BEFORE: I have a big day today, I've got to get up early and go a couple miles across Queens by bus because there's another German pork store closing down, now I love German cold cuts and during the pandemic I found a ton of places to buy them, but unfortunately now even the ones who made it through seem to be closing. Last year there was one in my neighborhood of Ridgewood that shut down, and now the great one in Glendale that's next to a restaurant called Zum Stammtisch is closing, though the restaurant is staying open, I guess not enough people love head cheese and liverwurst as much as I do, not enough to sustain a specialty store. So now I've got to go there on a Thursday before the place shuts down on Saturday, as I'm afraid by the weekend there won't be anything left in the store, they're for sure not re-stocking if they know they're closing on March 1. Then I've got to come back home and go out again tonight for an animation event pretty much on the other side of Ridgewood, so a lot of traveling across my neighborhood by bus today.
Kyle Bornheimer carries over from "Bachelorette". Now here's the line-up for Friday, 2/28, Day 28 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar".
Best Costume Winners and Nominees:
9:00 am "The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm" (1962)
11:30 am "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" (1962)
2:00 pm "Raintree County" (1957)
5:00 pm "Tess" (1979)
Oscar Worthy Dads:
8:00 pm "Life Is Beautiful" (1997)
10:15 pm "On Golden Pond" (1981)
12:15 am "Fiddler on the Roof" (1971)
3:30 am "The Great Santini" (1979)
5:30 am "Life with Father" (1947)
I was at 131 seen out of 314, and I've seen another 6 out of Friday's 9 - "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?"), "Tess", "Life Is Beautiful", "On Golden Pond", "Fiddler on the Roof" and "Life with Father". It's nearly my last chance to increase my stats. SO now 137 seen out of 323 takes me up to 42.4%.
THE PLOT: A couple experiences a defining moment in their relationship when they are unintentionally embroiled in a murder mystery.
AFTER: Well, I made it to the German pork store, and I was right, they were already out of a bunch of things, like the type of liverwurst I like. Other people of German descent were at the store today for the same reason, to get the bratwurst or other meats they like before the store runs out. I did get a pound of head cheese, some blutwurst and some ham, bologna and muenster cheese, and a sandwich to eat outside because I didn't want to wait to get home, it was a long ride on two different buses, back and forth. Then I went with my wife to the wholesale club, she just renewed her membership, and after that she dropped me off at the animation event, so I didn't have to go home, then take another bus. Animated shorts are a weird little animal, often you watch them and realize they don't really have much of a story, because sometimes the animator just wants to evoke an idea or a feeling, rather than tell a coherent story with plot points. There's not much time, it's a short film after all, but then you can be scratching your head after, wondering what the film you just watched was about. This is kind of why shorts aren't allowed on my blog, occasionally I'll watch one before a feature but then I don't really count the short in the tally, and partly that's because so many of them are, well, non-narrative. It's rare when you see an animated short that MEANS something or has a real point to make, sure some of them get a bad rap for this, but the problem persists.
Anyway, tonight's LONG feature (which actually isn't that long, it's just 86 min., so the shortest feature I've watched so far this year) is about a couple that's been together four years, and they feel like they fight a lot, but really, what they're doing is bickering. That's anything that might sound like a fight, but the issue at hand isn't all that important or serious, and nobody's really going to break up over bickering, or just mild disagreeing. Take my wife and me, we bicker over things like whether it makes sense to join one of those wholesale clubs, and she'll pay the fee to have a yearly membership because she thinks shopping there saves money. However, I'll argue that buying in bulk does make sense if you have five or more kids, or if you own a restaurant you're trying to stock, but for a couple with no kids, it makes no sense because they make you buy three of everything, which is more expensive when you buy, and also when you end up throwing food away because it goes bad. Like we stopped buying milk by the gallon because we don't drink much, and then half goes sour and we pour it down the drain - the two of us don't even usually get through a quart, so it makes more sense to buy a quart, however when we go to the wholesale club and see a gallon for $3.00, that SEEMS like a good deal, only it isn't if we're just not going to drink all of that. I'd rather buy one bottle of ketchup for $4 at the regular supermarket every two months than buy THREE now for $12, because it kind of feels like more money's staying in my pocket. So I go with her and try to point out which "deals" at the wholesale club make sense to buy. OK, so they were selling five dozen eggs for $30, which honestly seems cheap what with egg-flation going around due to the avian flu, and really, that's two eggs for a dollar, a good deal maybe. But then we have 60 eggs in the house, and how long will it take us to eat all those eggs? So honestly I'd rather pay $12 for 12 eggs, maybe each individual egg is more expensive that way, but we're paying out less money overall. Bottom line, I don't think the wholesale club saves money if it forces us to buy more stuff than we need, yet people still walk out of there having spent $300 and believing that they somehow saved money.
Leilani and Jibran in this film also have debates like this, and so they're under the impression that their relationship is problematic, but seen from another angle, hey, they're just like any married couple that argue about how to do things. They think they have to break up, because they don't see their little disagreements for what they are, a dress rehearsal for being married. But right after they break up, they get caught up in a murder situation, and since a guy who said he was a cop basically car-jacked them and ran a guy over, they believe that as people of color, they will be blamed for this murder and the police will track them down through their car and hold them responsible. So, out of desperation, they go on the run and try to solve the murder themselves, thinking it will be easier to go to the police if they already know the identity of the man who commandeered their car. I guess there's some logic there, but of course it's twisted and panic-fueled.
Well, I did say I needed a break from romance movies, because it turns out that watching a whole month of rom-coms will distort your views on relationships. "The Lovebirds" is essentially an action comedy with a couple in it, so yeah, this really couldn't have come at a better time. "Bachelorette" took a similar tack, detailing the events of one long night as people race across the city to fix their situation, however "Bachelorette" was neither as funny NOR as serious as today's film. Plus it was very stupid and every character was a terrible person. This one had more heart and was better planned out, as the two leads are motivated to solve the crime, like who was that guy who took their car, who was the guy on the bicycle he killed, and perhaps most importantly, WHY?
When our heroes get knocked out by a congressman's wife and they wake up, tied up in a barn, with someone demanding that they give up the pictures that their boss is using as blackmail material, well that's when they (and we) get the first clue about what's really going on. There's also a weird sex cult similar to the one seen in "Eyes Wide Shut" but eventually Leilani and Jibran end up in police custody, only to find out that they were never really considered to be murder suspects at all. They were worried over nothing, it turns out, because the police have video footage of the murder, after all there are cameras everywhere these days. Makes sense - but the pair still isn't out of danger, for reasons I can't give out here. No spoilers.
Does it make complete sense that witnessing a murder together and then going all over New Orleans during a wild night, encountering all kinds of weird people in an attempt to clear their names, would be the thing that brings them back together? Nah, not really but at least it's a bunch of wild action and crazy fun, and I was rooting for them the whole time because they're not horrible people. Also, they just want to compete on "The Amazing Race" together, which is a noble goal. (A reminder that this blog does NOT accept any advertising dollars of any kind, so when I tell you that season 37 of "The Amazing Race" begins on CBS on March 5, you know it's because I really love that show.)
Directed by: Michael Showalter (director of "Spoiler Alert")
Also starring Issa Rae (last seen in "Barbie"), Kumail Nanjiani (last seen in "Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire"), Paul Sparks (last seen in "The Bikeriders"), Anna Camp (last seen in "Jerry and Marge Go Large"), Nicholas X. Parsons (last seen in "We Have a Ghost"), Barry Rothbart (last seen in "Dean"), Catherine Cohen, Andrene Ward-Hammond (last seen in "Assassination Nation"), Lisha Wheeler, Moses Storm (last seen in "Fool's Paradise"), Nelson Cepeda, Casey Hendershot (last seen in "Jackpot!"), Aaron Abrams (last seen in "Jesus Henry Christ"), Joe Chrest (last seen in "Love, Wedding, Marriage"), Blaine Kern III (last seen in "The Dirt"), Briana Liu, Matthew Rimmer (last seen in "Grudge Match"), Jaren Mitchell, Betsy Borrego, Kelly Angell (Murtagh), Rob Eubanks, Mahdi Cocci, Joe Camp III, Gralen Bryant Banks (last seen in "The Burial"), Robert Larriviere (last seen in "Poms"), Shannon Nicole and the voice of Phil Keoghan
RATING: 6 out of 10 attempts to guess a phone password
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