BEFORE: Here we go, I'm halfway through Movie Year 16 after I watch this one. It's been a wild one for sure, very unpredictable - let's just say that a lot of this year's films feel exactly like the movies one might watch after watching more important movies for 15 years straight. But for once I'm in June when I hit the halfway point instead of May, this way I feel like I'm more on point to have open slots to work with in December, instead of running out of room for movies in mid-November. And now just one week until Father's Day, I wasn't sure I could maintain a movie per day during the Tribeca Festival but so far I'm doing all right.
There's been something of a "Reno 911!" reunion here at the Movie Year, Wednesday I watched "Balls of Fury" with Thomas Lennon ("Jim Dangle") and Kerri Kenney ("Trudy Wiegel") in it and the film was directed by Robert Ben Garant (aka "Travis Junior"), then yesterday's film had the voices of Mary Birdsong ("Deputy Kimball") and Carlos Alazraqui ("Garcia"), and today Wendi McLendon-Covey ("Clementine Johnson") makes an appearance. Last Tuesday of course was "I Love My Dad" with Patton Oswalt, and he was a frequent guest on that show, if I remember right. Toby Huss, too, and he was in two movies this week. Now I'm keeping my eyes out for Niecy Nash and Cedric Yarbrough...
Stephen Root carries over from "Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe". So I'm not even going to program anything past July 31, which should be the end of the Doc Bloc. But at some point I'll be interested in figuring out October, then I'll know how many slots to set aside for August, and how many will be left for November and December.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed" (Movie #4,204)
THE PLOT: Carl Nargle, Vermont's #1 public television painter, is convinced he has it all: a signature perm, custom van, and fans hanging on his every stroke - until a younger, better artist steals everything (and everyone) Carl loves.
AFTER: First off, this film is not DIRECTLY based on the life of Bob Ross - except that it seems to be based on a fictionalized version of that, only with the events that some screenwriter imagines happened to him.
Much like Beavis & Butt-Head, painter Carl Nargle seems like a throwback to a simpler time, he uses a rotary phone, doesn't know what Uber is, has a fold-out bed in his tricked-out van, and he still smokes a pipe even though most rational people have found a way over the years to break their smoking habits. They never SAY what year these fictional events take place, but it sure feels like Carl's keeping the Super 70's alive during the late Big 80's, perhaps. He's had some form of romance with nearly every woman working at the Burlington, VT PBS affiliate, perhaps because he came from the era of free love and didn't get the memo that those days are over, and women don't exist just to fawn over him and his paintings. Or perhaps he's got what I call "artist brain" and just thinks that all of those women are lucky to have shared moments with him in the back of his van. When we first meet Carl, the new female intern at the station is still awestruck to be in his presence, and the other staffers are sure that tonight's the night when Carl takes her to dinner, gives her a painting, and a ride in the van.
But in many ways Carl is also a dinosaur, and we know what happens to them, don't we? They eventually get replaced by mammals after the meteorite hits, and they die out or get stuck in a giant tar pit. If you don't evolve with the times, and turn into a bird or an alligator, it's kind of inevitable. The programming on PBS depends on its viewers, and they tend to skew older, too, so I imagine that public broadcasting is always running out of money, and that's probably only gotten worse now that everyone can watch any movie or TV show they want for free, somewhere on the internet.
I watched the documentary on the real Bob Ross - who was missing part of his left index finger, due to a carpentry accident. Also, he had served as a master sergeant and drill instructor at an Air Force base in Alaska, and he'd vowed to never raise his voice again once out of the military. Ross was working as a bartender when he discovered a show called "The Magic of Oil Painting" hosted by Bill Alexander and his thick German accent. (I watched that show, too, when I came home from junior high early...). Ross became a traveling salesman for Bill Alexander's art supply company, then struck out on his own after learning Alexander's "wet-on-wet" painting techniques. Ross worked with the PBS stations in Fall Church, VA and then Muncie, Indiana to record episodes for his "Joy of Painting" show that were then syndicated, while he turned his own art supply business into a $10 million company.
Bob Ross also painted THREE of every landscape scene, one made before the show that he used as a reference, a second made during the show, and a third, more detailed painting that would appear in his instructional books. So he made over 30,000 paintings in his lifetime, and they were in high demand, some selling for over $10,000. Ross was also married three times and had two children. NONE of the facts about Bob Ross in these last two paragraphs also apply to Carl Nargle, so you see that this is NOT a direct bio-pic in any way, though it's quite obvious that the inspiration for Carl is the "spirit" of Bob Ross, or the way that someone imagined him to be.
Now, if Carl Nargle had a successful business in selling his painting and other art supplies, then we wouldn't really feel sympathy for him, would we? So instead Carl is a struggling painter trying to survive on a public TV star's meager salary, and it's not so much that he's a failure, but it's more like he's afraid of great success. His secret goal is to make a painting of Mount Mansfield that's so good it can be part of the Burlington Museum of Art, however in two decades of painting Carl's never even inquired with the museum as to whether they'd be interested in accepting one or more of his landscapes with that very same mountain. Well, you just can't help somebody who doesn't want to be helped, I guess.
You can watch the "Happy Accidents" doc if you want to learn about Bob Ross' death and the fighting over his company between his family and the Kowalskis, there's no reason to get into it here because it doesn't apply to Carl Nargle one bit. But the good news is that Bob Ross's paintings are still out there, many were sold and many are in storage somewhere, and the Smithsonian acquired four of them and displayed one in 2021. As to the fate of Carl Nargle, you'll have to watch "Paint" to learn that. Carl is essentially replaced as the host of "Paint" on Burlington PBS by Ambrosia, a younger, more energetic but less talented woman who at least knows how to paint something other than the area around a specific Vermont mountain. We may never know why Carl didn't paint the portrait of that PBS donor, maybe he could only paint landscapes and not faces, that's my theory.
Also starring Owen Wilson (last seen in "Marry Me"), Michaela Watkins (last seen in "The Back-Up Plan"), Wendi McLendon-Covey (last seen in "Think Like a Man Too"), Ciara Renée, Lucy Freyer, Lusia Strus (last heard in "Soul"), Michael Pemberton (last seen in "Bridge of Spies"), Denny Dillon (last seen in "Bruised"), Evander Duck Jr. (last seen in "The Report"), Ryan Czerwonko, Elisabeth Henry (last seen in "What Happened, Miss Simone?"), Paul Kosopod, Sonia Darmei Lopes, Aidan T.K. Baker (last seen in "Pacific Rim: Uprising"), Rob Figueroa (last seen in "Seven Pounds"), Vin Craig, Joel Leffert, Elizabeth Loyacano, Lynda Suarez, Sarah Baker (last seen in "A Simple Favor"), Brit McAdams, Sylvia Fletcher, Ryan Gaul (last seen in "Killing Gunther"), Noa Graham, Crystal Tweed, Dina Washington, Colin J. Sweeney, Kristin Hensley, Scott Beehner (last seen in "Bombshell"), Jennifer Smedley.
RATING: 7 out of 10 newspapers stolen from people's mailboxes
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