BEFORE: I've got just three days left before I start my Summer Rock Concert Series - or maybe it's the Summer Rockumentary series, with bonus concert footage, whichever. So it's my last chance to get all my ducks in a row, double-check my links and make sure that I didn't leave anything out. Up until now it's been sort of disappointing that there was one music documentary in my possession that I couldn't work into the chain - and it was "Whitney: Can I Be Me". I was willing to table it, but then I saw that one of the cable channels is running a documentary about George Michael, and one of the people interviewed in that is Cissy Houston, and that made me think that I could work that doc about Whitney Houston into the mix. It took some doing, but I was right. Had to shuffle my David Bowie films down the line a bit, so they'll be appearing closer to the end of the chain, but it had to be done.
Then the only other problem was that there was a break in the chain, late in the line-up, even though people like Alice Cooper and Dee Snider have been interviewed countless times, for documentaries about themselves and others - but I just couldn't get the documentary about Quiet Riot to connect with the documentary about Black Sabbath. Again, the solution is to add another film or two, perusing the cast lists on IMDB until I could spot a connection. Unfortunately I was relying on a German documentary called "Cum On Feel the Noise" for my linking, but it's just not available on any channel or streaming service in America, so I had to find a replacement. But I found another documentary about Ozzy Osbourne that connects to the one about Metallica, so I can now take the doc "Lemmy" and move it to make the connection between Quiet Riot and Black Sabbath. Problem solved, only now the chain is 50 films long - but hey, that's a nice round number. This rock music topic should keep me occupied for the rest of the summer now.
(There's a documentary about Queen that's airing too, but it doesn't connect to anything else, so it's out. Sorry, Queen. I'll wait for the biopic "Bohemian Rhapsody", which looks quite good, based on the preview.).
This all kicks off on Tuesday - but for now, Octavia Spencer carries over again from "The Shack" for another film about a really smart kid.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Book of Henry" (Movie #2,973)
THE PLOT: Frank, a single man raising his child prodigy niece Mary, is drawn into a custody battle with his mother.
AFTER: As I approach my 200th film of 2018, which will mark the year as 2/3 over, I realize how many things I'm going to have to total up at the end of the year. Like the number of appearances by child actors (McKenna Grace making her third appearance today...) and also the number of fatalities - this has been a rough year on kids, in everything from "Rabbit Hole" to "The Shack". Thankfully the genius little girl in this film fared better, it's just that her mother died (the circumstances of this, we find out midway through the film) and she's being raised by her uncle.
He apparently realizes that she has incredible intelligence and a knack for math, but he resists any suggestions of putting her in a special school. And the reasons for this, we also learn later in the film. The uncle himself is a former philosophy professor, but now works in freelance boat repair. However, we're not sure if there was some kind of incident at the college (another plot point I've seen several times so far this year) or if boat repair just pays really well, or if perhaps this is just the sort of place where your philosophy degree lands you, sooner or later.
But everything in his life becomes grist for the mill once his mother comes back into his life, and wants to take Mary, her granddaughter, back to Boston. Well, it is the home of Harvard and M.I.T., but eventually despite some very nice gifts, we realize she wants to raise the kid as a carbon copy of her own late daughter. (Which circles me back around to the start of the week, this is a plot point from "Jurassic Park: Fallen Kingdom"...)
If there's a point to be made here, it seems to be something about how in confusing custody cases such as these, everyone claims to be doing what's best for the child in question - but how does anyone make that decision, is it based on income, closeness of relation, educational opportunities, living conditions, or what? And how can anyone be sure that whoever wants custody isn't just doing what they think is best for themself, and not for the child at all? And what constitutes a "normal" childhood, after all? Isn't every child's experience different?
Speaking personally, I tested very well on math when I was in grade school, and some of my grade school teachers did give me extra work, or challenged me to complete my work faster than the other students. When I hit 7th grade, I was put in an 8th grade math class - and during 8th grade, I was sent up to the high school each day to take Algebra II with the 10th graders. But this caused problems because the junior high and the high school were on different class schedules, so I was always missing some 8th grade class to take advanced math. And then by the time I'd reached 10th grade for real, I took Algebra II again, so things sort of balanced back out - and in 12th grade, I took calculus and did all the work, but honestly I have no idea what it was all about, or any memory of it now.
Something similar happened with computers, back when my parents were looking to keep me busy and mentally challenged during the summer, I took advanced summer courses at a college in Massachusetts - things like chess, logic, problem solving, and even radio broadcasting. Computers were high-priority then, like learning the BASIC programming language was important. (This would have been about 1981 or 1982.) From there, some students went on to learn Fortran and Pascal, but I sort of hit the wall at the tender age of 13, and after a couple days of a computer course at M.I.T., I realized I was in over my head, and asked my parents if I could quit. I think I made the right choice, because those languages never became important for anything, right? A few years later, everything was all HTML and Java and I would have been wasting my time if I'd stayed on that track - or at least that's what I tell myself.
But what I learned was that in many ways, it's better to be a large fish in a small pond. I knew I wasn't the smartest one in my high school, or the kid with the best grades, but I felt maybe I was in the top 10. My school started a program called "Academic Distinction" when I was a freshman, and I found that if I took a couple courses on independent study, I could keep my music elective classes and still qualify for the program. I did really well on the PSAT and other standardized tests, even got a little scholarship money out of that, but the best move I made was to take as many Advanced Placement courses as I could - the bonus was that if you took the A.P. test in one of those courses, it counted as your final exam, so by the middle of May in my junior and senior year, I could pretty much coast until June. And then all of those A.P. credits counted when I got to college, so I could take fewer of the required math and science courses at NYU (I think I took just Intro to Psych and Astronomy, both of which interested me...) and then got to graduate a year early!
I think that if I had been placed in a more advanced school, I might have felt out of place, or worse, felt like I was in over my head. Instead I chose to stay in the public high school and I waited for my chances to excel at things, like standardized tests. I know they say you shouldn't hide your light under a bushel, or something like that, but there's another school of thought that says if you under-promise, once in a while you get a chance to over-deliver. That's how I learned to live my life, anyway.
As for the movie, it's easy for me to pick someone to root for - whichever custodian is nicest to the girl's cat, and lets her keep him. See, that was easy. Next case...
Also starring Chris Evans (last seen in "Avengers: Infinity War"), McKenna Grace (last seen in "Ready Player One"), Lindsay Duncan (last seen in "Alice Through the Looking Glass"), Jenny Slate (last heard in "Despicable Me 3"), Glenn Plummer (last seen in "Frankie and Johnny"), John Finn (last seen in "The Human Stain"), Elizabeth Marvel (last seen in "Aloha"), Jon Sklaroff (last seen in "Masked and Anonymous"), Jona Xiao, Julie Ann Emery, Keir O'Donnell (last seen in "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes"), John M. Jackson, Joe Chrest (last seen in "On the Road"), Kelly Collins Lintz (last seen in "The Accountant").
RATING: 5 out of 10 dioramas
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