BEFORE: Another weekend is here, they seem to be coming on faster and faster, is that because we all start looking forward to them on Tuesday, or does time somehow speed up when you make it to your mid-late 50's? Well, I'm not working at the theater this weekend, so I've got two days to fill, or at least a day and a half after we get our taxes done and hit IHOP. You know, I'll probably waste a bunch of it by sleeping late on Sunday, and then the rest will probably be spent dubbing movies to DVD and then going through the lists of what's new on the various streaming platforms this month, I'm three weeks behind on that.
Allison Janney carries over from "The DUFF" and she's now in the lead for appearances this year all by herself, with 6 movies. Sally Field is in second place with 5. Now here's the line-up for Sunday, 2/23, Day 23 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar". Just over a week to go, the Oscars ceremony is right around the corner now.
Best Picture Winners and Nominees:
8:00 am "49th Parallel" (1941)
10:15 am "42nd Street" (1933)
12:00 pm "Grand Hotel" (1932)
2:00 pm "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (1958)
4:00 pm "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" (1967)
6:00 pm "Driving Miss Daisy" (1989)
Oscar Worthy Journalists:
8:00 pm "All the President's Men" (1976)
10:30 pm "The China Syndrome" (1979)
12:45 am "Network" (1976)
3:00 am "Woman of the Year" (1942)
5:00 am "The Front Page" (1931)
I was at 105 seen out of 255, and I've seen just another 8 out of Sunday's 11 - everything but the first two and the last one (I watched the remake of "The Front Page", made in the 1970's though)
SO now 113 seen out of 266 takes me back up to 42.4%.
THE PLOT: A teenage girl learns to cope with her parents' divorce, her sister's wedding, her best friend's pregnancy and the attentions of her first serious boyfriend.
AFTER: This film is not streaming anywhere, though I did record it on my DVR, that was the OLD DVR that I turned in last month in favor of the new one. I lost about 45 movies that way, but once I watch one of those films through some other method, then I no longer consider each film "lost", I cross if off that list and add it to a different list, the list of films that I have seen but I don't have a physical DVD copy of. You know, an emergency back-up collection in case all streaming suddenly stops one day or the Library of Congress burns down and they need someone to step in and re-supply them. Look, I don't know why I keep storing everything on DVDs, they probably laugh at me at Staples every time I buy a package of blanks, like "Oh, here's the last guy using DVDs, he's back to buy more!" Maybe I just like finding the movies on cable and crossing them off the list, it brings me some satisfaction, or perhaps it's just a habit I can't seem to break.
But I think I know WHY this film isn't streaming anywhere right now, it's, well, it's not very good. It's centered on Halley, a teenage girl and thankfully the movie spends almost ZERO time at her school, because we've seen all that in movies before, it feels like just yesterday because it was. But all that stuff is played out, they tried to make her home life more interesting vis-a-vis relationships. Her parents are divorced, and her dad is a local soft-rock DJ who's planning to elope with his new girlfriend, only they also want to have an elopement party, which is really counter-productive, but this guy can't resist being the center of attention. Meanwhile her mother is busy being bitter about the break-up, an attempt to record a message for potential online dates ends in disaster when she yells at the camera. OK, we'll circle back to that later.
Halley just can't deal with how horrible her parents' divorce was, and more importantly, how it affected HER, because it's 2003 and she's a millennial who makes everything about HER. Meanwhile her older sister, Ashley, just got engaged and she totally forgot to consider how her engagement announcement (happening on the same day as the finalization of Halley's parents' divorce) would affect Halley. How dare she try to live her life and be happy! Doesn't she know that 100% of the marriages that Halley is aware of don't last? What's the point of trying to be happy in a post-Y2K world, anyway?
Same goes for Scarlett, Halley's best friend, who starts a relationship with Michael, the school soccer champ, without realizing how that was going to affect Halley's ability to run over to her house and burst into her bedroom without knocking. It's like Scarlett didn't even THINK of that when she initiated the relationship. Michael's best friend, Macon, is always hanging around, and it seems only natural that Michael and Halley should get together and then they'd be a foursome that could double-date - only Halley doesn't like Michael all that much, he's the bad boy type with hair hanging in his face and he also skips school for like a week at a time with no explanation. Why couldn't Scarlett pick a guy to date whose best friend would be a better match for Halley? That was very inconsiderate of her, and when Michael dies unexpectedly after a soccer match, it's like karma, right? He deserved to die because he didn't have a better best friend for Halley to hook up with.
Nevertheless, Halley starts dating Macon, after the funeral anyway, and after Scarlett finds out that her summer fling with Michael got her knocked up, which means at some point she'll have less time to spend with Halley, again, this is very inconsiderate of her. Halley's mother catches her making out with Macon and grounds her, so she can't go to the New Years Eve party, what a bitch Halley's mom is, especially since she's getting it on with the mailman, so what right does she have to dictate who Halley can make out with? Remember, this is all about entitled Halley. So even when she's in a car crash with Macon, and he drops her off at the hospital, she's very upset that he just drove away and didn't hang around, the NERVE of that kid. He explains that he didn't want to get in trouble with Halley's mother, but it's no use, he wasn't there when Halley woke up, so she simply has to break up with him. How else is he going to learn to BE there for her?
After that, Halley plays a part in breaking up her sister's engagement - really, they deserved it for not, umm, well I'm sure they did something that Halley didn't approve of, like they made her go to that stupid dinner with Ashley's future in-laws where she couldn't cut up a quail right and also got caught smoking in a bathroom where a dog jumped through a window for some reason. Really, this movie's like some kind of fever dream, it doesn't make any sense and random things happen and also there's a dog that you've never seen before. But then the wedding is back on because Lewis brought flowers to the airport so Halley has to wear a very stupid unflattering purple bridesmaid dress, and again, people are just NOT taking her into consideration when they make these decisions, so she's got like an infinite number of things to complain about.
As the movie title suggests, maybe it's a lot to deal with, however the movie never, ever offers any advice on HOW to deal, which, you know, might have been appropriate. Should Halley do yoga or meditate, or just dance to burn off some tension? I don't know, but you'd think a movie called "How to Deal" would offer up some suggestions on that point, and it just doesn't, as if somebody forgot to write that part. There's a lot that happens, sure, but do those things come together and tell a coherent narrative that makes sense and also maybe offers some insight to the human condition? No, of course not. Life ain't nothing but a bunch of irritating problems that you have to deal with until you graduate from high school and move away, leaving your mother to figure out whether she wants to live there alone or move. I'm not saying life ISN'T a never-ending succession of minor irritations and major life problems, but we all watch movies to get away from all that, don't we?
I probably know what you're wondering, why not put the two Mandy Moore films this month next to each other, isn't that the point of all this linking? For that matter, why not put the two films with Jayne Eastwood next to each other, or why have two sets of two Heather Graham films, instead of four all in a row? Look, I only need ONE connection between each film and the next, there are connections all over the place that I don't follow, that's just the way it works, and I planned out a chain that was the right number of movies for the space I had to fill, and it works. If you think you can do better than me at the linking, you're welcome to try. Knock yourself out.
Also starring Mandy Moore (last seen in "Love, Wedding, Marriage"), Trent Ford (last seen in "The Island"), Alexandra Holden (last seen in "In a World..."), Dylan Baker (last seen in "Miss Sloane"), Nina Foch (last seen in "You're Never Too Young"), Peter Gallagher (last seen in "Palm Springs"), Mackenzie Astin (last seen in "Wyatt Earp"), Connie Ray (last seen in "Worth"), Mary Catherine Garrison (last seen in "Begin Again"), Sonja Smits (last seen in "Owning Mahowny"), Laura Catalano (last seen in "Elvis Meets Nixon"), Ray Kahnert, Andrew Gillies (last seen in "The Virgin Suicides"), John White, Alison MacLeod (last seen in 'The Time Traveler's Wife"), Bill Lake (last seen in "Fatman"), Charlotte Sullivan (last seen in "Fever Pitch"), Philip Akin (last seen in "The Man"), Claire Crawford, Ennis Esmer (also last seen in "Miss Sloane"), Thomas Hauff (last seen in "Molly's Game"), Darryl Pring (last seen in "The Boondock Saints II: All Sants Day"), Patrice Goodman, Audrey Gardiner, Jayne Eastwood (last seen in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3"), Judi Croon, Sandi Ross (last seen in "Guilty as Sun"), Gabrielle Ashry, Dana Reznik, Darrin Brown (last seen in "Shotgun Wedding"), Darrell Hicks, Jon Hyatt, Jeff White (last seen in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2").
RATING: 4 out of 10 grapefruit segments
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