BEFORE: Julie Hagerty carries over again from "She's the Man", and it seems that after being a headlining star in the 1970's, she had a whole second (third) career in the new Millennium, playing older Mom characters in romantic comedies. (she's a rom-com-Mom?) Hey, more power to her, you've got to keep working to keep your SAG card and your AFTRA pension, I think.
Here's todays' line-up for TCM's "31 Days of Oscar", Day 12:
Best Original Score Nominees:
7:15 am "Carefree" (1938)
9:00 am "Night and Day" (1946)
11:15 am "The Enchanted Cottage" (1945)
1:00 pm "Of Mice and Men" (1939)
3:00 pm "The Old Man and the Sea" (1958)
4:30 pm "The Harvey Girls" (1946)
6:15 pm "On the Town" (1949)
Best Original Score Winners:
8:00 pm "The Red Shoes" (1948)
10:30 pm "Spellbound" (1945)
12:30 am "Now, Voyager" (1942)
2:45 am "A Little Romance" (1989)
4:45 am "Lili" (1953)
Just 4 seen out of 12 today, "The Old Man and the Sea", "On the Town", "Spellbound" and "Now, Voyager". So now I'm at 53 seen out of 136, or 38.9%, I've got to do better if I'm going to get closer to 50% than 40%. But hey, the last 7 days are all Best Picture nominees and winners, and I've seen the vast majority of Best Picture winners.
THE PLOT: On a trip to her hometown, workaholic Ally reminisces with her ex, Sean, and starts to question everything about the person she's become. Things only get more confusing when she meets Cassidy, who reminds her of the person she used to be.
AFTER: Sometimes you can feel it when a screenwriter protests too much - like one character here asks another if they're trying to re-create a "My Best Friend's Wedding" situation, trying to attend someone's wedding just to break up the engaged couple and get back together with their ex-lover. So that's a tip-off that this movie is ripping off "My Best Friend's Wedding", right? Like if there was a movie about a shark attacking beachgoers and someone said, "Oh, this isn't like "Jaws", is it?" then my next thought would be, "Oh, so this is just like "Jaws", isn't it?" Well, this is kind of like "My Best Friend's Wedding", therefore, but re-enacted by half of the cast of "Community".
I suppose that's not really fair, because it's really just TWO actors here that were in "Community", but who's to say there couldn't have been more? Show me a movie that can't be made better by adding Joel McHale to it, I'm just saying. "Community" was a great show that I watched live when it first aired on NBC, but my wife didn't watch it until it was streaming on Netflix a year or two ago, go figure. We each come to things on our own time - I just made a list the other day of streaming shows that I'd like to catch up on, if I have time, and it includes "Echo", "Ms. Marvel", "Titans" (after season 2), "Only Murders in the Building" (also after season 2), "Star Wars: The Bad Batch" (after season 1) and "Star Trek: Discovery" (also after season 1) because now we got Paramount+ free, since we pay for Showtime.
Oh, right, "Somebody I Used to Know", which (almost) shares its name with a song that was a hit about five (nope, thirteen?) years ago, by some Swedish record producer named Gotye. which was about the slow, mysterious and painful process of breaking up with people, and how they then change from people who are very important to us into just people that we, you know, used to know.
The film is right on track with several of the other romance films that I've watched this month, ones where people are engaged to be married but suddenly having second thoughts, like in "A Guy Thing" and "The Wedding Ringer", only not exactly like those, you know, because it's a riff on "My Best Friend's Wedding". Ally is a successful reality show director and showrunner of the popular series "Dessert Island" (in which, apparently, contestants live on an island where they bake desserts competitively and also date each other, and WHY DOES THIS SHOW NOT EXIST ALREADY, and how soon can I watch this IRL?). However, the third season of the show, has not performed as well as the first two, and after learning the show is about to be cancelled, Ally flies to Washington state to spend a week with her mother in her hometown.
(She brings her cat with her, which I found a little odd, like when we go on vacation for a weekend or even a full week, we hire a cat-sitter, I don't think our cats would let us put them in a cat carrier, let alone fly with them on a plane, they'd be freaking out the entire time. But maybe she took the time to train her cat better, we just can't be bothered.)
She runs into her ex-boyfriend, Sean, in Leavenworth and they spend a whole day going to various German pubs and restaurants as they catch up - that sure looked like fun. But after Ally suggests they fool around, Sean says it wouldn't be a good idea. When Ally visits his house to apologize, she finds his family is there and there's a party for Sean's upcoming wedding. Now Ally is confused, why did Sean hang out with her for a whole day, was it just to remember the past times they shared, or is there a chance she could mess with the wedding plans and get back together with Sean?
Ally works her way into one wedding weekend event after another, including the last performance of the band that Sean's fiancée, Cassidy, has been in for years. Apparently she's giving up touring and playing music with her friends to devote herself to the marriage, and Ally sees in this situation a reflection of the choice she didn't make years ago, when she chose her career making documentaries and moving to L.A. over staying in Washington with Sean, and giving up on her dreams.
Ally then does a bad thing, it's done with the intention of driving Sean and Cassidy further apart, which theoretically could bring Sean and Ally closer together again. It also plays on the fact that there are things that Sean and Cassidy are not discussing, but probably should. Yeah, sure, the band thing is important, but what about the fact that Cassidy has dated mostly women up to this point, and is now marrying a man? That seems much more important to me, but it kinds of gets glossed over here, probably out of fear of saying anything negative about LGBTQ+ issues, like it seems the writer doesn't even want to GO there, but then why make the character this back-story in the first place? Yes, by all means, Cassidy should talk to Sean about her desire to keep playing music, to keep being HERSELF if this is a vital part of herself. But again, what about dating women, isn't that a part of herself, too, and a part of her story? What kind of marriage are they going to have, will she still want to date women, or be able to date women? The silence on this point is deafening to me, but maybe that's just me.
Yes, Ally tried to drive this engaged couple apart, for selfish reasons - but her actions also got them talking about the things they weren't talking about, and in a way that drove them closer together. So I guess the plan backfired, but Ally realized what she did was wrong, so in the end if all kind of worked out? Maybe? Jeez, relationships these days are more complicated than ever, the rom-coms from 2003 and 2008 didn't touch on these sort of issues. It was a different time back then.
Anyway, Ally eventually realizes that her presence at the wedding weekend was causing more harm than good, so she patched up the couple as best as she could and took off, back to her mother's place, where Mom's getting it on with her old third grade teacher. Umm, great, you go, Mom, live your best life. The good news is that Ally's assistant managed to talk to another network about getting "Dessert Island" picked up for another season - TV shows change networks all the time, don't they? Like "American Idol" used to be on Fox, now it's on ABC - and, well, that's about it, but it has happened before. Anyway, Ally also wants to make documentary shows about nudists, but it's a little unclear which networks could even air them - I guess there's that "Naked & Afraid" show, right? Is that still a thing? But for the love of God, what is the clever name of this nudism show that Ally is directing? "Unclothed and Personal"? "The Daily Nudes"? "Grin and Bare It"?
Also starring Alison Brie (last seen in "Promising Young Woman"), Jay Ellis (last seen in "Escape Room: Tournament of Champions"), Kiersey Clemons (last seen in "The Flash"), Danny Pudi (last seen in "Star Trek Beyond"), Olga Merediz (last seen in "In the Heights"), Haley Joel Osment (last seen in "Spielberg"), Ayden Mayeri (last seen in "Confess, Fletch"), Fabi Reyna, Marian Li-Pino, Ted Rooney (last seen in "Legally Blonde"), Amy Sedaris (last seen in "Handsome: A Netflix Mystery Movie"), Sam Richardson (last seen in "Senior Year"), Zoë Chao (ditto), Kelvin Yu (last seen in "Elizabethtown"), Evan Jonigkeit (last seen in "Tallulah"), Rochelle Maria Muzquiz, Loudon McCleery, Phillip Ray Guevara, Hanna Barefoot (last seen in "King Richard"), Leigh Guyer, Rachel Pate, Jeb Berrier (last seen in "I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore"), T'ai Hartley, Erika Vetter, Nick Bryant, Jeanine Jackson (last seen in "Fearless"), Anais Genevieve, Nevaeh England, Mark Pettet.
RATING: 6 out of 10 strings of icicles hanging in the bar (year-round)
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