BEFORE: Ellen Burstyn carries over from "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore". and I've just got to get back into a normal sleeping rhythm. I know, I know, why start now? But I stayed up late while we were in Atlantic City, watching some TV shows on my phone and desperately trying to clear some shows off of my DVR, it's been filling up faster than usual lately because suddenly all of my shows are finally back on the air - "Masked Singer", "Survivor", "The Amazing Race", 3 different "Law & Order" series, and now a third late-night show every day, "After Midnight", and I'm falling further and further behind. There are like 5 eps of "Shark Tank" and 3 of "CSI" that are taking up space, but I can't seem to make any progress, because as soon as I watch "The Daily Show" and Colbert and Meyers each night, it's time to start on my movie.
I'd say I could catch up this weekend, but Saturday we're getting our taxes done and Sunday I'm working at the NY International Children's Film Festival, so there goes that idea. I've been staying up until 4 am just so I can clear another show or two from the board, but I just can't keep up, it's all coming in too fast. This is why I watched the Oscars on Hulu in the hotel room, just so I could remotely clear a four-hour Oscars broadcast from the DVR. Before you know it, there will be 27 episodes of "Chopped" stored up again, and 12 episodes of "Bar Rescue", which is now a very low-priority show for me. I wish somebody would cancel it so I could stop. I know, I know...
THE PLOT: A mosaic of stories about love and loss, exploring our relationship to the objects, artifacts and memories that shape our lives.
AFTER: Well, this is a real bummer of a movie - I know how it ended up on my romance list, but it's just not one, not by any stretch of the imagination. I don't find someone pining for their dead spouse as very romantic, not when in "Moonlight & Valentino" and "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore" the widowed people managed to get on with their lives and love again - sure, not right away, but eventually. You know we're in the tail end of my romance chain (just two more to go!) when I find myself watching a movie about dead spouses and divorced people.
(Speaking of which, it's a bit odd that Diane Ladd played Flo in "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore", which was yesterday's film, and her ex-husband, Bruce Dern, turns up in the next movie today. Well, I enjoy little coincidences like that, for sure.)
The real plot of this movie centers around the fact that when someone dies, the people who loved that person have to decide what to do with all their stuff. And sometimes people put that off for years, other times people fight over the stuff, and then other times people just throw it all away or donate it to a Goodwill store. That's really not much of a plot to build a movie around, is it? Nope, didn't think so.
But the stories are interconnecting - the guy that checks out the insurance claims when people file after an accident moves from place to place and story to story, and then the guy who Helen sells her dead husband's baseball to is seen in the next story, finally getting around to clearing out his parents' old house, and going through stuff with his sister, when tragedy strikes his sister's family. In the case of the young girl, her parents come to realize that she was the family photographer and in charge of the computer that held all their music, so without her there, they can't seem to figure out how to find her favorites songs or gather pictures of her for the funeral because they can't unlock her phone. Sorry, boomers, but you might have to ask for help with these fancy tech devices, maybe go to a library and look it up on the internet, or maybe just ask somebody under the age of 25?
The really most tedious part of all is the scene where Helen sells that autographed baseball, and the conversation between her and Will, the sports memorabilia dealer, is about ten times longer than it needs to be - they keep going over the SAME points over and over, over-explaining the process of selling something to a dealer. What's funny to me is that the dealer doesn't see the need to verify Ted Williams' autograph, he KNOWS that it's real because people who sell signed items that have been in their family for decades "rarely" forge the signatures. Then he ends up over-paying Helen for the autograph that he's "sure" is authentic. I can almost guarantee that this is NOT the way most baseball memorabilia sales go - I think you're much more likely to have a dealer offer below market rate for a signed baseball, just because the seller doesn't have a C.O.A. and therefore she can't prove that the signature is authentic - then he'll turn around and sell it to a collector for top dollar, because he's going to create a phony hologram authentifying certificate, or doctor up a photo of Ted Williams signing THIS ball, or more likely seal it in plastic so the next buyer can't really get a good look at it, and then double the price.
But that's it, that's the movie - people die, and then their families have to go through their old photo albums, record albums, clothes and all that junk up in the attic and decide what to do with it. Geez, if I'd known that was all there was to see here I probably would have skipped it. I know that someday I'm going to have to go through everything in my parents' old house in Massachusetts, and I'm not looking forward to it - there's hardly anything collectible there, we stupidly lost pieces from our old board games and jigsaw puzzles, and who needs a giant pile of VHS tapes. BUT there is a large pile of old National Geographic magazines, those might be worth something, but my mother's cookbooks, probably not. The greatest thing of value in the house might be my mom's piano, and a large collection of sheet music - the trick would be finding someone for whom those things might have some value.
Also starring Jon Hamm (last seen in "Top Gun: Maverick"), Catherine Keener (last seen in "Lovely & Amazing"), Bruce Dern (last seen in "The Kid Stays in the Picture"), John Ortiz (last seen in "Horse Girl"), Nick Offerman (last heard in "Sing 2"), James Le Gros (last seen in "The Myth of Fingerprints"), Amber Tamblyn (last seen in "127 Hours"), Patton Oswalt (last seen in "80 for Brady"), Annalise Basso (last seen in "Captain Fantastic"), Mikey Madison (last seen in "Monster"), Jennifer Mudge (last seen in "You Don't Know Jack"), Chris Marquette (last seen in "Race to Witch Mountain"), Joanna Going (last seen in "The Tree of Life"), Shinelle Azoroh (last seen in "Don't Let Go"), Romy Rosemont (last seen in "Whatever It Takes"), Hugo Armstrong (last seen in "Lucky"), Beth Grant (last seen in "Just Before I Go"), Arye Gross (last seen in "Gone in 60 Seconds"), Lindsey Kraft (last seen in "A Futile and Stupid Gesture"), Ashlyn Faith Williams, Bella Pellington.
RATING: 3 out of 10 jazz records (first printings, hopefully)
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