in "Vita & Virginia"), Jessica Sarah Flaum, Laura Allen (last seen in "Tulip Fever"), Juli Erickson (last seen in "Bernie"), Matthew Rauch (last seen in "Phil Spector"), Ellen Burstyn (last seen in "Faye"), John Heard (last seen in "Too Big to Fail"), Dana Healey, Aaron Williamson, Shay Lee Abeson, Isabella Amara (last seen in "Vengeance"), Jodi Long (last heard in "The Monkey King"), Isabelle Nelisse (last seen in "It"), Daniel Berson (last seen in "War Dogs"), Chelsea Alden, Frances Conroy (last seen in "No Pay, Nudity"), Tina Parker (last seen in "Men, Women & Children"), Scott Takeda (last seen in "The Space Between Us"), Noah Lomax (last seen in "Trial by Fire"), Grant James (last seen in "Factory Girl"), Madison David, Tarek Bishara (last seen in "Barely Lethal"), Gretchen Koerner (last seen in "Irresistible"), Jaqueline Fleming (last seen in "Contraband"), Jacob Craig Bullock, Logan Chadwick, Cadence Lee, Kristi Taylor

RATING: 5 out of 10 family photo albums