BEFORE: OK, a banner day today because I passed on this film several times before - I'm thinking I didn't watch it during my Adam Sandler chains because it seemed more like a ensemble romance film, and then when February rolled around, maybe I didn't watch it because it was an Adam Sandler film? Or maybe I just ran out of space several times OR maybe I saw how much linking potential this film has, and thought I should save it for a rainy day to get myself out of a linking jam. Well, I'm tired of passing on this film, it's past the time to get rid of it.
Now, this film does connect to several other romances on my list, such as "Good Luck to You, Leo Grande" and "New in Town", but I can't concern myself with that. I'm stranding some other films about love tonight, but I'll just have to deal with that next year - maybe some new films will be added to the list that connect to those stragglers, there's no way to predict that.
We've got another increasingly rare Birthday SHOUT-out today - Jason Douglas, born February 14 of some year, but the IMDB won't tell me WHAT year. Well that's odd. Also I've become an expert on various character actors of all sorts and I have no idea who this man is, despite 322 acting credits - he was on "The Walking Dead" but I don't watch that show. Ah, he played the town sheriff in "Jack Reacher: Never Go Back" and the infamous "Wayne" in the movie "Snitch". Nope, still doesn't help. Ah, well, I hope you enjoy your birthday, Jason Douglas, however old you're turning today, and I hope you get to spend time with your wife, Jessica, and your three kids.
Kaitlyn Dever carries over from "Ticket to Paradise", and here's the line-up for Saturday, 2/15, Day 15 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar":
Best Picture Winners and Nominees:
5:30 am "The Racket" (1928)
7:00 am "The Big House" (1930)
8:30 am "A Farewell to Arms" (1932)
10:15 am "The Barretts of Wimpole Street" (1934)
12:15 pm "Mister Roberts" (1955)
2:30 pm "The Yearling" (1946)
4:45 pm "Around the World in 80 Days" (1956)
Oscar Worthy Cowboys:
8:00 pm "True Grit" (1969)
10:15 pm "Cat Ballou" (1965)
12:00 am "Giant" (1956)
3:30 am "The Westerner" (1940)
I was at 68 seen out of 163, I've seen 4 out of Saturday's 11: "Mister Roberts", "Around the World in 80 Days", "Cat Ballou" and "Giant". They played "Giant" as the closing film of the Tribeca Festival two years ago, and it was a last-minute addition to the line-up that meant I couldn't lock up the theater for another 3 1/2 hours, so thanks for the extra pay, guys! SO now 72 seen out of 174 takes me down just a bit to 41.3%.
THE PLOT: A group of high school teenagers and their parents attempt to navigate the many ways the internet has changed their relationships, their communications, their self-images and their love lives.
AFTER: I forgot yesterday to mention my preferred mental metaphor for marriage - I think of it like a minefield. You know in a war movie when someone wanders off into a minefield, then they have to walk very carefully through it, or else one wrong step will blow off a limb, or several bad moves in sequence will blow them to little bits? Yeah, that's marriage, but maybe I'm coming at the concept like a formerly divorced person would, of course your experience might vary. If you say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing where your spouse is concerned, then you might have to tread very carefully, and be very aware of your actions while you retrace your steps and back out of the danger zone. Or your actions could be so wild and egregious and against the rules of common decency that you blow up the whole damn deal, and then you're alone again and you'll feel like a pile of warm body parts that used to be a soldier. The two leads in last night's film had felt that way for years, because they walked through the minefield of marriage and they each set off a few mines, I'll bet, and so neither had much interest in walking back into that danger zone, at least not at first.
Now, tonight's film happens to not be a very romantic one, so maybe it's not the best film for the big holiday itself, but, you know, those are the breaks. I think there might be a wedding featured in every film these week EXCEPT the one that landed on V-Day, so maybe I shouldn't have added that extra Sally Field film, but I work with what I have, the chain still knows best. Last year's film on Feb. 14 was "Moonlight and Valentino", and it was about a wife dealing with her husband's sudden death from an accident, and again, not exactly the most joyous of films, but with movies as with relationships you have to take the bad news with the good, I guess. Anyway we're here tonight to learn about modern relationships (OK, so the film's 10 years old, whatever) and how they've been affected by the internet and smart phones and social media.
Teens especially, but adults also to a lesser extent, have had their lives changed by technology - how they communicate with each other, how they see themselves and how they represent themselves online, and then there's the matter of relationships. There are no wrong answers in this discussion because really, they're all wrong answers. Grammar and spelling have gone completely out the window when people talk with as few letters as possible, LOL, BRB, WTF or sometimes by only using images and no letters at all. Time was that you could send somebody a picture of an eggplant or a peach and you would just be suggesting what to eat for dinner and maybe dessert. Well, that ship sure sailed.
We start with the average American (Texas, but OK) family - Donald Truby is a man addicted to porn, and it's so bad that his laptop has become infected with malware and the videos won't even load any more, so he has to use his son Chris's computer just to be able to see the porn now, and a search through his son's browser history reveals that his son has the same addiction. Twinsies! Also, umm, yuck. The time-honored tradition of sneaking a peek at your dad's Playboy or Penthouse magazines is long gone when you realize your son's been watching even dirtier stuff on YouPorn than you do. Chris is a football player who finally makes a move on one of the cheerleaders, but he's watched so many porn clips that he has no idea how regular people have sex in the real world, or perhaps he can now only get aroused by the porn, that can happen when you limit your diet like that. Like there are people who only eat mashed potatoes or one simliar food, because they are comforted by it and they can't leave that comfort zone to try something else. Porn rewards the viewer with the dopamine they get through sexual release, and then they don't have to go through all the trouble of having a conversation with someone and then trying to convince that person to have sex with them, porn is the instant hit, the sure thing, every time.
Donald's wife is unsatisfied in the relationship (gee, maybe it has something to do with all the porn her husband watches) so she turns to Ashley Madison, which was a site back then that many people, married or single, used to hook up with other horny people on the D.L. Her first few affairs are satisfying, so she's not really inclined to stop that, either, while her husband uses the SAME internet to find paid escorts, so yeah, these two really deserve each other. The funny thing is that they relate to each other better when they're both having sex with people outside the marriage. And here I thought they were going to pull an updated version of "The Pina Colada Song" and get these two to accidentally date each other, but nope, they're using different web-sites for their hook-ups so that's not likely to happen.
That cheerleader Chris tried to have sex with was Hannah, and she's one of those influencers, always posing in provocative outfits because that's what brings in the likes and the followers, and her mother is taking the photos and promoting her daughter as a "model", but in that case, how far is too far? Unless you can get her sponsors or advertisers that still isn't going to pay for her college, and Hannah's audition for a TV series doesn't go well once the TV people see her web-site with the almost-nudie pics. Yeah, they were looking for a more wholesome type, and posting too many swimsuit pics just makes her look, umm, non-wholesome.
Hannah's mother, Donna, starts dating Kent, whose wife abandoned him several years ago, so he's raising his son Tim solo after the divorce. Kent wants his son to keep playing football, but Tim wants to quit because he doesn't see the point, plus he wants to have more time for online gaming, so he's depressed all the time - until he meets Brandy, an introverted girl who has to deal with her over-protective mother who monitors all of her texts, keeps adult men out of her Facebook contacts, and obsessively tracks her phone so she'll know where Brandy is at all times. Well, she's not wrong, exactly, there are a lot of creepos out there on the Facebook, but there needs to come a point where you trust your kids to act properly, or not, because at some point it does become THEIR decision who to see and who to sleep with, but Brandy's mother is just not ready to surrender that power. When she learns that Brandy has a secret Tumblr account where she can "be someone else" and also that she's been sneaking off to make out with Tim, she shuts that down by sending Tim break-up texts from Brandy's phone. (What could POSSIBLY go wrong there?)
Then there's one more cheerleader, Allison, who starved herself all summer so she'd look better in her selfies. Football player Brandon finally notices her as a result, and after they share a kiss he suggests they have sex so she can get her first time over with, sure it might hurt a bit but then it's done, right? No consequences unless she has an ectopic pregnancy and miscarriage caused by her malnutrition, but really, what are the odds of THAT?
Wow, that's a lot of dysfunction and miscommunication and messed-up relationship stuff for one high school in one little town in Texas, right? And if this is just one town, imagine what's going on all day, every day, across this great nation of ours. So if you came here today for a happy film about love on Valentine's Day, I'm sorry, but you came to the wrong place. My imperfect process has sent us a message today, we need to be kinder to each other, and also respect the Earth because it's just a little blue dot in an enormous universe of nothingness, and when it's gone, nobody out there will even notice. But the good news is that we've identified the culprit for all of these social problems - it's football, and cheerleading! Nothing good can come from either of those two things. Boys get injured playing football and also it causes friction between them and their parents when they lose games or decide they don't want to play any more. Meanwhile girls who go out for cheerleading have to wear those short skirts and put themselves on display, while maintaining an impossible standard where beauty and fitness are concerned, some starve themselves and others get injured doing stunts, so remind me again, what's the upside? Plus they all end up with those horrible stuck-up attitudes and get impregnated by the jocks, so really, why do we even bother with this?
I'm just kidding, the internet is at fault here, it's the source of all the modern problems, from non-censored hate speech to easier access to degrading pornography to web-sites that make it much too easy to cheat on your spouse. Sure, the internet has made it easier to order food, look up crossword puzzle answers and play games on your phone until 4 am, but with all that has come a lot of downsides, too. There's neck pain and sore fingers and blurred vision, not to mention all the things that Instagram does to people's minds. But good news, soon A.I.'s going to take over the whole store, and it's going to be able to figure out what images we want to see, based on our most secret inner fantasies, and then show them to us, so real people won't be exploited any more, and then everything's going to be just fine. And then one day soon that Voyager spacecraft's going to reach some alien race, and they'll be so intrigued by the message of hope we sent to them that they'll head over to our solar system and find us, then either eat us or enslave us, so problem solved.
If you're not having the best of Valentine Days, if you're divorced and lonely or single and lonely, I wish you some kind of solace and remind you that it's not your fault, it's the internet's. Get out there and meet some new people, fall in love, get your heart broken but don't stop playing the game, just remember to STAY OFF the internet. No good can come from it.
Directed by: Jason Reitman (director of "Ghostbusters: Afterlife")
Also starring Adam Sandler (last heard in "Leo"), Jennifer Garner (last seen in "Deadpool & Wolverine"), Rosemarie DeWitt (last seen in "Your Sister's Sister"), Judy Greer (last seen in "Jeff, Who Lives at Home"), Dean Norris (last seen in "Fool's Paradise"), Timothée Chalamet (last seen in "Dune: Part Two"), Olivia Crocicchia, Ansel Elgort (last seen in "Allegiant"), Katharine Hughes (last seen in "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl"), Elena Kampouris (last seen in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2"), Will Peltz (last seen in "Sierra Burgess Is a Loser"), Travis Tope (last seen in "Independence Day: Resurgence"), David Denman (last seen in "The Nines"), Dennis Haysbert (last seen in "The Minus Man"), J.K. Simmons (last seen in "Jennifer's Body"), Colby Arps, Shane Lynch (last seen in "A Very Murray Christmas"), Jason Douglas (last seen in "Snitch"), Phil LaMarr (last heard in "Kung Fu Panda 4"), Kaleb King (last seen in "Everybody Wants Some!!"), Christina Burdette (ditto), Richard Dillard (last seen in "The Last Stand"), Tina Parker (last seen in "Minari"), David Jahn, Jake McDermott, Kathrine Herzer (last seen in "Barely Lethal"), Helen Estabrook, Jeff Witzke (last seen in "The Front Runner"), Jillian Nicole Jackson, Dan Gozhansky, Tori Black (last seen in "Don Jon"), Irene White (last seen in "The 15;17 to Paris"), Luci Christian, Jaren Lewison (last seen in "Tag"), Craig Nigh, Candace Lantz, Jon Michael Davis (last seen in "Green Book"), Nick W. Nicholson, Kristin McKenzie Rice and the voice of Emma Thompson (last seen in "Beautiful Creatures")
RATING: 4 out of 10 hours spent playing "Guild Wars"
No comments:
Post a Comment