Being Mary Tyler Moore

Year 16, Day 174 - 6/22/24 - Movie #4,762

BEFORE: Shifting over to documentary mode makes things both easier and more difficult for me, it's easier because I don't have to decide what to watch for the next month or so, plus the films tend to be shorter, so I can pretty much coast for a while.  But the process is more difficult because of all the archive footage being used, there are SO many more people to keep track of, and when I've seen them before, and really, just a logistical nightmare counting how many times I've seen Dick Cavett or Dick Van Dyke or Richard Nixon this week is a chore. (So many Dicks!)

Dinah Shore carries over from "Sly".  Moving from one of the biggest male stars in movies to one of the biggest female stars in TV.  Tomorrow's film I think is more of a curveball, but I'll be back to tribute / bio-docs before you know it. I think things might have been a bit weirder if I'd gone around the doc circle the other way, and followed the Sylvester Stallone documentary with the one about Katherine Hepburn.  Oddly, they both would have used footage from "The Lion in Winter".

THE PLOT: Explores the vanguard career of Mary, who, as an actor, performer and advocate, revolutionized the portrayal of women in media, redefined their roles in show business, and inspired generations to dream big and make it on their own. 

AFTER: I grew up in the era of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show", and when you're a kid, those characters on TV are REAL to you, like maybe you haven't figured out what an actor is, and that those people on TV are just pretending, but I do remember thinking it was weird that the show was named for Mary Tyler Moore, and the character was named Mary Richards, like there was something of a disconnect there, why does she have two different names, and which one is her real name?  Perhaps I was also seeing reruns of "The Dick van Dyke Show" at the same time, and sure, that was probably confusing to me that the same lady who was a mother and housewife married to a TV show writer at 5 pm was also working for a Minneapolis news station at 8 pm, like did she get divorced, or did her husband die, and what happened to her son?  And why does her husband keep calling her Laura, I thought her name was Mary?

(Things got weirder a few years later when the head writer at that news station somehow got a job as a captain on a cruise ship, by then I was probably starting to figure out that the people on TV were not really real...  On top of all that, the guy who lived next door to The Jeffersons was often seen on "Sesame Street" painting numbers in weird places.  Life can be confusing when you're a kid.)

There's so much to anyone's life when they live long enough, and if you only watch the sitcoms then maybe you don't think very much about the actors' lives when they're not on TV, how they have marriages and kids and divorces and they also have to go on auditions for jobs that they don't get, 99% of the time.  Mary Tyler Moore almost didn't go to the casting session for "The Dick van Dyke Show" because she'd been rejected for so many acting jobs that week.  And prior to that, she was barely seen on a show called "Richard Diamond, Private Detective" as the answering service operator who took messages for a very busy detective and relayed them to him in a very sexy voice - she was seen in silhouette except sometimes there were shots of her legs, which is about as sexy as TV got back then.  But when she asked for a raise, the producers told her there were a lot of actresses with nice legs and sexy voices who wouldn't ask for a raise, so she was shown the door. 

From there, it was on to tiny roles in shows like "Bourbon Street Beat" and "Johnny Staccato" where she played women getting arrested, and Westerns like "Wanted: Dead or Alive" and "Stagecoach West" where she played memorable roles like Brunette #2.  This is actually the career path for the majority of actors, playing background roles with maybe one line of dialogue, if they're lucky, so when you land a major role in a sit-com, you'd damn well better take it, and thank whatever deity you worship that today was finally your day.  Most sitcoms only go five years anyway, so even if you're making bank, you'd better save some money because before long you'll be going to auditions again.  Mary Tyler Moore hit the jackpot twice, and even though there was just a four year span between those two shows, the whole world kind of changed in-between.  

The original plan was for Mary Richards to be a divorced woman starting over again in Minneapolis at a news station, but CBS had three rules for their sitcoms - no Jews, no mustaches and NO divorces.  Sure, it's the 1960's but let's bury our heads in the sand and pretend all the things we don't like don't even exist.  So Mary Richards was fresh out of a bad relationship, but OK, it wasn't a divorce.  People still tuned in every week to see her forming friendships at the TV station and working through some things, and reall, there was subtle feminism once a week on the TV.  The same lady who was the first housewife to wear pants then became the first sitcom woman to put career first over trying to be a wife and mother. It's more ground-breaking than you think, really. 

In real life Ms. Moore was also breaking ground by having her own production company, run by her husband, Grant Tinker, and also hiring female writers (still a rarity at the time) and taking some flack from both sides, from the conservatives for showing an independent feminist woman and from the feminists for not going far enough.  (Really, they got stuck on her calling her boss "Mr. Grant"? Give me a break.). Then it was just a matter of sitting back and watching the Emmys come in, for what may have been the greatest ensemble of comic actors and writers working together to put out a weekly show. 

But everything has to come to an end, the Mary Tyler Moore show and the marriage to Grant Tinker, so she had to re-invent herself again.  She moved back to NY (she was born in Brooklyn Heights, lived in Flushing, Queens but her family moved to L.A. when she was 8) and took up stage acting, appearing in "Whose Life Is It Anyway?" and a failed version of "Breakfast at Tiffany's".  Well, it just goes to show that everybody's got a few stinkers on their resumé, even Sylvester Stallone and Mary Tyler Moore. 

Also starring James L. Brooks, James Burrows (last seen in "Robert Klein Still Can't Stop His Leg"), Debra Martin Chase (last seen in "Whitney"), Katie Couric (last seen in "The Queen of Versailles"), Joan Darling, Joel Grey (last seen in "Tick, Tick...BOOM!"), Dr. Robert Levine, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Julia Louis-Dreyfus (last seen in "You People"), Isaac Mizrahi (last seen in "For Love or Money"), Rosie O'Donnell (last seen in "Everything Is Copy"), Bill Persky, Bernadette Peters (last seen in "The Automat"), Phylicia Rashad (last seen in "Frankie & Alice"), Robert Redford (last seen in "The Company You Keep"), Rob Reiner (last seen in "Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You"), Ronda Rich, Beverly Sanders (last seen in "Magic"), Susan Silver, Fred Silverman, Treva Silverman, John Tinker, Lena Waithe (last seen in "The One and Only Dick Gregory"), Reese Witherspoon (last seen in "Fear")

with archive footage of Mary Tyler Moore (last seen in "Lucy and Desi"), Morey Amsterdam (last heard in "Gay Purr-ee"), Julie Andrews (last heard in "Minions: The Rise of Gru"), Patricia Arquette (last seen in "Otherhood"), Bea Arthur (last seen in "Idina Menzel: Which Way to the Stage?"), Edward Asner (last seen in "Muppets Haunted Mansion"), Manny Azenberg, Conrad Bain (last seen in "Postcards from the Edge"), Lucille Ball (last seen in "The Super Bob Einstein Movie"), Rona Barrett (last seen in "Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic"), Hugh Beaumont, Jack Benny (last seen in "Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It"), Rock Hudson (ditto), Deborah Kerr (ditto), Barbara Billingsley (also last seen in "Lucy and Desi"), Carol Burnett (ditto), Danny Thomas (ditto), Ellen Burstyn (last seen in "Nostalgia"), Sid Caesar (last seen in "Mel Brooks: Unwrapped"), Imogene Coca (ditto), Dick Cavett (last seen in "Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood"), Richard Chamberlain (last seen in "I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry"), Connie Chung, Tom Conti (last seen in "Oppenheimer"), Walter Cronkite (last seen in "Elvis"), Elvis Presley (ditto), Richard Deacon (last seen in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1956)), Tony Dow, Barbara Eden (last seen in "A Very Brady Sequel"), Georgia Engel (last seen in "Betty White: First Lady of Television"), Valerie Harper (ditto), Ted Knight (ditto), Gavin MacLeod (ditto), Betty White (ditto), Nanette Fabray (last seen in "The Band Wagon"), Betty Ford (last seen in "The U.S. vs. John Lennon"), Betty Friedan, Vincent Gardenia (last seen in "De Palma"), Sissy Spacek (ditto), Larry Hagman (last seen in "The Family"), Goldie Hawn (last seen in "The Christmas Chronicles: Part Two"), Audrey Hepburn (last seen in "Dean Martin: King of Cool"), Dustin Hoffman (last seen in "I Could Never Be Your Woman"), Timothy Hutton (last seen in "Beautiful Boy"), David Janssen, Danny Kaye (last seen in "Dionne Warwick: Don't Make Me Over"), Burt Lancaster (last seen in "1900"), Donald Sutherland (ditto), Cloris Leachman (last seen in "Alex & Emma"), Norman Lear (last seen in "Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You"), Bob Newhart (ditto), Carroll O'Connor (ditto), Carl Reiner (ditto), Sally Struthers (ditto), Tea Leoni (last seen in "House of D"), David Letterman (last seen in "That's My Boy"), James Lipton (last seen in "Val"), Rose Marie, Jerry Mathers, Larry Mathews, Garry Moore, Bill Quinn, Jason Robards (last seen in "Beloved"), Gena Rowlands (last seen in "Bad Reputation"), George Segal (last seen in "Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind"), Gloria Steinem (last seen in "Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists"), Ben Stiller (last seen in "Bros"), David Susskind (last seen in "The Kid Stays in the Picture"), Marlo Thomas (last seen in "LOL"), Grant Tinker, Dick Van Dyke (last seen in "Belfast"), Oprah Winfrey (last seen in "Scandalous: The Untold Story of the National Enquirer")

RATING: 6 out of 10 appearances as Happy the Hotpoint Pixie

Sly

Year 16, Day 173 - 6/21/24 - Movie #4,761

BEFORE: It's here, it's finally here, my annual Documentary Chain!  It's really because of the Doc Block that I first realized that I could make it through an entire year without breaking the chain, which is weird because for years I thought that I would NOT be able to complete the chain unbroken in any given year BECAUSE OF documentaries, and I didn't want to give them up.  But it turned out I had things backwards, and docs are what made it possible - I watched a bunch of docs about rock music in 2018, starting with the touring years of the Beatles and going through just about every group under the sun and ending with Rush's last tour - and they ALL connected, mostly because every rock doc used footage of the Beatles or The Stones or Hendrix.  All it required me to do was a little more research, and the docs would no longer be the thing that was holding me back.  Sigourney Weaver was my entry point into that first Beatles doc, and Paul Rudd narrated that Rush documentary, so I had my exit point back to fiction films.  That was the secret sauce, planning the correct entry and the exit.   

So for this year I had 35 or 36 docs arranged in a perfect circle, so really, I could enter at any point I wanted, go in either direction, and try to land something very American on July 4.  This worked for me two years ago, I had a similar circle and I landed "WBCN and the American Revolution" on July 4 - OK, so it's just a movie about a Boston radio station, but damn, the title had "American Revolution" in it, so it felt right.  Well, I'm doing that again, I found my entry point into the circle, and it turned out to be the star of my Father's Day film - I just had to add 3 more films with that actor, and things lined up perfectly (?) again.  The Doc Bloc has swelled up to 40 films now, because I added a few more recent ones, but it's still a circle, there's footage in "Sly" of a certain actor who will also appear in Documentary #40.  But ending with that particular doc gives me a fair number of exit points, like I think I want it to be that SAME actor, but we'll see.

Robert De Niro carries over from "The Last Tycoon" and he was in two movies with Stallone, "Cop Land" and "Grudge Match", so I'd put the probability of there being archive footage of him here in this doc as very high.  I'd say about 100%.

THE PLOT: The nearly fifty year prolific career of Sylvester Stallone, who has entertained millions, is seen in retrospective in an intimate look at the actor, writer, director-producer, paralleling with his inspirational life story. 

AFTER: Sure, let's start with one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, why not?  Also, they showed this doc at the theater, in that Tuesday night film appreciation class that I sometimes manage.  So that's what put it on my radar, back in November, and sure enough, there was a way to work it in, because most docs use SO much archive footage - naturally, it's easier to just license footage than to set up cameras and interview more people.  Also, what better way to illustrate the points being made about Stallone's career than to have clips from all the "Rocky" movies, and the "Rambo" movies, even the stinkers like "Oscar" and "Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot".  Well, they say you learn more from your mistakes, right?  So where's the footage from "Rhinestone"?  

I wish I could say that Stallone has valuable insights about life, loss and filmmaking.  Well, maybe you'll find some insight in one or two of those arenas.  Of course he talks about what his life was like before "Rocky", where he and John Herzfeld went around NYC sneaking into movie theaters, supposedly they never paid, which is a weird thing to admit.  Stallone could probably buy his own movie theater now, so, umm, why not pay back those theaters for all those movie tickets you didn't buy back in the early 1970's?  But this was all valuable research for "Rocky", which took Stallone from being an extra in films like "The Prisoner of Second Avenue" or a subway mugger in Woody Allen's film "Bananas" to becoming the breakout box office star of 1976.  

"Rocky" won Best Picture of 1976, and the Best Director award for John Avildsen, but at some point Stallone and Avildsen had a falling out so starting with "Rocky II" Stallone directed most of the films in that franchise, and later one of the "Rambo" films and the first "Expendables" movie, too.  Well, you can't argue with success, and if you can turn one movie into a six-movie franchise, well, then that's what you do.  (Huh, Avildsen came back for "Rocky V", I hadn't realized...)

Stallone claims that the "Rocky" and "Rambo" characters are polar opposites - but, are they?  Most fans of action movies might not even realize there's any difference at all, they just want to see a good fight, whether that's in a boxing ring or on the battlefield.  Look, I'll admit it, I've never seen any of the "Rambo" movies, it's one of the few franchises that I've managed to avoid all these years.  Maybe someday I'll have to finally cross them off my list, but it's never a top priority with me - look, I've been busy, ok?  They'll always be there, even if I watch them last out of everything.  "Rambo", "Saw", "Transformers", "The Fast and the Furious", those to me just really feel like I'd be scraping the bottom of the barrel, I'd get no joy from them, I'd just be watching them to say I watched them, and it would feel kind of unfair to the other movies that I do want to watch.

We also see Stallone go back to his old neighborhood of Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan and talk with some of the locals who now live on his old block.  And I'm sure they vetted those New Yorkers first, because they're not phased AT ALL to be talking to Sylvester Stallone.  Sure, celebrities, they're just like us, they go back to visit their old terrible apartments every 40 years and they just strike up conversations with people on the street.  There's also WAY too much footage of the movers packing up Stallone's memorabilia and statues of him as he prepares to move from his Los Angeles home to a new one in - Florida?  Well, he's old enough for that, sure. But why Florida?  And do we need to see EVERY SINGLE item getting wrapped up?  He's got empty nest syndrome, as his daughters are all grown up and have their own reality TV show now, so he's not retiring, he's just moving so he can start a new chapter somewhere else. 

I suppose it's also great that he and Schwarzenegger are friends now, after co-starring in the "Expendables" movies, and they can laugh about the friendly competition they had during the 1980's and 1990's.  Who had bigger muscles?  Who fired bigger guns, held in one hand?  Who was winning at the box office?  Yes, movie stars, they're petty just like us.  Also, since we're still under a week away from Father's Day, we learn about Frank Stallone Sr. and what an S.O.B. he was, he even wrote a boxing movie after "Rocky" came out that was just like "Rocky" only the name of the main character was "Sonny".  Well, like son, like father, because Sly admits to going to see all those movies for free and then just transcribing all the dialogue and changing a few words to make his own screenplays.  Umm, does he realize that's not "writing", that's just "copying"?  You know what, you tell him. 

When their parents split up, Frank Jr. lived with their mother in one state, and Sylvester lived with their father in another, and Frank Sr. had some scam going where he bought up bad horses and trained them for polo, even if they were blind or feeble he ground every last bit of energy out of them.  Sly might have become a champion polo player if his father hadn't insisted on knocking him off of horses and killing all his love for the sport.  Jeez, sounds like a prince of a guy - but you know, we all reach a point in our lives where we reject the things our parents like and we strike off on our own, it could be a sport or a profession or a religion, but when you're 18 or 20 you just want to leave home and find your own thing, it's perfectly natural.  

For Stallone that was acting, and after those small roles in "The Lords of Flatbush" and "Death Race 2000" and even a porn film called "The Party at Kitty and Stud's" (it's true, look it up...) that road of rejecting polo and everything his father stood for led Stallone to Los Angeles where he crashed at Henry Winkler's place and got his "Rocky" screenplay made into a movie, so yeah, that kind of made everything work out for Stallone.  Sure, there were bumps in the road, and some movie missteps but he learned a lot along the way, and it's really about the people you meet and punch along the way, isn't it?   

Things all kind of came full circle when he transitioned into the "aging trainer" role in the "Creed" movies, playing essentially a version of Burgess Meredith's role from the original, but none of that is mentioned here.  This is really a doc for fans of "Rocky" and "Rambo" or maybe both.  For me, well, I guess one out of two ain't bad. 

Also starring Sylvester Stallone (last seen in "Barbie"), Arnold Schwarzenegger (last seen in "Scandalous: The Untold Story of the National Enquirer"), Quentin Tarantino (last seen in "Destiny Turns on the Radio"), Frank Stallone (last seen in "Hudson Hawk"), Talia Shire (last seen in "The Sparks Brothers"), Henry Winkler (last seen in "I Could Never Be Your Woman"), John Herzfeld, Wesley Morris, Jennifer Flavin,

with archive footage of Muhammad Ali (last seen in "Balls of Fury"), Terry Crews (ditto), Woody Allen (last seen in "The Kid Stays in the Picture"), James Cagney (ditto), Steve Austin, Marlon Brando (also last seen in "Barbie"), Sandra Bullock (last seen in "Bullet Train"), Johnny Carson (last seen in "Alice Doesn't Live Here Any More"), David Caruso (last seen in "Proof of Life"), Richard Crenna (last seen in "Made in Paris"), Brian Dennehy (last seen in "The Seagull"), Estelle Getty (last seen in "Betty White: First Lady of Television"), Teri Hatcher (last seen in "2 Days in the Valley"), Hulk Hogan (last seen in "Air"), Anthony Hopkins (last seen in "Man Up"), Perry King (last seen in "Switch"), Jack Lemmon (last seen in "Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind"), Dinah Shore (ditto), Jet Li (last seen in "Mulan" (2020)), Dolph Lundgren (last seen in "Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom"), Ed McMahon (last seen in "The Super Bob Einstein Movie"), Burgess Meredith (last seen in "Mr. Warmth - the Don Rickles Project"), Peter O'Toole (last seen in "Spielberg"), Al Pacino (last seen in "Jack and JIll"), Chazz Palminteri (last seen in "Idina Menzel: Which Way to the Stage?"), Roger Rees (last seen in "Happy Tears"), Steve Reeves, Peter Riegert (last seen in "A Shock to the System"), Mickey Rourke (last seen in "Domino"), Sage Stallone, Jason Statham (last seen in "Cellular"), Sharon Stone (last seen in "All I Wish"), Mr. T (last seen in "Beauty"), Milo Ventimiglia (last seen in "Tell"), John Wayne (last seen in "Belfast"), Carl Weathers (last seen in "Think Like a Man Too"), Bruce Willis (last seen in "Precious Cargo"), Burt Young (last seen in "Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time") and the voices of Norman Jewison, Joe Eszterhas. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 things learned from watching Steve Reeves as Hercules

The Last Tycoon

Year 16, Day 172 - 6/20/24 - Movie #4,760

BEFORE:  Robert De Niro carries over again from "1900" as De Niro Con marches on, and Bobby D will be my entry point into the Doc Block, which starts tomorrow.  Yes, almost a month and a half of documentaries, enough to get me through June AND July and I'll have to figure out what to watch in August and September later, but there's plenty of time for that. Not really.  

The original plan was to watch this BEFORE "1900", but by switching things around, I lined up another Birthday SHOUT-out - this time to Bonnie Bartlett, born June 20, 1929.  Damn, and Donald Sutherland passed away today at the age of 88, just one day after I watched "1900".  I'd hate to think I had anything to do with it.

THE PLOT: F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel is brought to life in this story of a movie producer slowly working himself to death. 

AFTER: This kind of plays like a more downbeat version of "Babylon", another film where a man rises to the rank of producer in early Hollywood, then realizes it's not all it's cracked up to be.  So this type of story has been around for a long time - but F. Scott Fitzgerald never finished this story, it seems in 1976 they were so desperate for another "Great Gatsby" that they raided his body of work and settled for second best.  That being said, if Fitzgerald were still alive and somehow watched "Babylon", with all of its weird vomit scenes and elephant poop scenes, he'd probably kill himself. 

It's believed that Monroe Stahr is a stand-in for the real-life producer Irving Thalberg, who was also a character in "Babylon".  So at least we've reached the point where if someone wants to make a movie about the best movie producer of the 1930's, at least they can use his real name now. Progress?  They later turned "The Last Tycoon" into a stage play in 1998 and an HBO miniseries that ran for one season in 2017, but got cancelled before they could make a second season.  Seems about right.  

Harold Pinter adapted Fitzgerald's novel into this 1976 film, and Elia Kazan directed it, this was his last film.  That's a heavy credits llist for a movie that feels half-finished, and somehow they had to find an acceptable ending when Fitzgerald couldn't be bothered.  But if you go back and look at the original book, the narrator is Cecilia Brady, daughter of Pat Brady, the head of the studio.  There's a whole backstory where she's going to Bennington College and then flies back to Hollywood, and she's met at the airport by an author and a failed producer who are there to accompany her, only the plane has trouble and they have to land in Nashville, and they kill time by visiting the estate of President Andrew Jackson - all of that got cut out of the movie, go figure, but clearly they wanted the focus to be on De Niro's character, producer Monroe Stahr. 

Anyway, that failed producer asks Cecilia to deliver a message to Stahr, then he commits suicide.  OK, who wants his window seat on the plane?  Cecilia has had a crush on Stahr for years, but he's always kept her at arm's length, probably because her father is the head of the movie studio and if he sleeps with her, he'll get fired. Anyway Stahr is still grieving over the death of his wife, who was an actress and they're still preserving her dressing room as a monument to her.  But after a minor earthquake - because L.A. - a water pipe bursts on the set and Stahr sees two women clinging to a giant statue head as it floats out of a set, and one of the women reminds him of his late wife. 

Here's where the book's focus shifts from Cecilia to Stahr, and the movie picks up with the giant floating statue head.  Stahr pulls some strings and gets the phone number of the woman he saw on the statue head, and arranges a date - but it's the wrong woman.  When he drops her off after the date, though, he sees her friend, and that's the woman who reminds him of his dead wife, so naturally he pursues her.  But it's two dates before she'll even tell him her name (Kathleen Moore) or any personal details, then he drives her to the house he's having built on the beach in Santa Monica, and then they have sex.  But then Stahr gets a letter from Kathleen, it turns out that she's been engaged to another man for a long time, and now she's decided to go ahead with the wedding.  (Very similar to what happened to Finn in "Great Expectations"...)

Stahr is clearly upset, of course, and something breaks inside of him.  He starts hanging out with Cecilia again, and she arranges a meeting with a labor leader (and suspected Communist) who wants to organize a labor union within the studio.  It does not go well, Stahr gets drunk and starts a fight and ends up with a black eye - and though this brings him closer to Cecilia, it's all the excuse that her father needs to blackmail him into taking a "long vacation".  He did, of course, have an affair with an engaged woman - think of the scandal!  I presume this is the point where F. Scott Fitzgerald stopped writing, because the movie and the book (completed in 1993 by a Fitzgerald scholar) take different story paths.  

In the movie, Stahr has a vision of Kathleen playing out a scenario that he had pitched to a writer - something about emptying her purse and throwing her black gloves into the fire, it doesn't really make much sense.  But in the 1993 now-finished novel, the studio head hires a hit-man to have Stahr killed, but Stahr survives the attempt and does the same, he hires a more professional killer to take out Brady, then leaves for New York City.  He considers calling off the execution, but then he has to catch his plane, so the job is done, and Cecilia is left without her father or her lover.  Bummer. 

It's not just that this film feels kind of unfinished (because it is), but it also feels like nobody involved with it wanted to BE there. Not De Niro, not Monroe Stahr, not anybody.  Come on, guys, you live in the dream factory, you make movies for a living, could you at least please TRY to enjoy it?  I know this is set during the Great Depression, but that doesn't mean that simply everybody was depressed all the time.  Then again, I help people make movies for a living and yeah, I get it, some days you're just dialing it in and going through the motions.  If you're always afraid of getting fired or the studio going under, I guess I can see how that could wear down a guy.  

Anyway, this movie with "Last" in the title now becomes the last fiction film I'll watch for a while, but I'm sticking with the Hollywood theme as I enter the Doc Bloc tomorrow.  There were probably a thousand ways I could have gotten in to the Doc Bloc, but I worked out the one that puts the "right" film on July 4, and also gives me a lot of options for where to go when it's over. So I'm sticking with that. 

Also starring Robert Mitchum (last seen in "Becoming Mike Nichols"), Tony Curtis (last seen in "De Palma"), Jack Nicholson (ditto), Jeanne Moreau (last seen in "They'll Love Me When I'm Dead"), Donald Pleasance (last seen in "The Eagle Has Landed"), Ray Milland (last seen in "Mr. Warmth - The Don Rickles Project"), Dana Andrews (last seen in "The Best Years of Our Lives"), Ingrid Boulting, Peter Strauss (last seen in "Operation Finale"), Theresa Russell (last heard in "Being Human"), Tige Andrews (last seen in "Mister Roberts"), Morgan Farley (last seen in "Macbeth" (1948)), John Carradine (last seen in "House of Dracula"), Jeff Corey (last seen in "Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man"), Diane Shalet, Seymour Cassel (last seen in "It Could Happen to You"), Anjelica Huston (last seen in "When in Rome"), Bonnie Bartlett (last seen in "Salem's Lot"), Sharon Masters, Eric Christmas (last seen in 'Harold and Maude"), Leslie Curtis, Lloyd Kino (last seen in "Midway" (1976)), Rutanya Alda (last seen in "The War with Grandpa"), Pamela Guest. 

RATING: 4 out of 10 framed photos of Cecilia (on her own wall? what a narcissist...)

1900

Year 16, Day 171 - 6/19/24 - Movie #4,759

BEFORE: Robert De Niro carries over again from "Great Expectations". As you might imagine, De Niro is rapidly rising through the ranks of actors with the most appearances this year, thanks to De Niro Con (the home version). I don't think he'll make it to the top spot, currently held by Kevin Hart, but he may get close, especially if he pops up in a couple of docs unexpectedly, that's been known to happen. 

I had to take an extra day to watch this, since the version I have (which aired on Starz a few months ago) is over four hours long.  The original released version was even longer, at five hours and 17 minutes, which is a combination of the original release in two parts, however at some point for American audiences the director was forced to make a stripped-down version that could be viewed all at once without taking up your whole evening.  So since I was taking the whole day off Tuesday to recover from Tribeca FF, I watched two hours in the afternoon (Part One) and then the other two hours at night, post talk-shows.  

THE PLOT: The epic tale of class struggle in twentieth-century Italy as seen through the eyes of two childhood friends on opposing sides. 

AFTER: Well, I made it through all four hours of this movie, I can't possibly imagine what else could have been in the five hour version.  Maybe they explained the politics a little better in the longer version, who knows?  I was very confused by the politics thing, the socialism inherent in the countryside of Italy before the first World War, and then the rise of fascism leading up to World War II.  But the movie kind of skipped over both wars, which maybe seems like an odd choice.  Maybe that's what's missing from the four-hour version, all the war scenes?  

The film is also somewhat misnamed, because only a very small part of it takes place in the year 1900, in the beginning, I assume.  So it really should have been called "the 1900's" or "the first half of the 20th Century", giving it the name of one single year doesn't really work if the time span covered is really 45 years.  Actually, the movie starts with the ending, we see Italy in 1945 just after its liberation from Fascism, and we've seen the fall of Berlin so many times in movies, but the fall of Mussolini's Rome, not so much.  What we see is an angry mob of peasants chasing down Donald Sutherland and a woman who are trying to escape on bicycles that are loaded up with their possessions, so it's s metaphor for the upper class, I suppose, being burdened with all of their worldly goods while the peasants are able to chase them down because they are unburdened, umm, except for their pitchforks.  Yeah, this scene is probably not going to end well for Sutherland's character.  Meanwhile, De Niro's character, whoever he is, is being held at gunpoint by a young man and forced into a barn full of cows.  He explains that this is also the barn where his grandfather died, and then he starts to narrate the tale of how things got to this point, so we're rocketed back in time....

To the birth, in 1900, of two male babies, one is Alfredo Berlinghieri, born to the land-owning family, and we see his grandfather, also Alfredo, (maybe he's the one they name the creamy pasta sauce after) outside encouraging his daughter-in-law (?) who's inside, giving birth to his grand-child.  On the same day, a grandchild is born to Leo Dalco, who's the foreman on Alfredo's land.  The two grandfathers approach the day very differently, Alfredo passes out bottles of wine and celebrates the day, because he's a rich man and this is his first grand-child, while Leo Dalco has probably like 40 grand kids, and he keeps on working because, like, what's one more?  Another metaphor, no doubt, about the differences between the classes.  The poor people really do seem to have more children, don't they?  Well, really, what else do they have to do?

Olmo is raised by his grandfather as a Socialist, and Olmo watches as the peasants attempt to go on strike, and eventually many of them get replaced by threshing machines that can clear hay from a field in ten minutes, where before that would have taken 10 laborers half a day.  But the strikes bring Olmo and young Alfredo together, and they become close friends, like brothers.  Alfredo wants to be a Socialist, too, but as the child in the landowners' family, really, it's just not going to take.  By the time of World War I, and this is where the movie skips ahead a few years, Alfredo stays behind to run his family's plantation, while Olmo is forced to enlist in the Italian army.  When Olmo returns from the war, he finds that Alfredo's father, Giovanni, has hired a new foreman, Attila, who treats everyone cruelly.  (That he has the name of a famous Hun is probably another symbol, he represents the approach of fascism.)

But hey, at least Alfredo and Olmo are back together as friends, though now played by adult actors, and they get into all kinds of wacky situations like visiting a prostitute together.  Which gets very awkward because she doesn't want them to take turns, she wants to get things over with quickly, so sure, have a threesome with your best friend, what could possibly go wrong?  Olmo has, well, not a wife, but a partner, Anita, because Socialists didn't believe in marriage, it was too close to "owning" another person's love, so I guess they had open relationships?  Olmo and Anita lead protests together, but in the early 1930's she dies during childbirth, so Olmo has to raise his daughter (also named Anita).  Alfredo, meanwhile, has a couple of girlfriends but marries Ada, an alcoholic whose favorite pastime appears to be pulling pranks, like pretending to be blind, and also then over-apologizing to everyone for pretending to be blind. 

At some point Giovanni dies, making Alfredo the new "padrone" of the plantation, and this neatly puts him and Olmo on opposite sides of the political spectrum - it's impossible to be both a Socialist AND a landowner, apparently.  Meanwhile, Attila, the cruel foreman, rallies the Fascist black-shirt troops by strapping a cat to a wall and killing it.  I'm not sure exactly how this was supposed to inspire soldiers or promote Fascism, maybe he just didn't like cats?

In Act Two, things come to a head as Alfredo and Ada mess around with cocaine, and Attila takes up with Regina, who's Alfredo's cousin, and she doesn't really like Alfredo's wife.  She says "It should have been me..." but I'm not sure if she was referring to how it should have been her running the plantation or it should have been her marrying Alfredo. Maybe both.  But anyway Attila and Regina make a cruel pair, at one point they track down a missing child and they spin him around in fun until they knock his head off.  Whoopsie.  No worries, they try to hide the body in a crypt, but when it's found they just keep blaming Olmo or another random guy until everybody agrees that's who probably killed the kid.  

Then Alfredo's wife, Ada, leaves him, and it's a bit unclear whether she goes to live with Olmo or just wants to be alone and drink all day.  The peasants start to revolt against Attila and the fascists, and Alfredo fires Attila so he can spend more time killing families.  But the peasants throw horse manure at him, and Olmo rubs his face in a big pile of fresh, hot manure.  Then Olmo disappears on his bicycle for fear of retaliation, and his daughter Anita rides off in the opposite direction, just in case.  

Eventually we're back to where we started, with the peasants chasing down Attila and Regina with pitchforks, and a young man holding Alfredo at gunpoint.  The workers want to put Alfredo on trial for the crime of being a cruel landowner, not realizing that he always wanted to be a Socialist at heart.  Olmo comes back, just in time to represent Alfredo at his trial, and Olmo declares that Alfredo is "dead", so that they won't kill him.  An interesting legal strategy, because if he and his landowning ways are dead, symbolizing the overthrow of the old social system, then maybe he can save his life. 

Finally, representatives of the new Italian government arrive, and they want the peasants to give up their weapons, the war is over. Alfredo probably was wishing they could have arrived a few hours earlier, but cooler heads prevail and the peasants give up their guns because now that Fascism is dead, all of their problems are solved and there will never be any class struggles ever again in the future.  Yeah, sure. 

OK, so I'm not really sure if this was accurate, if what I learned about Italian history is genuine, or if this is just one person's perspective on history, and how things might have gone down back in the early 20th century.  Really, a lot of this movie just felt like a collection of odd moments, like what do you do when you and your friend have a threesome with a hooker and she has an epileptic fit shortly after?  Or what happens when you go to your best friend's house and accuse him of maybe sleeping with your wife, but you find out that she's not there, as you expected, but she just left you and went somewhere else?  Very awkward.  And what do you do with a woman who's driving you in a fancy new car but insists on pulling that prank where she pretends to be suddenly blind, and she might crash the car?  Well, I guess you marry her, that's what. Whatever.  It was a different time, that's for sure. 

Also starring Gerard Depardieu (last seen in "Green Card"), Dominique Sanda, Francesca Bertini, Laura Betti, Donald Sutherland (last seen in "Moonfall"), Stefania Sandrelli, Werner Bruhns, Stefania Casini, Sterling Hayden (last seen in "The Long Goodbye"), Anna Henkel, Ellen Schwiers, Alida Valli (last seen in "The Paradine Case"), Burt Lancaster (last seen in "De Palma"), Romolo Valli, Giacomo Rizzo, Pippo Campanini, Antonio Piovanelli, Paulo Branco, Liu Bosisio, Maria Monti, Anna Maria Gherardi, Demesio Lusardi, Pietro Longari Ponzoni, Jose Quaglio, Clara Colosimo, Vittorio Fanfoni, Edda Ferronao, Paolo Pavesi, Roberto Maccanti, Odoardo Dail'aglio, Piero Vida, Patrizia De Clara, 

RATING: 4 out of 10 orders of frog's legs

Great Expectations (1998)

Year 16, Day 170 - 6/18/24 - Movie #4,758

BEFORE: No Monday movie, as I came home at 1 am on Sunday night/Monday morning, and fell asleep sitting at my desk for a couple hours - when I woke up I figured I should probably go to bed in a real bed for once, and then of course had to work on Monday morning.  Today I tried to sleep all day to catch up but that didn't really work, I only made it to 11 am.  But anyway it's Day 2 of my own personal De Niro Con, even though the real one ended on Sunday. 

Now, the real De Niro Con had a stellar line-up, films like "Mean Streets" , "Goodfellas", "Raging Bull", "Taxi Driver", "The Deer Hunter", "The Godfather Part II", and (for some reason) "New York, New York" and a special conversation with De Niro and Tarantino after a 35mm screening of "Jackie Brown", but I've seen ALL of those movies, so there's probably no way that my version can compare, I'm kind of left with the crumbs after years of dining on the main entrees from Bobby D's career. (I feel like I can call him "Bobby D" now because you know, I saw him crossing the sidewalk and entering the press tent that one time...)

But of course we know Mr. De Niro co-founded the Tribeca Film Festival, and just look at the ripple effect - years later the festival is bigger than ever, and that resulted in me working 6 long-ish shifts, and that's a bump in my paycheck next month.  So I owe him for that, and I'm paying it back with this week's movies, even if they don't represent the cream of the crop.  I'm sore and I'm tired but I can still make it through one of his films late on a Monday night.  Tomorrow's film might be more of a challenge...

The upside here is that I noticed that things felt maybe one day off, if I go by the very arbitrary mark of actors' birthdays.  Laurie Metcalf's birthday was June 16 and I watched "Somewhere in Queens" on June 15.  I missed another one by one day last week - now I'm sure there will be tons of celeb birthdays during the Doc Block, but who knows, maybe things will line up better if I skip a day and proceed from here.  As a result, today I'm sending out a big Birthday SHOUT-out to Kim Dickens, born June 18, 1965.  Let's see, who else has birthdays in June and July?  It would be great if some of my documentary subjects did - and it's just 3 days until Doc Block.

THE PLOT: Modernization of Charles Dickens' classic story finds the hapless Finn as a painter in New York City pursuing his unrequited childhood love. 

AFTER: Clearly, this film was made shortly after the success of the 1996 version of "Romeo + Juliet" with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes.  You can see that, right?  One film that takes a classic novel and "modernizes" it is a hit, then another one gets fast-tracked and before you know it, you've got a hot trend on your hands.  What other classic novels or plays got re-vamped in the late 1990's?  What a deal, the story's already written, we don't have to pay for like five screenwriters and a sixth one to punch it up. 

Sure, I can see why some parts of Dickens' novel needed to be changed - we can no longer identify with an orphan from the streets of London during the Industrial Revolution, but an orphan from the Gulf Coast who works on a fishing boat?  OK, maybe. Now part of me wants to stop and go back to the original novel, just to see what made the grade in 1998 and what didn't.  Hold on...let me go do that. 

OK, so they changed Pip's name to "Finn", and Miss Havisham's name to "Ms. Dinsmoor", but they kept Estella's name intact. (Why we didn't see a rash of Millennial kids named "Estella", I'm not sure...). And in the novel Pip lived with a blacksmith, not a fishing boat captain, but that's OK. And then when he goes to London, Pip gets an apprenticeship with a lawyer, but here in the 1998 film he becomes a NYC downtown artist.  The rest kind of proceeds similarly in both versions, though this movie seems to have also really trimmed away the extraneous characters (Magwitch, Molly, Compeyson...)

Young Finn encounters a convict in the Gulf Coast marshes, and it's De Niro in full Travis Bickle mode.  The convict instructs him to bring him some bolt cutters and food the next morning, and Finn complies, because, well, this guy now knows his name and where he lives, and will probably kill his family if he doesn't. Keep this incident in mind, because it could be important later.  Finn tries to take the convict to Mexico in his rowboat but a police boat gets in the way - the convict disappears into the Gulf and Finn goes back to his life, later he sees on the TV news that the convict, Arthur Lustig, was captured and returned to death row.  

Young Finn here gets an opportunity to visit the aged Ms. Dinsmoor, and play in the ruins of her giant house with Estella, who kisses him when they drink from a fountain, and then Ms. Dinsmoor encourages him to draw Estella's portrait, since he can't dance or sing to entertain her.  What Finn doesn't know is that Ms. Dinsmoor is training Estella to win over men's hearts, as a method of getting ahead in the world. (It was a different time...). She even warns Finn that Estella will break his heart, but also she was aware that he was probably not going to heed the warning, because really, the only way to learn about the down side of romance is to go through it. Time passes and Finn grows older, but instead of sealing the deal with Estella or going on an actual date, she goes off to boarding school, and Finn realizes that he missed his window. 

So Finn goes to work on the fishing boat, his sister has gone AWOL and he gets a visit from a NYC lawyer, telling him that a gallery owner in New York is interested in his art, and a mysterious benefactor is going to pay for his plane tickets and expenses to go to the Big Apple.  Since he finds out that Estella lives there, naturally Finn assumes that Ms. Dinsmoor is his patron, and wants him to go pursue Estella, but we know what happens when you "assume", don't we?  Still, he takes the opportunity to leave the fishing business and make it happen in NYC, the only trouble becomes, what to paint?  Estella solves this problem by coming to his apartment and posing for him, which is problematic because she's dating someone and on the cusp of being engaged.  So yeah, everything seems to be coming together for Finn, except things are more complicated than ever.  

Estella does NOT show up for Finn's big gallery opening, but his uncle Joe does, and completely embarrasses him in front of the cultural elite in the art world.  Ms. Dinsmoor shows up, apparently she's got houses in both Manhattan and Louisiana, and she drops the bomb that she's in town for Estella's wedding. Once again, Estella was only toying with Finn, she only posed for him to make her boyfriend jealous, and thus caused him to propose.  

Then Finn gets a visit at his downtown loft from an older man, who needs to use his phone.  But it's the convict from the start of the story, Lustig escaped from prison again, years ago, and has been in hiding ever since.  But, he's done all right for himself, and reveals himself as Finn's mysterious benefactor, as Finn was the only person who ever did a kind favor for him, so any extra money he ever made went to fostering Finn's art career, and probably paying for that loft. Lustig is headed for Paris to start a new life there, and Finn takes him to the subway station, which will take him to the airport.  But there in the Chambers St. "A" station, Lustig sees some old friends from the neighborhood, and it doesn't end well. 

NITPICK POINT: Lustig and Finn get on a G train at Chambers St. to get away from these mobsters who have a beef with Lustig.  Only the G train doesn't stop there, it's really the ONE subway line that doesn't come into Manhattan at all, it just goes between Brooklyn and Queens.  But someone getting stabbed on the G train?  Well, that tracks, honestly.  But then the problem is that after they get away on the G train, one of the mobsters somehow catches up with the G train - how? By taking another train on the same line?  That's impossible, because another G train couldn't possibly catch up with the G train they were on.  Did he somehow jump on the back of the train after the doors had closed?  This guy just didn't look that athletic, sorry.  

Look, I could understand it if they were on an L train.  There are so many problems with the L train, between brakes being activated, sick passengers who need medical attention, and the line being completely shut down for random service upgrades, that if you needed to catch somebody on an L train that just left, you could take the A train to Broadway Junction the long way, catch another L train going in the other direction, and catch up that way, because the train they got on probably would break down somewhere right after Lorimer St..  For that matter, you could get on another train that went the long way around the surface of the entire planet and probably catch up with that L train that just left.  Seriously, I used my subway app to sign up for alerts every time there's trouble with the L and it's constant, all day every day.

Anyway, if you need help writing that book report for English class, this updated version of Dickens' story probably isn't going to be much help.  In the book Ms. Havisham dies when her wedding dress catches fire, but here Ms. Dinsmoor just kind of gets dementia and fades away.  Finn goes to Paris but returns to visit his uncle Joe, and then encounters Estella again, back in Ms. Dinsmoor's garden.  Estella is divorced or something, she has a daughter, but perhaps she's damaged enough now to finally be open to a relationship with Finn, they're both older and wiser and have made a few mistakes to learn from, and sure, that's where a lot of people might find themselves this day, so finally at the end there's something of a payoff for modernizing this whole affair. 

It kind of feels like somebody put this big cast together and then didn't know what to do with everyone, though.  Or they put out a big casting call and then just threw in whoever was available that day they were shooting the big gallery opening.  I mean, if you're going to cast Lance Reddick, you should really have something for Lance Reddick TO DO, not just be a guy at a party who might want to buy some art some day. Just saying. 

Also starring Ethan Hawke (last seen in "The Northman"), Gwyneth Paltrow (last seen in "Moonlight and Valentino"), Chris Cooper (last seen in "The Company You Keep"), Hank Azaria (last seen in "Eulogy"), Anne Bancroft (last seen in "I Could Never Be Your Woman"), Josh Mostel (last seen in "State of Play"), Kim Dickens (last seen in "Lizzie"), Nell Campbell (last seen in "The Killing Fields"), Gabriel Mann (last seen in "I Shot Andy Warhol"), Stephen Spinella (last seen in "The Normal Heart"), Jeremy James Kissner, Raquel Beaudene (last seen in "Boys and Girls"), Marla Sucharetza (last seen in "One for the Money"), Isabelle Anderson, Peter Jacobson (last seen in "Better Living Through Chemistry"), Drena De Niro (last seen in "City by the Sea"), Lance Reddick (last seen in "John Wick: Chapter 4"), Craig Braun (last seen in "Flawless"), Kim Snyder, Gerry Bamman (last seen in "Superstar"), Dorin Seymour, Marc Macaulay (last seen in "Cleaner"), Ana Susana Gerardino, Dale Resteghini.

RATING: 5 out of 10 sold paintings

About My Father

Year 16, Day 168 - 6/16/24 - Movie #4,757 - FATHER'S DAY FILM #5

BEFORE: We've come to another confluence this year, like earlier we had Easter Sunday butting up against April Fool's Day, and before that we had Ash Wednesday on the same day as Valentine's Day - now I blame the eclipse for these things maybe but come on, it's been a weird year as the calendar goes. Remember that there was another confluence, between the 2024 solar eclipse and the NCAA men's basketball championship game. If you were to tell me that Election Day, Veteran's Day and Thanksgiving were all in the same week in November this year, I'd be inclined to believe you.  But today is Father's Day and the last day of the Tribeca Film Festival, that's got to mean something to somebody, right?  

This year, the Tribeca Festival announced De Niro Con, which is a block of Robert De Niro films on the last three days of the festival - yesterday at the theater where I work there was a panel with De Niro and Quentin Tarantino, but of course it was my day off.  BUT, I've seen both of those people in person before, I met Tarantino at San Diego Comic-Con years ago, and I saw De Niro crossing the sidewalk to enter the theater last year to attend the premiere screening of "About My Father, on May 9, 2023.  That was the same day that it was announced that De Niro's girlfriend was pregnant, and he was due to become a father again at the age of 80.

The real De Niro Con officially ends today, but my own version is just starting - I've got a few of his films left that I haven't seen, so I'll cross those off this week, and then he also appears in the first film of my Documentary Block, so this means my month-long foray into docs is very, very close. 

THE PLOT: When Sebastian tells his old-school Italian immigrant father Salvo that he is going to propose to his all-American girlfriend, Salvo insists on crashing a weekend with her rich parents. 

AFTER: Yeah, maybe I wish this one had been funnier, but I suppose I could say that very often.  It's not laugh-out-loud funny, just kind of slice-of-life funny, if that makes sense.  But it kind of highlights the class difference in America, between the middle- and the upper-, or the difference between being a second-generation American and a tenth-generation, between someone whose ancestors came through Ellis Island and someone whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower. 

On the other hand, it also feels like kind of a re-tread of "Meet the Fockers", with the parents of both halves of a couple coming together, and them being total polar opposites of each other. 

Sebastian Maniscalco plays sort of a fictionalized version of himself, and I suppose that kind of warrants its own category in the year end wrap-up maybe, between "Die Hart" and "I Love My Dad" and probably a few others. 

The fear in both cases is that your parents are going to embarrass you, especially dear ol' Dad. Bringing your father along on a trip to your potential in-law's summer house on July 4 is a great idea, except that it's also a terrible idea.  Sebastian can't seem to properly play tennis when his dad is watching, because he's self-conscious about enjoying himself with his dad around, also he knows that his father's going to knock him for spending money on frivolous tennis lessons.  It's great that Salvo is there AND he runs a women's hair salon, because Ellie's mother, Tigger, needs to appear on MSNBC and because it's a holiday weekend, she can't get her hair done, so Salvo steps in.  Except that he gives her a near crew-cut, which is terrible.  Except that the TV viewers regard it as a "power" haircut, so it's actually a great political move.  Jeez, this movie can't seem to make up its mind about whether things are good or bad...

Ellie's parents own a giant hotel chain, and Sebastian also works in that industry, which is GOOD.  BUT he works for the competition, and he wants to marry their daughter, which is potentially BAD.  BUT they offer him a job managing a fancy hotel that they own, so that's GOOD, right?  Wrong, because that would mean he'd have to move out of Chicago, leaving his father behind, and that's BAD.  Plus Salvo already doesn't trust Ellie's parents, and them giving his son a new job somehow makes him trust them even less.  I mean, what are they up to, being so kind and generous and accepting, it's unnatural, right?  

Ellie's parents also scheme to have a famous designer buy a bunch of her "professional" artworks. Which is GOOD, except they didn't tell her that they were the ones financing the purchase of those artworks. so that's BAD.  And they want to put those artworks prominently in their hotels, which is GOOD, except then Sebastian recognizes one of her paintings in the hotel brochure they gave him, which is BAD, because now he's complicit in keeping their secret, unless he can find a way to tell his girlfriend that her parents secretly bought her paintings, which made her feel GOOD but if she knew that her parents were giving her money, again, that would be BAD.  She just wants to be successful in her artistic endeavors because she earned it, and she can't do that if her parents keep helping her out. 

Look, I'm exhausted, I just got home after a 16 hour shift at the theater, so I've got to wrap this up.  What we've learned from this year's Father's Day movies is that fathers want to protect their sons and daughters, and are willing to go to some crazy insane lengths to do that.  Ellie's father was willing to buy a bunch of her paintings to make her feel successful, and Sebastian's father was willing to compete in July 4 party games and a hot-dog eating contest and have actual FUN just to try and figure out if his son's girlfriend's family were decent people, and if Ellie was worth giving Sebastian grandma's ring so he could propose. Joe Russo got his son's girlfriend to pretend to get back together with him so he wouldn't be depressed and therefore practice basketball and win that scholarship to Drexel, and craziest of all, Chuck catfished his own son and pretended to be a waitress named Becca in order to give him something to live for.  Yeah, these fathers ALL screwed up, but they all did it to protect their children, so, really, they care too much and they have a really screwy way of showing it.  OK, maybe there's a lesson in there somewhere, I don't know, I'm way too tired. 

I hope you got to take your father out to brunch or lunch or dinner, and it wasn't too crowded.  If you don't live nearby, I hope you were able to connect on the phone.  And if your father is no longer with us, I hope you have good memories that you can keep with you.  

Also starring Robert De Niro (last seen in "Stanley & Iris"), Leslie Bibb (last seen in "No Good Deed"), Kim Cattrall (last seen in "The Bonfire of the Vanities"), David Rasche (last seen in "Kill Your Darlings"), Anders Holm (last seen in "Top Five"), Brett Dier, Adan James Carrillo, Colby Shinn, Jessie Camacho, Carla Christina Contreras, Arielle Prepetit, Zue Farmer, Marisa Cornett

with cameos from Chris Hayes (last seen in "Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump"), Ana Navarro, Jonathan Van Ness. 

RATING: 4 out of 10 bottles of "night cologne"