BEFORE: Last year's films leading up to Father's Day included "Dom Hemingway", "The Tender Bar", "Nobody" and then "Blended" and "That's My Boy" on the holiday weekend itself. There was a loose theme about absent fathers somewhere in there, but "That's My Boy" was meant to be a comedy about the most cringe-worthy annoying father ever. Goal achieved, at least until this film got released in 2022.
Amy Landecker carries over from "Project Almanac".
THE PLOT: A hopelessly estranged father catfishes his son in an attempt to reconnect.
AFTER: The director/star of this film claims this is based on a true story, that his father really catfished him in order to chat with him online. Sure, that's messed up, but really, way to turn your own personal tragedy or messed-up family situation into a narrative work. Many people do that, only not everyone is so lucky (?) to have a messed-up family situation that has an outside chance of entertaining people while offending them at the same time. It's modern alchemy, turning straw into gold, making a silk purse out of a sow's ear or whatever you want to call it.
Hey, is that MTV show "Catfish" still on? Apparently so, because Season 8 was 95 episodes long, stretched from 2020 to 2024, and the most recent show aired in January of this year. Wow, that's a lot of people catfishing out there, it's like America's third most popular national pastime or something. Who knew? The guy who made the "Catfish" movie, apparently. That guy did the same sort of thing, he formed a relationship with somebody online - a young girl who was supposedly an artist, and then went to meet her in real life, only to find that, well, she didn't really exist. And it seems this is going on all over the place, because it's so easy to take screenshots and find other people's good times and selfies on social media, and pass them off as your own. Sure, it's sad because the people doing it aren't happy with their lives and need to pretend that they're someone else having a better time or a better life.
I don't mean to humble-brag, but I've never felt the need to self-promote my experiences as anything other than what they are. Between beer festivals, food-based vacations with my wife, comic-cons and the famous people I meet at the college theater, it's enough to make me happy-ish, so there's no need to overhype things. When was the last time acclaimed actor Michael Shannon asked YOU where the men's room is? I thought so. Did Kathleen Turner and Annette Bening trust YOU to put them in a tiny elevator and bring them up to the theater stage? Nope, that was me. Onward and upward. Elliot Page came and visited the theater for a screening at NewFest, and I happen to know we hate some of the same people, but there's no reason to re-hash old feuds.
The point tonight is that social media has changed the way many of us relate to the world, and if we can't have real friends, at least we can have virtual ones, or followers, or online haters, really, I'll take any form of interaction I can get. Just wait until somebody figures out that all we really want is to see that number of followers and likes growing and growing, so really, why don't we just program everything to get a zillion likes and we can then all just feel good about everything we post, even if it's not for reals? Wait, I think we have that already, and it's called TruthSocial...
So with the premise that a father would create a fake online profile because his son has blocked him on social media, the film then takes this idea to the ultimate ridiculous extreme. The father's new profile is based on a cute, friendly waitress he met at a diner in Maine, but he doesn't bother to change her name or anything, he just reposts all of her posts as his own, and why she doesn't spot the duplicate profile, I have no idea. Maybe she never searches that platform for her own name - also catfishers may not be all that aware how easy it might be to spot a dupe profile. If someone has a very common name, however, there could be a couple hundred Mike Johnsons or Sarah Smiths out there, and then how do you wade through all of those to figure out which ones are fakes or dupes or Chinese bots? I have a very uncommon surname, but someone with my exact first and last name once called me by phone because we both had profiles on Compuserve, and he was getting ready to delete his profile there, and I had recently joined (this was back in the early 1990's, he was a retired firefighter in Arkansas, still the only other person I ever met who was my namesake...)
So Chuck chats and texts with his son Franklin, but as fake Becca. Things are going fine until Franklin wants to talk on the phone with Becca, to prove to himself that she's real. Chuck then enlists his boss/girlfriend to pretend to be Becca, but without briefing her on what's really going on, that conversation does not go well. Then things get worse when Franklin asks his father to drive him up to Maine (from Massachusetts, I think...) so he can meet Becca in person. Yeah, that's not going to go well either, but I think Chuck was looking for a way to come clean to his son somewhere on that long car trip, and just couldn't find the words. Then things get even worse when they stop at a motel and Franklin wants to have virtual sex (sexting) with Becca, and doesn't know his own father is responding, copying and pasting texts from a sexting encounter with his own girlfriend. Yeah it's super awkward.
This whole thing works cinematically because the film takes the step of depicting two people who are texting each other as being in the same room, even though they're not. So we're seeing things that aren't really happening except they are, in people's imagination or the virtual world. So these scenes probably wouldn't have the same impact if they were just texted words on the screen, and of course the actors re-create the virtual events because film is a visual medium, but if you're dead-set against images of a father and son making out, well, you might have a problem with this film.
It also "works" only because both father and son are straight, and if either one were gay, or if this were a straight father and daughter, that would probably be over the line of good taste. Even as it is this might be beyond what you might find acceptable subject matter, so don't say I didn't warn you. As for the ending, I get it, but some people might also find that it's too far over the line.
The nature of the father here is explained by his former cheating during games of online chess - he was pitting his real human opponents against a chess computer, by playing the same moves, and repeating the computer's responses as his own. This is sort of genius, and it's still cheating, of course, but it this is how somebody wants to get ahead in life, who am I to say what's wrong? My wife and I play an online game called Heardle, where you hear the first few seconds of a song and try to name the song (in a number of categories, including Rock, Pop, 70's, 80's, Elton John, Queen, etc.). The temptation is there to cheat by using Shazam or Siri to identify each song, but that would take 100% of the challenge and fun out of it, so we don't do that. Or it also reminds me of Stephen Wright's stand-up routine where he said he wanted to put a humidifier and a dehumidifier in the same room and let them fight it out. That's funny, but similarly pointless.
Also starring Patton Oswalt (last seen in "80 for Brady"), James Morosini, Claudia Sulewski, Lil Rel Howery (last seen in "Space Jam: A New Legacy"), Rachel Dratch (last heard in "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse"), Ricky Velez (last seen in "The King of Staten Island"), Sarah Helbringer, J.P. Edwards, Ricky Pak, Seamus Callahan, Zae'on James, Sheri Fairchild, Afrim Gjonbalaj
RATING: 6 out of 10 posted "lost dog" flyers (hey, an element carrying over from yesterday's time travel film!)
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