BEFORE: Well, what else can I do with a movie about two parents but put it somewhere between Mother's Day and Father's Day? Makes sense, right? It connected to "Because I Said So" through one of the child actors, so originally I was going to watch it right after coming back from my week off, but then in working out the path to Father's Day I realized that didn't really work, also I would need it later on to make another connection, so moving it to here in the chain solved two problems. I often find that if a film doesn't fit, it's better to drop it and then if it serves another purpose as a link later, then dropping it was totally justified. I dropped "Men, Women & Children" last year for space reasons, still trying to work it back into the chain - who knows maybe next year it will be JUST the film I need to make this same type of connection.
David Koechner carries over from "Balls of Fury".
I'm getting close to the halfway point for the year - I was going to leave some empty spaces because the Tribeca Film Festival will be taking place for the next 10 days, and I may have some very long shifts. But then I didn't like which movie fell on the halfway mark for the year, so I found two more films I want to see and of course that loaded up the schedule, so now there are no free days. Well, I can sleep in July, I guess, no worries.
THE PLOT: A widowed Coast Guard Admiral and a widowed handbag designer fall in love and marry, much to the dismay of his 8 and her 10 children.
AFTER: I caught the end of a documentary film about child stars the other night - not the new controversial one about the teens who came of age while working for Nickelodeon, but a different one about the stars of older shows like "Leave It to Beaver" and "What's Happenin'?", it looked like it was made for HBO about 20 years ago, and I'd love to find it now and put it on my list, but it's not popping up on the IMDB, no matter who I search on. Anyway, I should probably add "Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV" to my list anyway, even if it's not really my thing. A couple of those Nick and Disney stars pop up in tonight's film, though again, I'm not really an expert on those shows.
Speaking of 20 years ago, tonight's film came out in 2005, but it's a remake of a film from 1968 that had Lucille Ball (with 10 kids) marrying Henry Fonda (with 8 kids). Maybe back in 1968 larger families were more in vogue, or it was easier to support 18 kids on a military salary, but I question whether that was possible in 2005, it certainly wouldn't be now. Your mileage may vary, of course, but I guess there's a certain thrill in watching a blended family of 18 kids on screen because if you have two or three kids that are driving you absolutely bonkers, well then you can take comfort in the fact that your life could be SO much worse. This is how I and other people with no children probably feel about movies where parents have two kids. There, but for the grace of God, go I...
Sure, we all watched "The Brady Bunch" in the 1970's, unless you're too young for that and you watched the "Brady Bunch" movies in the 1990's. (or "Step by Step" or the "Cheaper by the Dozen" remake...). I don't know, even when you figure that this film was made in 2005 it still seems so vastly outdated. Kids get into trouble, kids have parties when their parents are away, kids make messes out of things. Jeezus, what year was this? What happened to "kids look at porn on the internet" or "kids get pregnant unexpectedly" or "kids torture frogs and grow up to become serial killers"? Isn't this all just too quaint and innocent, sort of?
I also wish the humor didn't always rely on Dennis Quaid falling down and landing in a bucket of paint or a kiddie pool filled with paint, or falling off the boat and landing in the ocean. It's kind of just the same thing, over and over again. Whoever has this fetish for seeing teen girls covered in paint, too, should take a long hard look at themselves in the mirror and think about what they've done. Also, the things that ends up uniting these two different groups of children is them working together to drive their parents apart - I honestly can't decide if that's idiotic or brilliant, but either way, it's all just very clunky.
The house party scene in particular - the party was only possible because both parents needed to go out to a special function, one where Rear Admiral Beardsley was offered some commandant position, which he declined because he cared about his family (stupid...). But as seen many times before in the film, the family has a live-in housekeeper. WHY ON EARTH would they leave their 18 children alone and not put that housekeeper in charge? That's exactly WHY the parents have the housekeeper, to watch the kids while they are doing their jobs. They suddenly forgot they have a housekeeper? They gave the housekeeper the night off? What a huge plothole that nobody else seems to have an issue with.
Also starring Dennis Quaid (last seen in "The Special Relationship"), Rene Russo (last seen in "Just Getting Started"), Rip Torn (last seen in "Eulogy"), Linda Hunt (last heard in "Solo: A Star Wars Story"), Jerry O'Connell (last seen in "Scream 2"), Jenica Bergere (last seen in "Gloria Bell"), Josh Henderson, Sean Faris, Katija Pevec (last seen in "Eagle Eye"), Dean Collins, Tyler Patrick Jones (last seen in "Red Dragon"), Haley Ramm (last seen in "Into the Wild"), Brecken Palmer, Bridger Palmer, Ty Panitz (last seen in "Because I Said So"), Danielle Panabaker (last seen in "Time Lapse"), Drake Bell (last seen in "Superhero Movie"), Miki Ishikawa, Slade Pearce (last seen in "Miss March"), Lil' JJ, Miranda Cosgrove (last heard in "Despicable Me 3"), Andrew Vo, Jennifer Habib, Jessica Habib, Nicholas Roget-King, Dan Mott, Mateo Arias, Jaelin Palmer, Connor Matheus (last seen in "Envy"), Jordan Wright (last seen in "Dreamgirls"), Gian Franco Tordi (last seen in "Monster-in-Law") and the band Hawk Nelson.
RATING: 4 out of 10 coordinated bathroom schedules (which is also stupid, why would a lighthouse need to have more than one bathroom?)
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