BEFORE: I'm home today and it's snowing pretty hard in NYC, so I'm going to have to open up the closet in the basement where we keep the snow shovels, I can't avoid it. I got through the last storm just by using ice melt, two applications of that and the sidewalk and steps were clear within a day, but the snow's piling up for the first time in maybe two years, so I've got to shovel. At my age an hour of shoveling then leads to maybe two days of recovery time, and that's no fun. After I write this I'll have to suit up and get to it.
Nia Long carries over from "You People". It feels weird after a week of (relatively) rom-coms to go all the way back to 1993 for this comedy (which isn't labeled as a romance on the IMDB, but I got a feeling...) but that's what I have to do to set up tomorrow's film for Valentine's Day. Once that film landed on 2/14 I saw the connection and I didn't want to mess with the chain after that. So here goes, let's clear an older film off the list, one that's been on it positively forever. This was airing on Hulu a couple years ago, as nearly everything has, but it scrolled off of there, and now it's not streaming anywhere for "free", so I either have to pay $3.99 today or watch this one illegally - after paying to rent "An Evening With Beverly Luff Linn" I'm inclined to go the free route.
EDIT: I forgot that Turner Classic Movies was starting their "31 Days of Oscar" programming on February 9, so I'm going back and dropping them in post facto. They're dividing up the movies by category this year, so today is Day 5, devoted to:
Best Original Screenplay Nominees:
7:30 am "La Strada" (1954)
9:30 am "Mr. Hulot's Holiday" (1953)
11:15 am "Woman of the Year" (1942)
1:15 pm "It's Always Fair Weather" (1955)
3:15 pm "North by Northwest" (1959)
5:45 pm "The China Syndrome" (1979)
Best Original Screenplay Winners:
8:00 pm "The Great McGinty" (1940)
9:30 pm "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (1953)
11:30 pm "Gosford Park" (2001)
2:00 am "Network" (1976)
4:15 am "Princess O'Rourke" (1943)
I'm going to say I've seen 6 out of these 11, "Woman of the Year", "North by Northwest", "The China Syndrome", "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind", "Gosford Park" and "Network", so I can finally start making some progress, moving to 26 out of 56 overall, and up to 46.4%.
THE PLOT: A young black woman discovers that her father was a sperm donor, and if that weren't bad enough, he's white.
AFTER: This was a film that came about because Ted Danson was dating Whoopi Goldberg in real life, or maybe they started dating while they were making this film, I'm not sure. But there was something between them, and that led to Danson getting divorced, and that's a bit of life imitating art because his character in "Made in America" is divorced, and also has a girlfriend, but he's happy to cut her loose when she starts hanging out with a man closer to her age. I guess she was kind of wearing him out, as he's not as young as he used to be. Who is?
Anyway the whole premise here is based on a woman's choice 18 years ago to get pregnant via a sperm bank, and so her daughter learns by studying blood types in biology class that the man she thought was her father couldn't be her father. They don't really get into the whole A, B, O, positive or negative thing, but I think they didn't have to, somehow she knows the blood type of her dead father, and that's a little odd. I guess we can infer that the man she thought was her father was incapable of having children, so his wife took the initiative so they could have a child? It doesn't really matter, all that's important is that the sperm bank messed up in their record-keeping (not once, but TWICE, but what can you do? It was the start of the information age and mistakes were made...)
I was always led to believe that a person had the legal right to track down their genetic parents if they really wanted to, though it might take a court order to get the fertility clinic to open up their records. Zora here is either unaware of that process, or unwilling to take the time, because she'd rather bring a friend to pretend to make a donation while she finds the record room and somehow accesses their records on their Commodore 64. This took place before passwords were invented, I suppose, considering how easily she accesses their private files, or maybe their password was "1-2-3-4", I don't know. There's no time to get into that when we have to do another comedy bit about how bad Whoopi Goldberg's character is at riding a bicycle or following the rules of the road.
Look, it's simple, a bicycle is legally a VEHICLE, and subject to the same traffic laws as a car. You can't drive a car on the sidewalk, therefore you can't ride a bike on the sidewalk. But when they introduced thousands of Citibikes to NYC a few years back, they somehow forgot to find out if people understand how to properly follow traffic laws, it was (and continues to be) a disaster.
Time for a shoveling break - followed by a lunch break - OK, I'm back.
Anyway, my instincts were spot on, because this ended up having some romance to it, because those two actors had off-screen chemistry, so that often leads to on-screen chemistry, too, ideally. Sarah and Hal spend more time together after they sort out the fertility clinic mix-up, because they both want to spend time with their daughter - however they end up having the SAME conversation every time they get together, which is basically "I'm her father...", followed by "No, I'm her mother..." as if those two things are mutually exclusive, which they aren't. Or it's "She HAD a father, his name was Charlie..." as if nobody can quite figure out what happened in the past, even though it's fairly clear. Or is it?
Meanwhile, a couple of very nice older white ladies shop at Sarah's store, The African Queen, and she locks them in the store at one point, but they keep on shopping anyway. They end up fascinated by African fashion and art, which is cultural appropriation of the highest order - Sarah gets very mad at them at one point, but this doesn't bother them, they just keep on buying African stuff from the store. Could happen.
Also meanwhile, Hal films a few TV commercials for his used-car business, involving an increasingly bizarre and dangerous set of zoo animals, and they all go horribly wrong, he gets attacked by a bear and then there's a runaway elephant who chases Sarah's bicycle because she keeps ringing the bike's bell for some reason, and the elephant is attracted to the sound, again for some reason, even though this probably isn't how elephants work. And the commercial film crew has apparently never heard of editing, because they don't do any retakes and the ads then feature the animal mishaps, but these turn out to be a big hit with the audience, and the dealership suddenly sells every car on the lot. Who knew?
This gives Hal more time to spend with his daughter, and more time to spend with Sarah as she recovers in the hospital from the inevitable bike accident the film has been setting up since the opening credits. Hal also donates blood at the hospital, and so that functions as a de facto paternity test, which could have (should have) taken place much earlier in the film if these characters could only have gotten their acts together. But no, they were all too busy trying to figure things out to actually take the time to figure things out.
In the film a family is formed because the characters spend so much time together - I've heard several films use the INXS song "Never Tear Us Apart" as a romantic song, but I'm not sure it is, with the lines "I was standing, you were there" as explanation for two people getting together. Oh, great, you fell in love with me because I was THERE. That's pretty much what happens here, the premise that two people should be together because he already impregnated her artificially seems very shaky, and the complete opposite of fate or destiny or whatever. He was just THERE (or was he?). Anyway, it's not too hard to predict the ending, Hal wants more out of life and is finally ready to be someone's partner again and someone else's dad. In real life, though, the Danson-Goldberg romantic partnership lasted about 18 months, and at one point Danson did a comedy routine in blackface that somehow did not get him permanently cancelled. But that's a story for another day.
This movie was a box office hit, back in 1993, but it's only got 29 reviews on the IMDB, and since it's not streaming anywhere I'll wager that nobody's even watched it since 2017, when it was on Hulu. Yeah, seems about right.
Also starring Whoopi Goldberg (last seen in "Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It"), Ted Danson (last seen in "Creepshow"), Will Smith (last seen in "King Richard"), Paul Rodriguez (last seen in "Clifford the Big Red Dog"), Jennifer Tilly (last seen in "The Haunted Mansion"), Peggy Rea (last seen in "Cold Turkey"), Clyde Kusatsu (last seen in "Love Happens"), David Bowe (last seen in "Drillbit Taylor"), Jeff Joseph, Rawley Valverde, Fred Mancuso, Charlene Fernetz, Shawn Levy, Lu Leonard, Phyllis Avery, Frances Bergen (last seen in "American Gigolo"), O'Neal Compton (last seen in "Nixon"), Michael Halton, Mel Stewart, David E. Kazanjian, with archive footage of Shirley Temple
RATING: 4 out of 10 pieces of exotic sushi
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