BEFORE: OK, so I'm still not quite ready for back-to-school, but this movie has a bunch of kids in it, and those kids all go to school, right? So, really I've been on topic all week long, because nearly every film this week has had kids in it, I'm just not watching them attending class.
Woody Harrelson carries over from "Wilson", and now I'm sort of regretting my choices, because I just found out he's in the upcoming movie "Venom", and I'm wondering if there could have been a way to re-organize things to leave a slot open for that film, but I'm just not seeing a way to do that. It's bad enough I posted the review for "Ant-Man and the Wasp" 3 weeks after I saw the film, I can't just leave an open slot and fill it later with a review, that seems like a rule violation. So sorry, "Venom", I'm just not going to be able to watch you this year.
But, Academy screener time is coming up very soon, so maybe in the early days of 2019 I'll have a whole new crop of films that I'll be able to watch improperly. Of course, the pile of screeners at work (that I haven't seen) has dwindled significantly, so that means that the new ones should be coming in any day now. It's always two steps forward and one step back, isn't it?
AFTER: This seems like a film that just didn't manage to connect with modern audiences, because it's just so rooted in the mentality of the late 1950's and early 1960's, and that seems so long ago that it's probably hard for modern audiences to appreciate what life was like back then. Millennials just wouldn't understand why a wife was expected to stay home and raise children, instead of getting herself a career and hiring a nanny, like people do today. Also the fact that men would feel threatened by a working wife, and begrudge her any money that she might earn on the side, whether it come from taking in other people's laundry or winning contests or sweepstakes, because that would be a palpable threat to his manhood. Yes, things were very binary back then, you were either this thing or the other, a working man or a dutiful wife, and there was no in-between or crossing of gender lines.
(Also, people talked to each other on big, heavy phones that you could probably kill somebody with, and they were attached to the wall by a cord and GOD HELP YOU if you ever tried to walk around while talking on the phone, you could entangle your little brother or sister in the cord and probably kill them. Oh, and you couldn't do anything with your phone EXCEPT make a phone call - so no Facebook app, no tweeting a photo of your pork belly bahn mi sandwich and NO playing Candy Crush while you're waiting in line at Starbucks. Also, no Starbucks.)
And if you were expecting a call you had to WAIT ALL DAY at home for it, because there was no way to leave anybody a message or send them a text or poke them on Facebook to find out where they were. Fortunately, it all worked out because women apparently never left the home for any reason, except to buy groceries of course. Or to go get fire to bring back to the cave because the torches all needed to be re-lit. And it seems that generation of women couldn't handle driving a car, either, because it was WAY too complicated, what with first gear, and second gear AND trying to remember what a clutch did. (I still don't know...) If you ask me, men back then just kept telling women that they couldn't do things, and it seems like the women were only too happy to believe them, and leave all the driving and the banking and the owning of things to the men. What the actual hell? Didn't they ever read "Lysistrata"?
I know there are huge differences between my father (born in 1941) and myself (born in 1968). When he and my mother go somewhere, it's 100% certain that HE is going to drive. He still balances their checkbook, he controls the money, he does the taxes - these are all "men things" to him. He also loses his temper more often, I think I've seen my mother get upset maybe two or three times total, but with my Dad, any time there was a repair project to be done around the house, we learned to duck and cover if anything started to go wrong, because that would put him just one step away from losing it. So I've tried to be a better person, and part of that was re-defining what it means to be a man. I learned to cook before I got out of college, and now I cook dinner at home at least 50% of the time, probably more. I do my own laundry - there's just no reason in this day and age for a man to expect someone else to clean his dirty socks and such. When my wife and I drive somewhere, it's 100% certain that she's going to drive - mainly because it's her car, I've never owned one, but also because she's more comfortable doing the driving, and that's fine by me. When it comes to money I try to be equitable about paying for things, but she also earns more money than I do, and that's not a blow to my male ego. I held on to doing our taxes until two or three years ago, when it became too much for me to understand, with the health plans and the 401Ks, so now we take it all to H&R Block.
Anyway, there also used to be a time when milk got delivered to people's houses, and I don't know why this wasn't something everyone just bought at the grocery store when they got all their other food, but I promise to look into it. I remember we had a milkman in Massachusetts when I was a younger kid, but by the time I was a teenager I think they'd gone the way of the dinosaur. You'd think that with today's interest in locally-sourced hyper-organic food products they'd make some sort of comeback, but maybe they're working on milk and cheese delivery by drone or something.
And it also seems that you could support a family of 10 (plus an alcoholic father) just by entering contests and submitting winning jingles, which I'm not sure that I believe. I'd like to see the paperwork on this, that's all I'm saying. Maybe the advertising people back in the 1950's were just very lazy, like they couldn't ever finish a song so they had to open this process up to the public or something? Or maybe they weren't very creative, or some combination of both? Or maybe it was all a scam to sell more of their products, because you had to submit proof of purchase with every entry, so that means people were buying THIS brand of cereal or THIS brand of luncheon meat just to enter the contest, and then whatever prize there was given out was probably covered in value by the bump in sales, right?
Supposedly there were bored housewives whose only enjoyment in life came from entering these contests - again, you have to remember that holding down a job JUST wasn't an option without completely emasculating their husbands. But, really, wouldn't a second income in the family have been a better, more realistic answer to paying for things than mailing in contest entries all day long? What about the cost of postage, index cards and typewriter ribbons? Wouldn't that add up after a while? Wouldn't you have to send in like a thousand entries to each contest just to have a statistical shot at winning a prize? So that leads me to a NITPICK POINT here: what was draining this family's income more, the father's drinking, or the mother's contest-entering habit? On stamps and supplies alone, I have to think this was a cost-prohibitive venture, despite all the sleds, snow boots and pogo sticks that she won over the years. Then in addition to the proof-of-purchases, she had to go out and buy whatever product was sponsoring the contest, and spread it around the house, just to put on a good show for the contest promoters? What a waste of time and effort - I believe the family would have been better off if she just stopped wasting money on entering all the contests - it was all about her ego, anyway, right? Just to prove she could write better jingles than anyone else? For God's sake, if she was a great jingle writer why couldn't she get a job at an advertising agency doing exactly that? Oh, yeah, right, women didn't work unless there was a war on. What a crock.
Or, you know, another cost-saving measure, and I'm just putting this out there to consider, maybe DON'T HAVE TEN KIDS! I think they could have saved a lot of money that way. Birth control pays for itself in the long run, if you think about it.
Again, this was a different time, when a company could run a creative or skill-based contest, like to write a jingle or compose a poem that could be judged on its merits. No doubt, someone filed a class-action lawsuit during the 1970's and a judge ruled that all contests needed to be fair to everyone, and that no proof of purchase would be required, and no special skills needed to be displayed. This, of course, contributed to the dumbing-down of America, and where did it get us? We ended up with those "Monopoly"-based contests at McDonald's, where all the grand prizes ended up going to the friends and family members of the executives that were running the contest (it's true, look it up if you don't believe me...) I still can't eat at McDonald's because of this.
Me, I'm holding out for Jeopardy!, if I can ever get on that show I know I can make some serious green. I've been close a couple of times, passing the on-line test is a breeze for me (not bragging, just stating a fact) and then when I try out in person I've made it to the stage where they take my picture, and tell me that I'm in the contestant pool and I might be contacted some time in the next year to travel to L.A. and appear on the show. It hasn't happened yet, but I remain hopeful. The last time I tried out was in October 2017, and it was on the same day that I had to remove everything from our booth at New York Comic-Con, and I was exhausted, plus I had a cold and felt terrible. I still tried to maintain a positive attitude, look relaxed and happy, but I'm not sure I pulled it off. I'm going to keep trying, though, because I don't have that many bucket list items left to cross off - just that one, really.
One thing that the movie really nailed, though, was the depiction of life in Ohio. I spent enough time there during my first marriage, visiting my first wife's family, to know that if you live in Ohio, your number one goal should always be figuring a way to get yourself OUT of Ohio, to live somewhere else, anywhere else. Unless you happen to like bowling, chili served on top of spaghetti and rooting for perennially-losing sports teams, it's just not a great place to be.
Also starring Julianne Moore (last seen in "Far From Heaven"), Laura Dern (also carrying over from "Wilson"), Trevor Morgan (last seen in "The Patriot"), Simon Reynolds, Monté Gagné, Ellary Porterfield, Jordan Todosey, Robert Clark, Michael Seater, Erik Knudsen, Jake Scott, Susan Merson (last seen in "Phenomenon"), Martin Doyle, Catherine Fitch, Carolyn Scott, Lindsay Leese (last seen in "Ginger Snaps"), Tracey Hoyt, Dan Lett (last seen in "X-Men: Apocalypse"), with a cameo from Nora Dunn (last seen in "The Guilt Trip")
RATING: 5 out of 10 hearts of palm
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