BEFORE: I am under the weather today, I had a small cold and then drank 2 beers on Friday night, thinking I could curtail it, or at least force myself to sleep it off. It didn't work, so today when my manager texted me to remind me that I'm working Sunday morning AND I'm going to lose an hour's sleep to the stupidity of Daylight Savings Time, I figured I'd better back out while there was still time for someone to cover my Sunday morning shift at the NY International Children's Film Festival. Look, I have trouble getting up early as it is, but when you throw in the loss of an hour's sleep AND a head cold, I'm just not going to make it. I would have woken up in a panic at 9:30 or 10 when I was supposed to be there at 9:00, and well, the results were not going to be pretty. I've got a chance to use some of those sick hours that have been piling up for three years, I'm sure I'm at the maximum number they can give me because I never (OK, hardly ever) use them. Well, tomorrow I'm using them and the festival will have to go on without me. I need a weekend just to drink soup and coffee and DayQuil and just sit and watch TV until there's no more TV to watch. Sorry, but I'm tapping out. I took a COVID test and it came up negative, so it's just a cold, but why go to work in a public space and infect other people? I've covered other people's shifts when they get sick, so this weekend, it's my turn.
Dagmara Dominczyk carries over from "Priscilla".
THE PLOT: A searing look at a day in the life of a powerful executive. As Jane follows her daily routine, she grows increasingly aware of the insidious abuse that threatens every aspect of her position.
AFTER: Sad to say, we're in the dark side of the romance chain now, or else the chain is really over and we're on to something else, it's tough to say. But I'm on powerful celebrities grooming teenage brides, and today it's an executive fostering an environment of toxic masculinity and abuse toward his female assistant. This is the film they show us now in NYC as an example of harassment in the workplace, and also the way some managers try to stamp out reporting of that harassment, because really, in the end, what's the harm? Male executives have run the film industry for a very long time and they've burned through hundreds of assistants and interns but the business is doing well, so why mess with a good thing?
Actually, they just show that CLIP of Jane visiting the H.R. manager and then walking away without filing any sort of claim against her boss, which I'm sure goes on, however I had not yet seen the whole film, so I didn't really have the right context for the use of that clip in last year's anti-harassment training. Honestly I was thinking, "No spoilers! I haven't seen the film yet, and now I know that she never files a claim! How about a damn spoiler alert during this training session?"
There's no surprise that there are bosses out there who abuse the system, they take advantage of young interns both work-wise and sexually, even though some of the worst offenders have been publicly removed from their positions, it's probably still happening, and cultural change is not system-wide just yet. Although we never SEE the boss in question during this film, we hear his voice when he yells at Jane for her latest "mistake", like saying the wrong thing to his wife when she calls about her credit cards being put on hold, or asking too many questions about why the new intern is being put in a very nice hotel room, or writing out checks with no payee name, which will then be used for God knows what.
Obviously, the boss is a serial cheater, and in other news, water is wet. You don't get to be a chief executive, generally speaking, or the head of a network or the President of the U.S., or anyone in a position of power without, on some level, taking advantage of your position or re-defining your moral position on fidelity. It's human nature, we want all that we have and just a bit more. I've been working in the studio recently with original art from an illustrated book about Monica Lewinsky, and that just kind of brings it all back, Bill Clinton's affairs and how Hillary had to look the other way, again and again. He was hardly the first President to have an affair, it was just the first time we all KNEW about it during his term. Right? But Trump's no different, except for Biden, probably every President did it, going back to Jefferson at least.
My first job in the film industry, I got a hint of what was to come, because I worked for a couple of directors who had been married but were recently separated, and they were each dating other people within the company or worked on productions with the company. I didn't feel like I was better than them, because I was with my first girlfriend/wife, who also worked as a sound assistant, and sometimes I got her jobs on shoots and sometimes she got me jobs on shoots, so it seemed very normal to be sleeping with an occasional co-worker, and that's just how the business runs. But when one director came back from a business trip to Asia and told me about the women he'd slept with there, I said, "Don't tell me, because I know your wife AND your girlfriend and you're putting me in a weird spot."
So here's this film about an assistant to a film executive, and she has to return found earrings to her boss's hook-ups, and she has to arrive early each day to clean stains from his office furniture, and OK, that's a shitty thing to have to do, and maybe it's a terrible job, but I don't see those things as harassment or abuse, that's just part of a shitty job. He may have no right to yell at her for perceived mistakes, but again, shitty boss, not necessarily harassment in my book. Hey, she's free to leave the job at any time if she doesn't like the tasks - or she's free to find a better job in the same company or a different company. I didn't really like my job sweeping up trash in a movie theater during the COVID summer of 2021, but I needed the money, and I used my dislike for the job as motivation to find a better job and get the hell out of that one. They asked me one morning to clean all of the bathrooms, and you know, that's really not my thing, but I did it, begrudgingly and then re-worked my schedule so I wouldn't be available for morning shifts, which is when they clean the bathrooms. An alternative solution would have been to do a really terrible job cleaning the bathrooms, so they wouldn't ask me to do it again, but my strategy was a bit more elegant.
You may notice that Jane is the first one in the office in the morning, and the last one to leave. Again, part of being in a terrible job but this also doesn't really constitute abuse, not if she's being paid by the hour. It's dark when she arrives and it's dark when she leaves, but this could just be a little thing we call winter. I remember having days working on film shoots where I went into a studio before sunrise and left late at night because I was always the one who had to paint the backdrop in the morning and then paint it back to white at night, so yeah, there were weekends where I never saw the sun, and sure, that affects you. "Hooker hours", I used to call it, because I'd pass hookers on the West Side both coming to the set and when going home. That was also a shitty job, but I kept at it until I found a way to get out and do something better.
So I don't know, this is kind of a nothing-burger of a movie to me, maybe because I'm too close to it. I've been through many of these same struggles at low-paying jobs with long hours working for demanding bosses. Maybe this means I've been abused, but I was always compensated for my time, and I stuck with it until I was considered a veteran, then moved on to the next thing. I'm sorry if I don't sound sympathetic to the main character's plight here, maybe I've just built up my own tolerance over the years. Or maybe it's the fact that after this film came out, we've seen "Bombshell" and "She Said" and others that were more direct about this sexual harassment problem and who the perpetrators were. I'm sorry I took so long to get to this one, but as a result, the topic is kind of played out now.
Oh, and Patrick Wilson has a cameo in this one - he's another person I saw at the theater, for the premiere of a film called "Ordinary Angels", he was outside waving at the fans and I was on outside tent duty. Again, I'm not supposed to engage but if I had, I could have mentioned that I've spoken on the phone with his wife, Dagmara, who is also my acting link for the next couple days. I'll explain the circumstances on Monday. But yeah, I'm a big fan of Patrick Wilson, who got to be in TWO big DC Comics movies, "Aquaman" and my favorite, "Watchmen".
Directed by Kitty Green
Also starring Julia Garner (last seen in "Sin City: A Dame to Kill For"), Matthew Macfadyen (last seen in "Deadpool & Wolverine"), Kristine Froseth (last seen in "Sierra Burgess Is a Loser"), Makenzie Leigh, Noah Robbins (last seen in "Fly Me to the Moon"), Jon Orsini (last seen in "Girl Most Likely"), Alexander Chaplin (last seen in "The Report"), Juliana Canfield (last seen in "On the Rocks"), Bregje Heinen (last seen in "Babylon"), Patrick Wilson (last seen in "Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom"), Patrick Breen (last seen in "For Love or Money"), Owen Holland, Rory Kulz, Migs Govea (last seen in "Motherless Brooklyn"), Daoud Heidami (last seen in "Molly's Game"), Ben Maters, Tony Torn (last seen in "Game 6"), Devon Caraway, Genny Lis Padilla, Clara Wong (last seen in "You Hurt My Feelings"), James C.B. Gray (last seen in "Bruised"), Sophie Knapp, Hunter Hojnowski, Andrew Hsu, Ray Sheen, Chester Wai, Liz Wisan, Fang Du, Cherie Mendez, Purva Bedi (last seen in "The Emperor's Club"), Kirit Kapaida (last seen in "The Lovely Bones'),
with the voices of Jay O. Sanders (last seen in "Music of the Heart"), Stephanye Dussud, Bray Poor (last seen in "Picture Perfect"), Lou Martini Jr. (last seen in "The Irishman"), Rafael Sardina (last seen in "The Brave One"), Jenna O'Gara, Heather MacRae (last seen in "The Namesake"), Cynthia Bastidas, Manu Narayan, Mark Jacoby (last seen in "The Post"), Karen Stewart.
RATING: 4 out of 10 e-mailed apologies
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