BEFORE: Jennifer Lopez carries over from "The Boy Next Door" and it's Leap Day - an extra day, something a bit unexpected and un-planned for maybe is in store, originally I thought maybe that should be "Gigli", but I've decided against watching that one, because i need to cut the list down. Again. This one still feels like it might be on theme for the "extra and unplanned" day, though.
Here's the format breakdown for movies watched in February:
5 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Boys and Girls, I Could Never Be Your Woman, The Wedding Ringer, A Guy Thing, I Don't Know How She Does It
6 Movies watched on cable (not saved): Over Her Dead Body, Loser, Moonlight and Valentino, Sex Drive, The Answer Man, The Boy Next Door
5 watched on Netflix: The Wrong Missy, You People, A Walk to Remember, She's the Man, Your Place or Mine
1 watched on iTunes: An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn
4 watched on Amazon Prime: People Places Things, Think Like a Man, Think Like a Man Too, Somebody I Used to Know
2 watched on Hulu: Together Together, The Last Song
4 watched on Amazon Prime: People Places Things, Think Like a Man, Think Like a Man Too, Somebody I Used to Know
2 watched on Hulu: Together Together, The Last Song
1 watched on Paramount+: The Back-up Plan
1 watched on Peacock: Bros
1 watched on Pluto TV: LOL
1 watched on Roku: Alex & Emma
2 watched on a random site: Made in America, Whatever It Takes
29 TOTAL
And here's todays' line-up for TCM's "31 Days of Oscar", Day 21:
Best Director Nominees:
5:30 am "Anna Christie" (1930)
7:00 am "Lady for a Day" (1933)
8:45 am "The Southerner" (1945)
10:30 am "Bad Day at Black Rock" (1955)
12:00 pm "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" (1948)
2:15 pm "Never on Sunday" (1960)
4:00 pm "Witness for the Prosecution" (1957)
6:15 pm "Midnight in Paris" (2011)
Best Director Winners:
8:00 pm "The Quiet Man" (1952)
10:30 pm "Giant" (1956)
2:00 am "All Quiet on the Western Front" (1930)
4:30 am "The Divine Lady" (1929)
OK, 5 seen out of 12 today. "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre", "Witness for the Prosecution", "Midnight in Paris", "Giant" and "All Quiet on the Western Front". That's something, right? This brings me to 84 seen out of 240, up to 35%. I'm not sure how my percentage can go up at this point if I've seen less than half of today's films, but that's how math works, I guess. Still with just 10 days left in the countdown I don't see how I'm going to get back to 40%.
THE PLOT: A woman conceives twins through artificial insemination, then meets the man of her dreams later that same day.
AFTER: There's been some debate raging in our country about when life begins, and for many years it seemed like maybe we'd settled this, landing on the notion that life begins with birth, but then others saying life begins at conception, and now things are all fuzzy again. (We still count how old someone is from the day they were born, and we still have birthdays and not conception-days, so I still have hope that this planet won't get over-populated and good sense can prevail in the cases of rape, incest and protecting the health of at risk pregnant mothers).
The latest wrinkle concerns frozen embryos in Alabama, which the state courts have decided are children and therefore alive, despite being frozen and incapable of breathing, thinking or functioning in their current state. Because they're embryos. Somebody has confused the potential for life with life itself, it seems, and now the whole process of in-vitro fertilization, in which the extra embryos are destroyed at some point, is tantamount to murder, and any clinic that was helpful in creating life is now, in the eyes of the court, equivalent to a death camp.
So here's a wacky thought, maybe take a look at the science involved and learn what an embryo really is, instead of letting God, or your notion of God, or someone who says they speak for God (which is ridiculous if you just think about it) determine what an embryo is and whether it's allive, or just has the potential to be alive in the future, because those two states are different. We don't look at a ball of dough, a can of tomato sauce and a package of mozzarella cheese and say, "Look, it's a pizza!" No, those things are just the ingredients, together they have the POTENTIAL to be a pizza, but it's going to take some time and some work and an oven before you can truly call that a pizza - until then, if the cheese was moldy you'd probably want to throw it out, and sure, then maybe you're not eating pizza for dinner, because you've thrown away a vital pizza ingredient, but you didn't throw away a pizza, you just threw out some bad cheese. Can we get some clarity on this point, please?
My point is that you can't have it both ways - if you don't like abortion and you want to outlaw that, we've got a conflict there between living in a free society where we have a separation of church and state and a group of people thinking that they have to regulate a process because it's what God wants, allegedly. But if you want to regulate abortion, then you also have to regulate IVF, which is only fair, because you've decided that messing with reproduction is messing with God's plan for us. We're either living in a free country or in "The Handmaid's Tale", and I have hopes that the legal system will eventually work this all out, only it may take an election year or two, and right now it could still go either way. Look, I don't have kids and I'm not likely to have kids, so I don't have a dog in this fight, but I'd like very much for humans as a species to not have so many kids that we break the planet any more than we already have.
OK, rant over, let's get to the romance movie. Really what we're dealing with here is bad timing, put to use for comic effect in a rom-com. Zoe has dated "many, many" guys over the last five years, but for some reason has never found "the one" that she wants to marry and/or have a family with. Umm, look, I kind of see the problem here, it's probably not a LACK of male partners, probably exactly the opposite. I saw Albert Brooks interviewed on the Bill Maher show, promoting the documentary made about his life and career, and they ran what he said about how he found the love of his life. Very simply, he stopped looking - and I love this quote, it's SO Albert Brooks. So I think the problem here is that Zoe just never stopped looking, so maybe she found the "right guy" three or four times, she just never stopped looking. Or she's secretly afraid of commitment, who can say but I'm going to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that she just forgot to settle, and settling is very important, because then you stop looking and you can maybe accomplish something. Marriage is like a job, and at some point you need to stop job-hunting and actually, you know, maybe do some work.
So she decides to have a baby on her own - fortunately she had a few jobs in the tech industry or something, before she left that career to own and run a pet store. But she's apparently got some money saved up, enough to pay for the sperm bank and the IVF treatments, the doctor bills, pregnancy clothes, baby supplies, child-care and schools, hopefully. I know, I know it's fiction and we shouldn't be concerned about this, but fiction still needs to reflect the real world and all of its challenges. I still need to believe that these characters can pay their bills on a monthly basis and afford the NYC apartments that I see them living in, otherwise, what exactly are we doing, Hollywood?
Anyway, she meets an attractive man as they fight over a cab on a rainy day, as you do, and then she sees him again, selling his cheese at a Farmer's Market. Seems like fate or kismet that they run into each other again and again, but it happens, especially if you hang out in the same Manhattan neighborhoods each day or ride the same subway trains or hail cabs from the same corner, again and again. So let's assume that the Farmer's Market is somewhere near her pet store and we'll work forward from there, OK? And then once you notice somebody and you recognize their face, you're more likely to notice them again if you see them again.
They meet cute and they start dating, but she doesn't QUITE know how to tell him that she might be pregnant. Then things get overly confused when her dog breaks the pregnancy tester and for some reason eats the test strip with the plus sign on it - this was all very wonky, and the plot of a movie really shouldn't depend on whether a handicapped dog in one of those little doggie wheelchairs throws up or not.
But there's a lot of vomiting in this movie, again, hardly ideal, but that's how we know Zoe is pregnant for sure, she throws up, because isn't that what pregnant women do? J. Lo's character throws up when she smells seafood, she throws up when she's nervous, she throws up at the drop of a hat - so if watching a beautiful woman is somehow your kink, man, are you in luck here. The bigger problem, of course, is how do you tell the man you're dating that you're pregnant, by anonymous sperm donor, and then what are the consequences of that? I would say that of course, honesty is the best policy and she should of course tell him sooner rather than later, but really, what's the harm? It's not like he's going to figure out that she's pregnant in a few months, maybe he'll just think she's gaining weight and throwing up a lot. JK.
Seriously, though, there was perhaps a temptation to go down the road of, "Well, just don't tell him, allow him to think that it's HIS baby, and she got pregnant right after they slept together for the first time." Well, that would be wrong, so thankfully the movie doesn't even flirt with going down that road. She does tell him the truth, and sure, there's fall-out from that, they split up briefly but then they decide they'd rather be together than apart, and Stan has to decide if he wants to be along on this crazy ride. Besides, he lied to her, too, he didn't mention that he's still in night school and trying to make something of himself - after he'd been married, opened up a Vermont inn with his wife, and then the business failed and he got divorced too. He now runs his parents' farm and he's making the best of that by crafting artisanal cheese, which is NOT a terrible plan. But he wants to run his own cheese and produce shop, unfortunately he's more a of a planner than a doer - well, you do have to dream it before you can do it.
The rest of the film is just more weird complications that have to be endured and dealt with - like the Single Moms group invites them to a live at-home birth that involves a swimming pool (this was apparently a trend back around 2010) and what they witness SHOULD have been enough to convince anyone to give birth in a more reasonable hospital-like setting. Zoe tries to buy a double-stroller for the twins and more baby clothes than they would ever need, but then the stroller was too big or something, so Stan went to the stroller store, and all of THOSE strollers were too big, too - I don't know, this part was really unclear and he ended up commissioning a custom-made stroller from the sales clerk, and that stroller was somehow better? Again, very unclear, if there was a better way to make strollers, why didn't the stroller store sell them that way? Similarly, if there was a benefit to Zoe sleeping with the special pillow, then why did Stan throw it in the dumpster? I get that he was jealous that she was snuggling with the pillow instead of him, but it's either "sleep pillow is good" or "sleep pillow is bad", the film needed to pick one. Is it "home birth good" or "home birth bad"? Again, pick one.
I don't really care for all the pregnancy stuff - I'm not in this film's target market. I came here just for the romance part of the story, all the rest is just mindless noise. I'm glad these two were able to work things out and find a way to overcome bad timing and stay together, but really, how's this going to work if we've calculated out how much two babies cost to raise and the film freely admits there's just not enough money in the world to get that done? So, therefore, it's impossible to pay for two kids and I'm wondering why anybody in the world would even attempt it. Thanks, you're justifying my lifestyle and my decision to stay out of that demographic.
Also starring Alex O'Loughlin (last seen in "The Holiday"), Michaela Watkins (last seen in "Ibiza: Love Drunk"), Eric Christian Olsen (last seen in "Cellular"), Anthony Anderson (last seen in "You People"), Noureen DeWulf (last seen in "Endings, Beginnings"), Melissa McCarthy (last seen in "The Little Mermaid" (2023)), Linda Lavin (last seen in "Betty White: First Lady of Television"), Tom Bosley (last seen in "Divorce American Style"), Maribeth Monroe (last seen in "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle"), Danneel Harris Ackles (last seen in "Still Waiting..."), Robert Klein (last seen in "Tales from the Darkside: The Movie"), Carlease Burke (last seen in "Save the Date"), Amy Block (last seen in "Keeping Up with the Joneses"), Jennifer Elise Cox (last seen in "A Very Brady Sequel"), Adam Rose (last seen in "The Bounty Hunter"), Peggy Miley (last seen in "Just Before I Go"), Sadie May Beebe, Logan Lauriston, Barbara Perry (last seen in "I Was a Male War Bride"), Art Frankel, Anslem King, Manos Gavras, Rowan Blanchard (last seen in "A Wrinkle in Time"), Riley B. Smith, Samantha Hall, Jared Gilmore, Peyton Lucas, Marlowe Peyton, with a cameo from Cesar Millan, archive footage of Ron Howard and the voice of Frank Welker (last heard in "Species").
RATING: 4 out of 10 sea urchins on a server's tray
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