BEFORE: Jennifer Lopez carries over from "The Back-Up Plan" and this is how the month begins, but honestly right now I have no idea how it's going to end. I've only programmed up until St. Patrick's Day, which will be on March 17 this year. This weekend I've got to start figuring out where I'm going to go from there, but here are the links that will get me to some very Irish movies: After J. Lo, John Bradley, Lake Bell, Mary Steenburgen, Jane Fonda, Loretta Devine, Giancarlo Esposito, Sharon Stone, Ellen Burstyn, Catherine Keener, Maddie Corman, Michael McGrath, Brendon Gleeson, Jon Kenny, and Brendon Gleeson again. Yep, see, very Irish there at the end. One option would be to go next to "A Haunting in Venice" followed by "Oppenheimer", but let me wait and see if some better chain presents itself - I can probably watch whatever I want for a while before I have to link to something for Mother's Day, but let me add in whatever's freshly streaming in March before I decide.
But here's todays' line-up for TCM's "31 Days of Oscar", Day 22:
Best Director Nominees:
6:15 am "The Informer" (1935)
8:00 am "The Crowd" (1928)
9:45 am "Great Expectations" (1946)
12:00 pm "The Heiress" (1949)
2:00 pm "I Want to Live!" (1958)
4:15 pm "12 Angry Men" (1957)
6:00 pm "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" (1967)
Best Director Winners:
8:00 pm "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town" (1936)
10:15 pm "A Letter to Three Wives" (1949)
12:15 am "Marty" (1955)
2:00 am "The Awful Truth" (1937)
OK, 5 seen out of 11 today. "12 Angry Men", "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner", "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town", "Marty" and "The Awful Truth". That's nearly half, that's got to improve my score? This brings me to 89 seen out of 251, up to 35.4%. Just nine more days to go until the countdown is over, but TCM saved some of the most popular films for the last week.
THE PLOT: A big-box store worker reinvents her life and her life-story and shows Madison Avenue what street smarts can do.
AFTER: I've already proven that watching a month's worth of romance movies WILL mess with your head - I'm pretty sure I've seen more break-ups and weddings that got called off at the last second in 2024 alone than I have in real life, that's a little odd but yeah, the math checks out. I determined that I've definitely spent more time driving cars in video games than I have in real life, in a way that's nearly the same thing. In both cases it's a heightened experience, for sure - would you rather drive safely and carefully both ways on your commute for the next 40 years, or play a video-game like "Grand Theft Auto" where you can smash up your car and run over pedestrians without any repercussions. The choice is clear - I just started playing "Red Dead Redemption" for the first time and already I've ridden a video-game horse more than I ever, ever will ride a real horse in the real world. Not my thing.
But you get what I'm trying to say? The stuff in rom-coms is highly exaggerated, each one has to show a bigger break-up (or break down) than the last film did, because the writers figure it's oh-so-more exciting that way, either the couple will get back together, which is great, or they won't, but they'll both move on to some new bigger, better, more perfect relationship. I know down deep that NONE of this relationship stuff is real (except once in a while, like surely some things from screenwriter's relationships must creep in here and there, there's stuff in "Loser" and "You People" and "Somebody I Used to Know" that simply MUST be based on somebody's real romantic relationships, because things are just so darn specific - why would somebody write about these things this way unless they really happened? OR maybe that's just a dodge, the writer WANTS us to think things could happen this way between two people so they add specific details so we figure that it must have.
"Second Act" is really kind of the opposite, I feel like I can state with certainty that this situation would NEVER happen to anyone, not ever, so the specific details here don't really help plead her case, we know this just isn't the way the business world WORKS, damn it! People don't go from grocery store assistant manager to cosmetics company consultant overnight, even if they DO fudge a few details on their resume. There's a word for that, it's umm, FRAUD, even if it was done by her nephew hacker on her behalf, it's still not right that she ACCEPTS the job in the company's executive offices, with an assistant and an apartment nearby that is both fancy AND schmancy. Yeah, you don't just quit your job one day because you got passed over for store manager and then send out five resumes the next week and land a job at this major, major company that makes shampoo and make-up and, umm, some other stuff I guess.
Maya is also some kind of "expert" on Franklin & Clark's whole product line, just because she used to re-stock aisles #4 and #5 at the supermarket. That doesn't logically follow, OK, so she may now the product names and how much each one casts, I'll give you that, but she wouldn't be able to interpret the data from a focus group, or, more importantly, know which type of people are buying the company's "organic" shampoos and WHY the other people are not. Nope, gotta call a few NITPICK POINTS on this one, Maya may be fast talker and a smooth operator, but there's just no way she could learn all this stuff in one week - it should take her about a week just to figure out what the questions are, let alone come up with the answers.
I wasn't even sure this was a "romance" per se, or if the IMDB just lists it that way out of some kind of default. Maya breaks up with her soccer coach boyfriend sort of early on, because he wants to get married and start a family, but she's not ready. Possibly because she never told Trey about the baby she had as a teenager, which she gave up for adoption. (Gee, I wonder if that plot point will be important later - you can count on it!)
That's just one example of the things this film gets bogged down in - there's barely any room for romance, what with Maya's long-lost daughter, the race to make cheap truly organic shampoos and the customer research for months just to find out there's no tangerine-scented ones out there already? Also the catered events for JUST the executives, the back-stabbing that takes place in board meetings and the "Working Girl"-like rise of a bit player to a real mover and shaker in the company. But you know sometimes "MORE" is not a good thing, remember the sub-plot in the movie "Striptease" about the plight of American farm laborers? No, of course you don't, because it was there but it just wasn't necessary, and there's a lot here that is similarly unnecessary.
It's a work movie, it's a relationship movie, it's a Christmas movie, and a few other things as well. Please focus on just a few things, please, because we don't have much time together and if you can't focus then it's going to feel by the end that we just didn't accomplish much here, but the reason it feels that way is because, well, we just didn't. And the whole thing's kind of moot because Maya would never have been hired at that company in the first place, because she lied about her resume and her experiences, and never saw fit to correct things during her initial interview or, really, any time after that easier. No, no, just tell HR what days you're available and then they can take it from there. And no, you don't get to file for unemployment now!
Also starring Vanessa Hudgens (last seen in "Tick...Tick...BOOM!"), Leah Remini (last seen in "Handsome: A Netflix Mystery Movie"), Treat Williams (last seen in "The Eagle Has Landed"), Milo Ventimiglia (last seen in "That's My Boy"), Annaleigh Ashford (last seen in "Unicorn Store"), Charlyne Yi (last heard in "The Mitchells vs. the Machines"), Alan Aisenberg (last seen in "Irresistible"), Freddie Stroma (last seen in "13 Hours"), Dave Foley (last heard in "Revengeance'), Larry Miller (last seen in "A Guy Thing"), Dierdre Friel (last seen in "Here Today"), Lacretta, Dan Bucatinsky (last seen in "Air"), Dalton Harrod, John James Cronin, Phil Nee (last seen in. "Sabrina" (1995)), Meng Ai, Elizabeth Masucci (last seen in "Shame"), Michael Boatman (last seen in "The Peacemaker"), Ed Jewett (last seen in "What's Your Number?"), Anna Suzuki (last seen in "Set It Up"), Ellen Cleghorne (last seen in "Grown Ups 2"), Brianda Agramonte,
RATING: 4 out of 10 ginkgo leaves
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