You're Cordially Invited

Year 18, Day 52 - 2/21/26 - Movie #5,252

BEFORE: If I'm posting late, it's because I was working at the theater ALL DAY Saturday, two events, and that means a double-shift, more than 12 hours, which is great because I need the money. One was an animation event that was showcasing work from the teachers at SVA, their recent films shown to the students. Well, I know a lot of animators but only one friend who had her work showcased - still, that's always nice when a friend drops by while I'm working. Yes, I made it about me, that's what all the films this week have had in common, characters who made everything about themselves. So there, and Geraldine Viswanathan carries over from "Cat Person". 

Now here's the line-up of films from Day 10 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, for Sunday, February 22. So after this day I'll be about 1/3 of the way through that chain, and meanwhile in my own Feb. romance chain I'm approaching the halfway point - they SHOULD both end at about the same time. Sunday's theme is "Oscar Goes to War": 

6:30 am "Captains of the Clouds" (1942)

8:30 am "Battleground" (1949)

10:30 am "Sergeant York" (1941)

1:00 pm "Story of G.I. Joe" (1945)

3:00 pm "Sands of Iwo Jima" (1949)

5:00 pm "The Bridge on the River Kwai" (1957
8:00 pm "Patton" (1970)

11:00 pm "The Deer Hunter" (1978)

2:15 am "Das Boot" (1981)

5:00 am "They Were Expendable" (1945)

Well, I know I've seen "Sergeant York" and of course "The Bridge on the River Kwai", then I can claim both "Patton" and "The Deer Hunter" so that's another 4 out of 10, which brings me up to 48 seen out of 110, and that's 43.6% - I'm still moving in the wrong direction. Just wait until they get to "Oscar Goes to Space" or "Oscar Goes to a Boxing Ring", that's when I might be able to gain some ground.

THE PLOT: When two weddings are double-booked at the same venue, the father of one bride and the sister of the other try to preserve the wedding weekend. 

AFTER: How is this not just "Bride Wars" re-packaged? I mean I guess the whole point of "Bride Wars" was a rivalry between two families that had known each other for a long time and therefore hated each other.  This film has the same starting point - two families book the same venue for their weddings, and things spiral out of control from there, only the two families do NOT know each other here.  They are very different families, so there may be some biases due to income level and state of origin, which are both all too common in the U.S. these days, sad to say. The location of the wedding venue is Palmetto Island, Georgia which is weird because when I hear "palmetto" I naturally think of South Carolina first, don't you? But I guess Will Ferrell's "Father of the Bride" character lives in Atlanta, so OK, I guess Georgia works. Ferrell's character got married on Palmetto Island years ago, but he's a widower now.  Meanwhile, the older sister of the other bride chooses that venue because her grandmother used to live on that island, and Margot remembers spending good times with her grandmother. 

The whole mishap comes about because Jim Caldwell calls to book the resort first, and they can only handle ONE wedding per weekend, the owner of the resort is very clear about that - unfortunately the owner is also elderly, and she forgot to write the name down. Just kidding, that would be very ageist - instead her pen has run out of ink, and as she goes to get another one, she dies of a heart attack. So she never added the name on the reservation IN INK, and even though there are scratches of the Caldwell name made with that inkless pen, the booking goes to the one made by Margot Buckley, the TV producer. Also Margot put down the deposit, and Caldwell gave money to the maid of honor, who did NOT remit the money to the resort. Probably because there was nothing on their books that told them who to bill, but still, that's another story. 

Margot has misgivings about turning away the Caldwell wedding, I mean, the father's wife is dead and he's a legacy, so Margot agrees to share the resort's grounds for a double wedding, only the two parties will not intersect, this won't be a joint wedding, they're just going to SHARE the sunset and the other amenities, so one wedding will be in a holding pattern while the other one wraps up its sunset ceremony on the docks, and then the second ceremony can happen when the first party is having their reception, and so on.  Everything might have worked out fine if Jim didn't happen to overhear Margot talking smack about his daughter, I mean you just don't GO THERE, at least not until the entire weekend is in the rear-view and you're back home in L.A. or producing the show "Is It Dead?" or however you spend your time.

I can't really say that people act here in predictable ways, or in ways that accurately reflect how people might act in real life. There are a number of instances where two characters simply hate each other and then they might be working together or at least having a friendly conversation in the next scene - so sometimes it feels like this movie's scenes are in the wrong order, or at least were edited together at random, more or less. Like Jim Campbell repays the generosity of the Buckley family (who was willing to SHARE the resort on Neve's big wedding day) by asking the local boat driver to swing by the Buckley wedding and splash the dock with their wake, which ends up putting the entire Buckley wedding party into the drink.  Then in the very next scene, he admits what he did just to clear his conscience, but come on, who DOES THAT? 

This film shares a number of other things with yesterday's film - both movies have their main female character singing at a party (birthday party in one, wedding party in the other) performing a duet that implies some kind of sexual connection with her father or stepfather. Ooh, classy. Stepfather porn is VERY in right now.  Seriously, this is an odd coincidence and is also very gross, in "Cat Person" Margot had to sing "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" in a duet with her mother, but directed at her step-father on his birthday. Ewwww...... And in tonight's film, Jenni Caldwell performs "Islands in the Stream" as a duet with her father, and they talk about being lovers and such. Double ewwww.....

Ooh, ooh, another weird connection, both "Cat Person" and today's film have characters named Margot, and that is just NOT a common name - in America, anyway. But since they introduce one lead character from one family who is single and then in the other family, the father of the bride is a widower, well if you can't tell who's going to get matched up together at the end of this film, well then you just ain't paying attention. I saw this coming from like a MILE away. 

And of course, the big one - both films follow that principle of "reductio ad absurdium", which means that first the screenwriters envisioned the set-up scenario, namely two couples get booked for the same wedding venue, and then started listing all of the things that COULD go wrong after that, from losing the sunset to a sudden downpour to the groom being accused of cheating with a bridesmaid, and it all gets thrown into the pot, so ideally what we'll end up with here is a whole stew full of mistaken identities, misspoken thoughts and just blind blunders done in spite to complete the required menu full of "Things That Can Go Wrong".  When the bride's sister gets bitten by an alligator, which was brought into the hotel by her nemesis/fremeny/future lover who was mad at her at first, but is also falling for her at the same time, well then that's when you know this scenario has gone just COMPLETELY off the rails. Sure, there are miscommunications that will happen at a wedding, often because someone is too embarrassed to mention the elephant in the room or they're trying to be polite or to not re-hash their childhood traumas as an adult, but come on, it's all inevitable.  We need to create the ultimate "everything goes wrong at the wedding" storyline because the last film that did this, years ago, just didn't take things far enough.  

I'd love to see the suggestions that the writers made which got turned down, like were they proposing "OK, and then terrorists invade Georgia" or "And then thermonuclear war breaks out" or were they struggling to keep things within the realm of possibility, for dramatic purposes if for now other reason? I guess we'll never know.

Directed by Nicholas Stoller (director of "Bros" and "Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising")

Also starring Will Ferrell (last seen in "Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary"), Reese Witherspoon (last heard in "Being Mary Tyler Moore"), Meredith Hagner (last seen in "Ingrid Goes West"), Jimmy Tatro (last heard in Strays"), Stony Blyden, Leanne Morgan, Rory Scovel (last seen in "Old Dads"), Keyla Monterroso Mejia, Ramona Young (last seen in "Blockers"), Jack McBrayer (last seen in "Cooties"), Fortune Feimster (last seen in "Family Switch"), Celia Weston (last seen in "The Extra Man"), Martha B. Knighton (last seen in "Civil War"), Bobby Moynihan (last heard in "Fixed"), Ava Hill (last seen in "Captain America: Brave New World"), Wyatt Russell (last seen in "Thunderbolts"), Vinny Thomas, Peyton Manning (last heard in "Ferdinand"), Josué Charles, Matt Mercurio (last seen in "Hangman"), Lauren Holt (last seen in "Barbie"), Zamani Wilder (last seen in "Bottoms"), Kermit Rolison (last seen in "First Man"), Wesley Mann (last seen in "The Shadow"), Lion Way, Wyatt Hunt, Krishna Sistia Ward, Sydney Wease, Samantha Binkerd (last seen in "Brothers"), Jack Caron, Lauren Halperin (last seen in "Senior Year"), Nick Jonas (last seen in "Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road"), Ginny MacColl, Sofia Palmero, Marc Inniss, Art Newkirk

RATING: 5 out of 10 white Chevy Suburbans 

Cat Person

Year 18, Day 51 - 2/20/26 - Movie #5,251

BEFORE: Originally this film was going to be much closer to the start of the romance chain, as it was just one more film with Isabella Rossellini in it - but I moved some things around to get that Bridget Jones film to land on Valentine's Day, and that meant I had to move THIS film to link things together once I flipped a section of the chain around. The original plan was to link from "The Last Five Years" to "A Family Affair" via Lily LaGravenese, which would have made "The Tale" the 14th film, and geez but that would be a terrible film to use as a V-day centerpiece. Maybe with "Roger Dodger" moving into February then the 14th film would have been "New in Town", and that's a bit better, but still... I stand by the decision to flip that section around, it just felt right - and by tomorrow I'll be back on the path as originally planned. It's fine, because there's so much crossover among this year's films because the same people tend to appear in rom-coms and such. There still might be some tweaking I need to do along the way, there's one film I may want to add and one I may want to drop and save for next year. 

So Liza Koshy carries over from "A Family Affair" and Ms. Rossellini is back for one night only and now it's a five-way tie for the most appearances for the year. Still such a long way to go, given what usually happens in the Doc Block it wouldn't be weird if Johnny Carson or Paul McCartney won the year again. 

Let's check in again with TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, this will be the line-up for Day 9, Saturday 2/21, the theme is "Oscar Goes Big (Epics)":

7:30 am "Ben-Hur" (1959)

11:30 am "Lawrence of Arabia" (1962)

3:30 pm "Cleopatra" (1963)

8:00 pm "Gone With the Wind" (1939)

12:00 am "Doctor Zhivago" (1965)

3:30 am "Quo Vadis" (1951)

So this is what it comes down to, we're just putting movies together because they're super long? I mean, I know you guys have a lot of space to fill and time to kill, but "long" is not a theme. Can we go back to linking films by actors? It's so much more fun. Anyway, I've seen 5 out of 6, I never got around to "Quo Vadis", but this has GOT to improve my stats. Now I've seen 44 out of 100, so duh, that's 44%. An improvement, yes, but only by a few points. C'est la vie, and if you haven't seen "Lawrence of Arabia" or "Doctor Zhivago" then go for it, just have a bunch of snacks and drinks standing by, it's going to be a very LONG Saturday if you're playing catch-up on TCM. 

THE PLOT: When a college sophomore goes on a date with an older man, she finds that he doesn't live up to the guy she has been flirting with over texts. 

AFTER: I've got another tough one tonight, because it's all about the perils of dating again, in this modern, post-Epstein world and this one ends up making the same point about relationships as "Woman of the Hour", namely that a man's biggest fear is that a woman will laugh at him, while a woman's biggest fear is that a man will kill her. It's not right, it's not fair, but it's where we find ourselves. Look, dating in general is a bit like that sign that hangs in a factory that says "X number of days since the last workplace accident". You can date someone for a week or a month or a year, but when things don't work out or you get your heart broken, that sign resets to zero and you start counting again. Really the only way to avoid this is to never date at all, it's the "Wargames" method, which one character here actually uses - Margot's ex-boyfriend reveals that he's not gay at all, he's asexual. He tried gay and it was even weirder for him than being straight, so he just stopped. 

But Margot feels the need to keep going, despite her feminist friend Taylor's efforts to get her to stop, too. (Taylor gives Margot so much anti-relationship advice, one has to wonder here if Taylor would prefer to be dating Margot herself, but this plot thread is not followed.) Together they represent the two schools of thought - continue to meet people and date and put yourself at risk, or become so careful and paranoid about relationships that you basically shut the whole system down and make no progress at all. Experience creates wisdom, however creating experience can be hazardous - so it just comes down to whether you're more comfortable being alone or trying to make progress in finding a partner. Maybe that's more like job hunting, because you constantly have to decide if you're comfortable with your job or if you need to take steps to find a new job, which would mean leaving the job you have. Yes, of course some people moonlight on the side, especially if their main job isn't giving them everything they need or want. 

Margot attends college and seems to be majoring in some kind of anthropology or applied science, and she also works in a movie theater. Well, that's something I know about, the movie theater thing - she works concessions and so there's some interaction with the film geeks, and she notices Robert because he orders both popcorn and Red Vines, an unusual combo. Hell, I've seen people pour their m&m's over their popcorn, but you know, that makes some sense. Anyone who eats red licorice must be a psychopath. Anyway, Robert doesn't really ask for her phone number, he kind of demands it - that's probably red flag #2, and there are really a LOT more to come. This is pretty much a movie filled with red flags - Robert is 33 and dating a 20-year old, that's another one. He also claims to be a "cat person", which is not a red flag if it's true, but if it's something he's saying about himself just to gain someone's trust, then it's a definite red flag. 

He also invites Margot out to see a movie in the same theater where she works, but that's very inconsiderate. If you work in a movie theater, you just don't want to go there on a date or on your day off, you want to be far away from there. Just saying. But why can't Margot SAY, "Hey, I don't want to go to my workplace as a customer..." or "Hey, sorry I'm not into Star Wars" or "Hey, I don't want to see the fifth movie in a 11-movie series" or she could even say, "Hey, let's see one of the other movies playing at the same cinema, BLANK would be a more romantic film even..." But I recognize the difficulties of being in a relationship and not wanting to impose your will on the other person, if you think it's tough to pick a movie to watch together try figuring out what to have for dinner, that's another nightmare minefield, eating in, take-out, it doesn't matter - it's just hard for two people to land on the same thing. Eventually one person has to drive that bus, and one person has to be the passenger and eat something they're not crazy about or you just both decide to eat what you want, even if that's two different things. What I'm saying is, in the interest of not driving each other crazy, have a lot of solo meals on hand, and don't take it personally if the other person doesn't want to eat the same thing as you that night. 

Sex can also be a very awkward thing - and Margot continues to "imagine" things going different ways before they really happen. This keeps the audience here kind of on their toes, because we never really know if something is happening for real or just in her imagination. So is THIS the scene where we find out that Robert is a serial killer, or is it just another intrusive thought? Jesus, is this what it's like to be a woman dating someone, just always waiting for the other shoe to drop and the truth about this weird guy to reveal itself? It's exhausting. But Margot continues to ignore all the red flags and eventually there's an awkward kiss, so she of course texts Taylor to ask if you can teach somebody to be a better kisser. Well, sure you CAN but that would involve having an awkward conversation about the awkward kiss, and that's so awkward that she never gets around to doing it, so the awkward kisses continue. And then because she can't have the similar conversation about sex, you guessed it, there's sex that's so awkward and clumsy that Margot is forced to have an imagined conversation with another version of herself who is standing in the room and watching the awkward sex happen.  

Harrison Ford is apparently to blame for this, along with social media. Ford because he played two of the coolest movie characters of all time, Han Solo and Indiana Jones, and neither one is very good with women. Were you surprised in Episode VII that Han and Leia were no longer together? Really, you shouldn't have been because he's not a character who's good at commitment, and honestly neither is Harrison Ford - Indiana Jones also had a different girl in every film and probably cheated on each one, too. And yet THIS is who film geeks have chosen as their idol, their role model where relationships are concerned. Umm, choose better? Social media is thrown into the blame blender because we all act differently when we text or post than we do in person. Humblebragging when we post is a common enough thing, because we all just don't want to be known, we want to be envied. And you can't really express tone in an e-mail or in a text, so things can easily be mis-interpreted or confused. Therefore we could read texts with the tone or meaning that we want, rather than the one that was intended. 

So yeah, a lot of things go wrong here just because Margot doesn't want to hurt Robert's feelings. Taylor then sends a break-up text for her because she couldn't bring herself to do it. Everything seems OK until Robert then demands some kind of closure, or at least an explanation regarding what went wrong or what he could have done better. STILL she can't bring herself to give him any constructive criticism, even though that may be exactly what he might need to hear. He's not going to get BETTER with her or with someone else unless he understands that he was inconsiderate on some level, personally or sexually. But, to be fair, Margot is just as guilty when it came to being self-centered, like she never asked Robert what he did for a living and she took a long time to ask him how old he was, stuff like that. Instead she was distracted by the lack of cats in his house, after he said he was a "cat person". Her friend Taylor's experience with a man in her feminist online group pretending to be a woman led her to doubt everything that Robert said about his own life, and if he's lying about something small, what else is he lying about? 

There is a perfectly reasonable explanation for everything - like that stray dog that Margot finds at the beginning of the film and tries to bring into her dorm. Later she sees the same dog at Robert's house, and this leads her to conclude that Robert has been stalking her for weeks. But is it the same dog, or just the same breed? How closely did she examine the dog, at either time? A lot of dogs look alike, and the second time she was in a more panicked situation. Also even if it WERE the same dog, and I'm not saying it was, what would that mean? How would Robert sending a stray dog into her life bring them together? What was supposed to happen, she would find a dog tag or electronic chip or something that would lead her to bring the dog to his house? And then what, she would just start dating the guy who lost his dog? None of that really makes sense, but then again, him having a dog and calling himself a "cat person" doesn't really makes sense either, but neither does that make him a serial killer or bad person. Maybe that really was his dog and maybe the dog was really lost for a while and then found its way back home, but we'll never know, and that doesn't make him a bad person either.  

So everything is kind of doubled here, because we see Margot's imagined and intrusive thoughts, there are scenes where she imagines him as a serial killer and other scenes where she imagines him as a perfectly normal guy. It's worth noting that the actor who plays Robert appeared in the movie "Saturday Night" playing two roles, Jim Henson and Andy Kaufman. Sure, two tall guys with kind of the same face, and one of them was crazy in a good way and the other was maybe crazy in a crazy way. Scratch that, they were both pretty crazy because I worked with animators for thirty years and I can tell you that the only people more demented and messed up are puppeteers. I wouldn't date a puppet person, that's all I'm saying, I don't think they're right in the head. Same goes for movies, you don't HAVE to watch the same thing all the time, I can't even tell you the last movie my wife and I watched together, but it might be "The Greatest Night in Pop". No, probably it was the "Yacht Rock" doc. 

Anyway, this is another example of "reductio ad absurdum", where a story starts with a simple premise and then keeps asking, "what else could possibly go wrong?" until the entire situation is a hopeless and ridiculous disaster from which there is no recovery. If either character had been able to walk away from the situation, and there were ample opportunities to do so, then things just wouldn't have gotten so out of control. It's something to think about the next time you get your heart broken, how much worse it could have been - sometimes, if you can walk away from it with your dignity intact, then you're ahead of the game, even if it doesn't feel like it. 

Directed by Susanna Fogel (director of "Life Partners" and "The Spy Who Dumped Me")

Also starring Emilia Jones (last seen in "Youth"), Nicholas Braun (last seen in "Dream Scenario"), Geraldine Viswanathan (last seen in "Thunderbolts"), Isabella Rossellini (last seen in "Cousins"), Hope Davis (last seen in "The Phoenician Scheme"), Christopher Shyer (last seen in "The Core"), Josh Andres Rivera (last seen in "The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes"), Melissa Lehman, Isaac Cole Powell (last seen in "Dear Evan Hansen"), Jeremy Gill, Kyle Selig, Liza Colon-Zayas (last seen in "All Is Bright"), Donald Elise Watkins (last seen in "Fly Me to the Moon"), Fred Melamed (last seen in "Lying and Stealing"), Camille Umoff (last seen in "Mean Girls" (2024), Sammy Bronco, Max Jenkins, Zachary Mooren, Joanne Joella, John Scherer, Pearl Sun, Michael Gandolfini (last seen in "Landscape with Invisible Hand")

with archive footage of Carrie Fisher (last seen in "Music by John Williams"), Harrison Ford (ditto), Sean Young (last seen in "Cousins")

RATING: 5 out of 10 phone charging cords

A Family Affair

Year 18, Day 50 - 2/19/26 - Movie #5,250

BEFORE: I've reached the first half-century mark for the year, and really it feels like 2026 JUST started. My work on arranging this year's Doc Block is coming together, at least in some places. David Lynch appeared in a couple of the cast lists for the docs I'm adding, so I MIGHT be able to include "David Lynch: The Art Life", which is very tough to link to because he's really the only person in it. There are some other films I may NOT be able to include - even though I really want to watch "Secret Mall Apartment", it has zero famous people in it, so there's just no way. Maybe I can review it as an extra film, outside of the regular count, if it fits thematically. If not, it's just going to take up space on my watchlists beside a few other docs that can't be linked to, like "Made You Look" and "Jedi Junior High". At some point I may need to just delete the ones that don't fit, but that's a very difficult thing for me to do. Hey, I linked to "A Disturbance in the Force" last year, I didn't think I'd ever get THERE, and same goes for "Casa Bonita Mi Amor". Often the solution is just to add more films to the list and hope some connection will present itself. This also worked for "Claydream", "Animation Outlaws" and "Trainwreck: Poop Cruise" last year...

Zac Efron carries over from "We Are Your Friends". 

Here's the line-up for Friday, 2/20 - Day 8 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming. Tomorrow's themes are "Oscar Goes to the Laboratory" and "Oscar Goes for a Drive": 

6:45 am "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" (1931)

8:30 am "Dr. Cyclops" (1940)

10:00 am "The Time Machine" (1960)

12:00 pm "Dr. Erlich's Magic Bullet" (1940)

2:00 pm "The Story of Louis Pasteur" (1936)

3:45 pm "Madame Curie" (1943)

6:00 pm "Edison, the Man" (1940)

8:00 pm "Driving Miss Daisy" (1989)

10:00 pm "Rain Man" (1988)

12:30 am "Bullitt" (1968)

2:30 am "Grand Prix" (1966)

5:30 am "Wild Strawberries" (1957)

Of course I've seen "The Time Machine", plus "Driving Miss Daisy", "Rain Man", "Bullitt" and "Wild Strawberries", I kind of lucked out today with 5 seen out of 12, but I could be doing better. Now I'm up to. 39 seen out of 94, which is still only 41%. I'm in a holding pattern but I should kill on Saturday's movies. 

THE PLOT: A surprising romance kicks off comic consequences for a young woman, her mother and her movie-star boss as they face the complications of love, sex and identity.

AFTER: I had to start a new year-end category because of some of the films that made this year's romance chain, it's called "Best #MeToo or H.R. Violation Film. This covers films like "The Tale" and also the THREE films so far this year in which people have dated or slept with their bosses. Look, they KNEW it wasn't right, but they did it anyway - we should all know this is a terrible idea, whether you're the boss or the employee, it is just NOT going to end well. Even the big CEO's like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk know this is not the way we do things any more, not if you want to keep control of your companies. The power dynamic is just ALWAYS going to come into play, but this month I saw it happening in "Roger Dodger", "Babygirl" and "Spin Me Round". 

But in tonight's film, a personal assistant's mother dates her boss, and that's, well, legal I suppose. There's an age difference between them, sure, but that can be overcome if two people really care about each other. Still, the film is all about the impact on Zara when her famous actor boss starts dating her semi-famous writer mother. Why, it's almost like the two of them didn't take her feelings into consideration when they decided to act on their mutual attraction - but really that's only because they didn't. Zara spends the whole movie complaining about how selfish and self-indulgent Chris Cole is (weird, Zac Efron also played "Cole" in yesterday's film...) and how he doesn't think or care about anyone else. To be fair, he does date a lot of women and break up with a lot of women, and he makes Zara buy the same break-up gift for all of those women, which calls to mind the "gift baskets" that Derek Jeter used to send to women after they spent the night together. Well, love 'em and leave 'em, it's kind of nice that they get a parting gift when he's tired of them, right? 

But then, ironically, Zara realizes near the end of the film that she is guilty of the same crime, she's only complained for every single minute since her mother started dating her boss, and always it's been about the effect on HER, and how this makes HER feel, and that it's not fair to HER. She was so focused on herself that she didn't even notice when her best friend, Eugenie, broke up with Malcolm and she was RIGHT THERE in their house while they were being all awkward and stuff. Look, if two seemingly mismatched people manage to come together in this crazy world, we should always encourage that and not be haters, right? Zara's really upset because she's not the focus of her mother's attention any more, now that she's an adult she has to take care of herself, and her mother can do whatever she wants, she always could, except that she put parts of her life on hold to raise her daughter. Jeez, let her date a younger man, who cares, and also, don't just settle for that Associate Producer credit, get whatever else you can out of this situation! 

I say this as someone with several A.P. credits to his name - now, a producer credit can mean a lot of different things, it could mean you helped raise money, it could mean you donated money, it could mean you weighed in on some trivial matter you happen to be an expert on, like what computer a writer would use or how much a barista might earn. Or in my case, it means you did just about every little thing in the production of an animated film from typing up the script to booking the sound studio to hours and hours of promotion and entering festivals to then making sure the release of the film followed the Academy rules so it would be eligible for Oscar consideration. But you know, it's just an honorary title as a sort of catch-all, no big deal really.

For Zara it also means buying Cole's dogs special food for their birthdays, picking up whatever clothes or random items he might have left at a girlfriend's house, and of course doing his grocery shopping and tracking down the exact whey protein he thinks he needs to make smoothies with. But no, she's the entitled one, it turns out - after all he PAYS her to do all these things, by accepting the job and the money you would think she'd be giving up her rights to complain about it. But come on, that's not where we find ourselves. I have to believe that people like Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt and Chris Hemsworth all have teams of personal assistants, and then support staff for those assistants, in addition to trainers and meal planners and drivers and probably personal shoppers as well. And if those people don't feel properly compensated, well, they're free to quit and move on and take better gigs if they can find them, it's called the free market system. 

At one point Zara quits, which she has every right to do, and before long Chris shows up at her house to try and get her to come back, with the promise of that A.P. title, and that's when he meets her mother. AHA, it's all her fault, because if she hadn't quit, then they might never have met and begun their little romance. Zara can't even own up to that. It comes as no surprise to the audience, then, when Chris refuses to hire Zara's friend to do the rewrites on his next film, and he wants to hire Zara's mother, Brooke instead. Well, probably the codicil to not dating your employee should extend to not dating the writer you just hired, or rather not hiring the woman you just started dating, but I guess we're just going to have to let that one slide. 

Why? Because it's Christmas, and Zara goes over to complain to her grandmother (her dead father's mother) about her mother STILL dating Chris, even though she asked her not to. Grandma urges forgiveness at this special time of year, and reminds Zara that her mother is also a woman, and her dating again after so many years is a positive thing, and also that IT'S NOT ABOUT HER. Jeezus, the whole damn generation is so entitled, they all want to be stars on social media and tell everybody what they ate for lunch and where the best place to get a taco is and how they apply their make-up. We've not just created a monster, we've created a whole generation of them that thing the world revolves around them. Did you know there are like six billion people in the world and there's only ONE of you?  The world is big and you are really just very small and I'll pay you $5 if you would just SHUT UP for five minutes, and I make this offer because I know deep down in my heart that you just can't. 

Yes, I realize I'm part of the problem now, I want to post on Instagram about what movie I watched yesterday and what beer I drank on Friday and a really nice meal I had 15 years ago in Williamburg. But unlike those Gen Z'ers, I KNOW that I'm part of the problem, and I take responsibility for it. If you don't like what I'm putting out, then don't follow and don't like, I don't care. There should really be a "don't care" button on most social media apps, like not a thumbs up or a thumbs down, just something that says this is not relevant to me, and I don't want to see any more posts like this one, can we arrange that? 

Anyway, Zara eventually realizes how self-centered she is, and she manages to get Chris and her mother back together again. Sure, things might continue to be awkward, but at least her mother didn't move to the East Coast to teach and she still has her producing job. Now that she realizes other people have needs and feelings, maybe she can work on getting into a relationship herself. Or are we saving that for the sequel? Well, I can honestly say I've seen plenty of films worse than this one, including a few this month. I can afford to go a little easy on scoring this one. 

Directed by Richard LaGravenese (director of "The Last Five Years")

Also starring Nicole Kidman (last seen in "Babygirl"), Joey King (last seen in "The Kissing Booth 3"), Kathy Bates (last seen in "Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret."), Liza Koshy (last seen in "The Naked Gun"), Wes Jetton (last seen in "The Eyes of Tammy Faye"), Ian Gregg (last seen in "Term Life"), Sarah Baskin (last seen in "The Friend"), Zele Avradopoulos (last seen in "The Out-Laws"), Vince Pisani (last seen in "The Electric State"), Sherry Cola (last seen in "Freakier Friday"), Olivia Macklin, Vee Bhakta (last seen in "Senior Year"), Maxel Amador, Seoum Tylor Aun (last seen in "We Have a Ghost"), Gissette Valentin (last seen in "The Tomorrow War"), Brooks Ashmanskas (last seen in "Julie & Julia"), Lily LaGravenese (last seen in "The Last Five Years"), Robin Skye (last seen in "Beautiful Creatures"), Irene Kim, J. Boone Smith Jr., Sean Evans (last seen in "Happy Gilmore 2"), Kannon Omachi, Hannah Hleap, Carrie Solomon, Reno Reyes

RATING: 6 out of 10 bottles of hot sauce sampled on "Hot Ones" (it's a quick, easy way for a film to show how famous somebody is...)

We Are Your Friends

Year 18, Day 49 - 2/18/26 - Movie #5,249

BEFORE: I guess I'm in kind of a holding pattern here, I've got 30 more romance-based films to go, so unless I messed up the linking, nothing needs to change and I'm set for the next month. I've still got three days before my next shift so I guess it's a good time to get things ready for the Summer Doc Block, even though I don't know exactly when that will start. I suppose that's going to depend on how many films it turns out to be, and also I need to know a good starting point before I can figure out how to get there. Last year's Doc Block was a long one, 49 films in all, but I covered a LOT of ground and I cleared a bunch of films - the list of docs I did NOT watch dropped down to a dozen or so, which is now kind of making planning the next one difficult - I left myself only about 25 films to work with, and so they don't all link together yet. I need to add more films, and that means finding the docs, figuring who's in all of them, updating the IMDB cast lists if they're wrong, and I'll probably have to scan through 20 films this week just to get things rolling. Even if I can get everything to link up, it still might be a shorter Block this year. 

Speaking of documentaries, the TCM "31 Days of Oscar" line-up for tomorrow, 2/19, has a bunch of them. The themes for Thursday are "Oscar Goes for the Facts" and "Oscar Goes to Prison". I don't see what those two things have in common, so I'm not really a fan of this year's organizational format. But here are the films: 

10:30 am "The Secret Land" (1948)

12:00 pm "Festival" (1967)

2:00 pm "Freedom on My Mind" (1994)

4:00 pm "The Times of Harvey Milk" (1984)

6:00 pm "Inside Job" (2010)

8:00 pm "Papillon" (1973)

10:45 pm "The Longest Yard" (1974)

1:00 am "Midnight Express" (1978)

3:15 am "The Big House" (1930)

5:00 am "Weary River" (1929)

Well, I've seen ONE of those 5 docs, "Inside Job" - that helps, but it's still not great. I've also seen "Papillon" and "The Longest Yard", two classics that also had some popular appeal. So another 3 seen out of 10 brings my score up to 34 seen out of 82, I'm down to 41.4%.

Ayden Mayeri carries over from "Spin Me Round". 

THE PLOT: An aspiring disc jockey falls for his mentor's young girlfriend. 

AFTER: I'm definitely going to consider this film as mortar, it's only here to hold the bricks together and keep the wall from falling down. It's the second simplest romance film, which is a love triangle. The first simplest, of course, is just about two people coming together with no complications, and who the hell wants to see that? Even "Puppy Love" had complications... So the second simplest configuration is a three-point triangle, and one person has to be the focal point and make a decision between two lovers. That duty falls on Sophie tonight, who is dating James but then has feelings for Cole. Well, Cole is over at the house all the time, he's working with James on making better electronic music, so I suppose this was bound to happen. As soon as James' more difficult personality traits started to manifest themselves, Sophie chose Cole because, well, he was THERE. 

I mean, the heart wants what the heart wants, but this one doesn't really make much sense, I mean James at least owns a house and seems to have some money, but Cole is an aspiring DJ with no job at first. Oh, he's trying, he and his friends get jobs working for a real-estate financial company, but they're just cold-calling people with properties in default, to find people that Paige can then offer to represent, and there's a good chance that Paige is running a scam and is going to end up saying "There's nothing I can do" and offer to buy the houses dirt cheap and re-sell them all for ten or fifty times what he paid. Yeah, that's not really a good career, so Cole better hope this DJ thing takes off. Sophie, what the heck are you doing here? Are you sure you don't want to think this through? Bear in mind that Cole would never have even thought to use your voice on his tracks if not for James. 

Cole's friends are an even worse bunch of dirtbags than he is, so at some point he's going to realize those guys are dragging him down, and he'll never succeed or develop any kind of discipline if he keeps hanging around with them. Surprisingly, after they all work for a bit at Paige's real-estate scam company, Mason suggests they rent a house together, and of course he gets the biggest room. Guys, renting is for suckers, you pay every month and where does that money go, you're not building up any equity. If you guys came into some money you should try to put a down payment on owning a house, OK, maybe that's a bit out of your reach right now, but it makes more sense than renting in the long run, but you guys aren't really living long-term, now are you? You all just want to go to the club every Thursday night and party and do drugs and try to get laid.

Anyway, the first thing they do when they rent a house is throw a massive rager, and the house ends up getting trash - well, that's one more security deposit they won't be getting back - and worse, Squirrel ends up dead after an overdose, which really puts a bummer spin on everything. 

But remember, this one's here because of the love triangle, so let me just pick that one apart before I move on and forget all about this movie. Cole escorted Sophie to her college reunion party, I guess James was busy that night. James gets into a fight with two guys who were bad-mouthing her - I mean, that's pretty typical for James and his friends, it seems that every party in this film turns into a fight, sooner or later, but at least this time he was standing up for Sophie. Then later the gang of friends goes to an electronic music festival in Las Vegas, but Cole gets a call from Sophie because James ditched her. So he ditches his friends so he can hook up with Sophie in a hotel. Well, James, this was maybe bound to happen if you stood up your own girlfriend. Just saying. 

James cuts ties with Cole because of what happened, but then for some unknown reason once Cole finally has his track ready, James gives him another chance and gets him booked to play at another festival in L.A. - this does not logically work, it's like the plot points are in the wrong order or something. If somebody stole your girlfriend, why would you help them advance in their career, like the following week? That pain would still be fresh, so it would make more sense if James wanted nothing to do with Cole at all and it would be the easiest thing in the world to just NOT help him get the gig. 

We went to Las Vegas in October 2019, a few months before the pandemic - we took a break from our BBQ Crawls and did a casino buffet crawl instead. Final score was FIVE buffets in a week, although my wife was sick during the last few days and I hit one of those buffets on my own. We did other things, of course, like my birthday dinner and we went to the Mob Museum and the Neon Sign Museum. But we hadn't checked out what other events might be going on in the city, so our first night coincided with THREE big music festivals taking place across the city, one was called Las Rageous and was taking place right outside our first hotel - so yeah, bad planning there, it was very hard to get to sleep that first night. 

Directed by Max Joseph

Also starring Zac Efron (last seen in "The Iron Claw"), Wes Bentley (last seen in "The Four Feathers"), Emily Ratajkowski (last seen in "Lying and Stealing"), Jonny Weston (last seen in "About Cherry"), Shiloh Fernandez (last seen in "Cadillac Records"), Alex Shaffer (last seen in "Win Win"), Jon Bernthal (last seen in "The Accountant 2"), Alicia Coppola (last seen in "National Treasure: Book of Secrets"), Wiley M. Pickett (last seen in "Lakeview Terrace"), Jon Abrahams (last seen in "Boiler Room"), Molly Hagan (last seen in "Cinema Verite"), Brittany Furlan (last seen in "The Dirt"), Vanessa Lengies (last seen in "Still Waiting..."), Rebecca Forsythe, Joey Rudman, Kelsey Formost, Scarlett Benchley, Devon Barnes, Robbie Silverman, Timothy Granaderos, Raleigh Adams, Kerry Stein, Posso, Andrew Bachelor (last seen in "Family Switch"), Dillon Francis (last heard in "Trolls Band Together"), Casey James (last seen in "Elizabethtown"), Chiara Aurelia (last seen in "Luckiest Girl Alive"), Tara Beaulieu (last seen in "Think Like a Man"), Jan Broberg (last seen in "Darling Companion"), Shahine Ezell, Miranda Rae Mayo, Daniel Pinder, Korrina Rico (last seen in "Horrible Bosses 2"), Brittany Riley, Erika Wester with cameos from Nicky Romero, Nev Schulman.

RATING: 4 out of 10 pieces of birthday cake (consumed passive-aggressively)

Spin Me Round

Year 18, Day 48 - 2/17/26 - Movie #5,248

BEFORE: I've been on Instagram for almost 6 months now, and I'm trying not to get bogged down in it all - my main purpose has been to sort through my old photos and therefore my memories, starting in about 2005 and working forward. I got through about 5 years so far, that's a pretty good rate and gives me hope that I could catch up with maybe 2 years - but my feed is this weird jumble of new movies and old meals, road trips and cruises from the past, and also Comic-Cons. Plenty of Comic-Cons, but also things seen and beer floats consumed lately, so it's probably a good representation of what goes on in my head, where the past things still live even though they've been temporarily forgotten, I just need things to remind me, then I wonder how they were forgotten in the first place. Hey, at least I remember that I forgot things, as I get older I may lose that ability outright. Then someday I can maybe watch my favorite movies again, but it will feel like the first time, so I've got that to look forward to. 

But what I've also found is some people who think like I do, since I post each day about what movie I just watched, I now follow people who roll D&D dice to determine their sandwich, another person who does the same thing with recipes, and a third person who does that for cooking ribs. Maybe I should have come up with a similar system to randomly roll for my movie each day - but honestly I like the chain-linking system so much better, even if it's essentially kind of the same. Lil Rel Howery carries over from "The Photograph". 

Tomorrow is Day 8 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar programming", and my stats are already fading. The themes for February 18 are "Oscar Goes on Stage" and "Oscar Goes to England" - here's the line-up: 

4:15 am "The Great Ziegfeld" (1936)

7:15 am "Morning Glory" (1933)

8:30 am "Stage Door" (1937)

10:15 am "Gold Diggers of 1933" (1933)

12:00 pm "To Be or Not to Be" (1942)

1:45 pm "Kiss Me Kate" (1953)

3:45 pm "The Entertainer" (1960)
5:30 pm "The Boy Friend" (1971)

8:00 pm "My Fair Lady" (1964)

11:00 pm "The Remains of the Day" (1993)

1:30 am "Anne of the Thousand Days" (1969)

4:15 am "Young Bess" (1953)

6:15 am "Pride and Prejudice" (1940)

8:15 am "David Copperfield" (1935)

I've seen "Stage Door", "To Be or Not to Be", "Kiss Me Kate", "My Fair Lady", "The Remains of the Day", and "Anne of the Thousand Days", so another 6 out of these 14, that brings me up to 31 seen out of 72, still just 43%, no improvement today.

THE PLOT: A restaurant manager wins a trip to her company's gorgeous "institute" outside of Florence, and also the chance to meet the chain's wealthy and charismatic owner. She finds a different adventure than the one she imagined. 

AFTER: This has really been the most intense February chain in terms of sexual harassment, there was "Roger Dodger" first, and then "The Tale" (forget harassment, that one had statutory rape in it) and then of course "Babygirl". It's a very bad idea to sleep with your boss, or even someone else at the office, but I've seen it in movies again and again, and most people seem OK with it, like if they just managed to keep it quiet everything would be OK, only that's not how it works. The dynamic of power is always there, so there's really no scenario where sleeping with the boss could be a "good idea". Even in "New in Town" the plant manager falls in love with the labor union rep and in "The Last Five Years" I think Jamie slept with his editor, and both of those are still over the line, I think. 

Tonight we're presented with the head of an Italian restaurant chain, "Tuscan Grove", who uses this program of rewarding managers with free trips to Italy so that he can wine them and dine them and take them out on his boat, as a seduction technique. Not OK, there's no world in which all of that is OK, but since this film is a couple years old it's a bit tough to say whether this is presented in comic fashion or just as something like, "Well, this is the way the world works, this is just what CEOs do..."  I mean, why do you work to become a tech billionaire or the head of a large company, if not to sleep with whoever you want, and use your money to seduce the interns?" In other words, was this considered funny in a pre-Epstein world and now it's not so funny, but more horrific? I think the film recognizes this is not OK. 

Tuscany here stands in for Epstein Island, and Amber notices that even the men who were rewarded with free vacations are named Dana and Fran, so it's possible that they were awarded the trips by mistake, and the company CEO seemed disappointed when he learned they were dudes. To be fair, some of the other women showed up at the "institute" ready to party, either with drugs or alcohol or jokingly willing to cheat on their spouses. Meanwhile, Nick, the head of the company, is played by the same actor who ran the martial arts dojo in "The Art of Self-Defense", and he's essentially the same character - in-charge, overly confident, a proponent of meditation and self-empowerment, while also capable of being a ruthless dictator and willing to use his money and power to get exactly what he wants, all of the time. And maybe you feel like you want to admire him and follow him, but it also feels like he's full of secrets and can take you out at any time. (I guess this is why you cast Alessandro Nivola, right?)

This film is listed as a romantic comedy, and honestly I had my doubts when it started to look a bit more like a horror film, I thought maybe I was watching another version of "Blink Twice". But there was a fair amount of mistaken identity going on here, the characters all interpret what's going on at the villa in the worst possible way, and it turns out they've drawn many false conclusions. Mostly, because there IS something untoward happening in secret, it's just not as bad as you might initially think. So, OK, romantic comedy that's mostly not about romance, it's more of a black comedy BUT still relief to learn that there's a perfectly illogical reason for what's going down, and sure, I can see how things got mis-interpreted. But this still counts as a terrible vacation, hosted by a bunch of wrong-doers, even if nobody died or was kidnapped or sold into sexual slavery. 

And then, after it all, Nick STILL shows up at Amber's restaurant later on, with a terrible gift, trying to work his charming male masculine energy to whisk her away on a sailing trip. After everything that went down, he STILL thinks he's got a chance at wooing her. All that entitlement really shows, he can be called on the carpet for his misdeeds, he can be outed as a pervert and serial harasser and abuser, and still his go-to move is to use his money and power and charm to keep getting laid. Honestly, it's easy to draw a line from him to Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or anybody listed in the Epstein Files, no leopard ever changes their spots. 

I don't really like being "tricked" by a film, like here careful editing and some clever story-telling led us to think one sort of thing was happening at the mysterious villa in Tuscany, and it turned out to be something different, maybe a few different things. I appreciate the twist, but it also kind of feels like a bait-and-switch. The director/co-writer here came up with this plot after reading about a popular Italian restaurant chain (gee, which one?) that offered its managers a retreat in Italy where the amenities were well below their expectations. He then applied the principle of "reductio ad absurdum" to develop more ideas for the screenplay - that's a Latin phrase that roughly translates as "What could POSSIBLY go wrong?"

Directed by Jeff Baena (director of "Horse Girl" and "The Little Hours"

Also starring Alison Brie (last seen in "Get a Job"), Alessandro Nivola (last seen in "The Art of Self-Defense"), Aubrey Plaza (last seen in "10 Years"), Fred Armisen (last heard in "Fixed"), Tim Heidecker (last seen in "Nutcrackers"), Tricia Helfer (last seen in "Bombshell"), Ayden Mayeri (last seen in "Jackpot!"), Ego Nwodim (last seen in "Players"), Molly Shannon (last seen in "Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything"), Ben Sinclair (last seen in "Save Yourselves!"), Lauren Weedman (last seen in "Imagine That"), Zach Woods (last seen in "Downhill"), Debby Ryan (last seen in "Horse Girl"), Stella Chesnut (ditto), Jake Picking (last seen in "Blockers"), Andrea Bertucci, Valentina Chisci, Camillo Pardi, Valentina Oteri, Mileece I'Anson, Alessandro Bertolucci, Antonio Fazio

RATING: 6 out of 10 plates of fettucini alfredo

The Photograph

Year 18, Day 47 - 2/16/26 - Movie #5,247

BEFORE: The safe move here would be to follow Nicole Kidman over to another romance film, but then my month would be too short, so I'm going to get to that other Kidman film in a couple days, I just found a way to squeeze three more romances here in-between. So we're not going to take the safe and easy route, which is fine because romance is a long and twisty path sometimes, or something to that effect. Maxwell Whittington-Cooper carries over from "Babygirl" instead. 

Here's the TCM "31 Days of Oscar" lineup for tomorrow, Tuesday, 2/17, and the themes are "Oscar Goes to the Desert" and "Oscar Goes Nuclear": 

6:30 am "The Desert Song" (1943)

8:30 am "The Wind and the Lion" (1975)

10:45 am "Morocco" (1930)

12:30 pm "Road to Morocco" (1942)

2:00 pm "Sahara" (1943)

3:45 pm "Khartoum" (1966)

6:15 pm "Them!" (1954)

8:00 pm "On the Beach" (1959)

10:30 pm "The China Syndrome" (1979)

12:45 am "Dr. Strangelove" (1964)

2:30 am "Seven Days to Noon" (1950)

Another wash-out for me, I've only seen "Them!", "The China Syndrome" and "Dr. Strangelove" out of this set. So 3 out of 11 brings me up to 25 seen out of 58, or 43%. Hopefully better days lie ahead. 

THE PLOT: When famed photographer Christina Eames dies unexpectedly, she leaves her daughter Mae a safe-deposit box that contains a photograph. Mae's investigation into her mother's early life leads to an unexpected romance with a journalist. 

AFTER: This film was released on Valentine's Day in 2020, and "Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy" was released on February 13 last year - so I guess people still go to the movies to see romantic films on Valentine's weekend, it's kind of comforting that that's still a thing. "Hey, let's stay home on Feb. 14 and stream something..." doesn't really have the same effect, unless you're going to "Netflix and chill" maybe. Nobody talks about "Hulu and chill" or "Tubi and chill", do they? 

There is a simple romance at the heart of this film, but really it's not that simple at all, it never is. These two people are affected by the past in their present, their past trauma dictates their actions, even if they're not fully aware of it.  Michael just got out of a relationship with Tessa, a girl from New Orleans, so sure, he's a little gunshy. Mae is still dealing with the effects of her mother dying, and with her final letter she told Mae who her father is, so she's spent a lifetime not knowing that, which has to have some effect on her dating life as well. Jeez, it's a wonder that any two people get together these days when they're all dealing with so much. But we all have to deal with hardship and loss and we have to be willing to try again, or else we're just running out the clock. 

Michael is a reporter interviewing people in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and he asks a man named Isaac about his photographs, one in particular is a photo of a woman from his past, who left him to become a photographer. Back in New York, he visits Mae, the photographer's daughter, who works at the Queens Museum. By chance the photographer had passed away a month or so ago, and they swap numbers and agree to talk more in the future. But after some time passes and Michael doesn't hear from her, he goes to see a movie at the museum to set up a "chance meeting" with her again. They start dating but the timing isn't great, as Michael is applying for a job in London. 

Back in the past, we see Christina, Mae's mother, in a relationship with Isaac that her mother doesn't approve of. After living with Isaac for some time, she leaves to pursue a career in photography in New York. When she calls a friend in New Orleans to share the good news about getting a job, Mae learns her mother has died, and when she returns for the funeral, she finds out Isaac has married someone else. Bad timing all around, really.  Years later, when Christina returns with her young daughter, things are even more awkward and Isaac is afraid to even ask if Christina is his daughter, so we all just kind of have to wait while everyone figures things out. 

In the present, after Mae goes to New Orleans to meet her father for the first time, Michael comes back to finish his article and finds her there, so they re-connect and after another wonderful day together, he drops the bomb about moving to London, and they agree that a long-distance relationship isn't practical. But going through her mother's work again, Mae finds a video where her mother says she wished she had put more effort into loving people - so Mae meets up with Michael again and they vow to make things work out. 

It's really a simple story, made a bit more complicated by the jumping back and forth in time - but I suspect that without that, the film would have all been just a bit TOO simple. Some secrets have to be withheld from time to time, and sometimes we the audience figure things out before the characters do. Well, that's just the way these things go sometimes. The important thing is that we don't repeat our parents' mistakes and it's even more important that we don't repeat our own - so get out there and make some all new mistakes!

Directed by Stella Meghie

Also starring Issa Rae (last seen in "The Lovebirds"), LaKeith Stanfield (last seen in "Haunted Mansion"), Chanté Adams (last seen in "Voyagers"), Y'lan Noel (last seen in "Slice"), Kelvin Harrison Jr. (last seen in "Assassination Nation"), Lil Rel Howery (last seen in "The Out-Laws"), Teyonah Parris (last seen in "They Cloned Tyrone"), Jasmine Cephas Jones (last seen in "Honest Thief"), Rylee Gabrielle King, Phoenix Noelle, Marsha Stephanie Blake (last seen in "See You Yesterday"), Wakeema Hollis, Rob Morgan (last seen in "Smile"), Chelsea Peretti (last seen in "Friendsgiving"), Courtney B. Vance (last seen in "Ben Is Back"), Christopher Cassarino, Dakota Paradise, Roy Jackson,

RATING: 5 out of 10 debates over Drake or Kendrick

Babygirl

Year 18, Day 46 - 2/15/26 - Movie #5,246

BEFORE: Well, I hope you all had a lovely Valentine's Day, we just stayed in and ate leftovers, and had some nice desserts - we'll go out to a restaurant tonight, when it should be less crowded, theoretically anyway. I'm only about 1/3 of the way through the romance chain, so there's still a LONG way to go, and there may be some ebb and flow here, it looks like things might heat up a bit and get steamy tonight. Dolly Wells carries over from "Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy". 

Let me just catch up on TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming for today and tomorrow - previously I was at 12 seen out of 23. 

Today it's Day 3, February 15, and the programming is "Oscar Goes Bad (Crime)":

7:00 am "Little Caesar" (1931)

8:30 am "The Letter" (1940)

10:15 am "Key Largo" (1948)

12:00 pm "Double Indemnity" (1944)

2:00 pm "Strangers on a Train" (1951)

4:00 pm "Rear Window" (1954)

6:00 pm "Bonnie and Clyde" (1967)

8:00 pm "White Heat" (1949)

10:00 pm "In Cold Blood" (1967)

12:30 am "Dog Day Afternoon" (1975)

2:45 am "Shaft" (1971)

4:45 am "The Window" (1949)

I'm claiming the middle seven here, starting with "Double Indemnity" and ending with "Dog Day Afternoon". I've seen the "Shaft" remakes but not the original, I know, for shame. But another 7 out of 12 brings me up to 19 seen out of 35, which is 54.2%. 

I'm going to calculate one more day to get out ahead of this thing, so if there's anything I want or need to record, I'll have a day's notice, and you will too. The topics for Monday, 2/16 are "Oscar Goes to a Family Reunion" and "Oscar Goes to Class": 

6:00 am "Our Dancing Daughters" (1928)

7:30 am "Edward, My Son" (1949)

9:30 am "The Magnificent Ambersons" (1942)

11:00 am "The Brothers Karamazov" (1958)

1:30 pm "I Remember Mama" (1948)

3:45 pm "I Never Sang for My Father" (1970)

5:30 pm "Auntie Mame" (1958)

8:00 pm "The Children's Hour" (1961)

10:00 pm "The Corn Is Green" (1945)

12:00 am "Blackboard Jungle" (1955)

2:00 am "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" (1969)

4:45 am "Good News" (1947)

I can really only claim three here, "The Magnificent Ambersons", "The Children's Hour" and "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" (finally, they're running the 1969 remake, which I've seen!) so another 3 seen out of 12 brings me up to 22 seen out of 47, which means I'm down to 46.8%. Last year I finished with 42.4% seen, so I was hoping to do better, but maybe not. 

THE PLOT: A high-powered CEO puts her career and family on the line when she begins a torrid affair with her much-younger intern. 

AFTER: This film was getting a lot of buzz around this time last year, I want to say, but then it only got one Golden Globe nomination and zero Oscar noms, so after that it kind of cooled off very quickly. It's a bit weird, a gender-swap on the usual story of a male CEO having an affair with a female company intern, it almost feels like someone was trying to justify that by making it some kind of female empowerment story, but that effect was totally lost, like cheating is cheating and you can't really justify the unjustifiable. If the woman is in the position of power, that's not really an improvement, if the woman is just as self-serving and self-indulgent as the typical man, and having a male intern trying to get ahead by sleeping with the female CEO, same issue, if it's wrong for a woman to use sex to advance or to blackmail the boss, then it's just as wrong for a man to do that. Whatever novelty was gained here by swapping the usual gender roles is negated by this being just as sleazy of a story as it was before. 

I guess maybe there's some form of fantasy fulfillment here, like maybe some people are watching this JUST for the torridness and naughtiness of it all, so this is porn on some level for some people, maybe. If you just want to fantasize about an office romance that's cheap and tawdry and very, very down and dirty, sure, that's your right as a movie-viewer. But we already HAVE porn for that, we don't need to stoop so low in a regular Hollywood movie, do we? Although it's Nicole Kidman, and she was also in "Eyes Wide Shut" and "Billy Bathgate" and "Dead Calm" and "Hemingway & Gellhorn" and geez, are there any movies that she has NOT been naked in? Is there anyone out there who maybe has NOT seen her naked in a movie?  And I hate to be ageist, but she was 57 when this film came out, at what point is she maybe too old to do nude scenes? 

Look, I'm not going to say her penchant for nude scenes caused her most recent divorce, because there's no way to know that, but it couldn't have helped that she was frequently out making movies while Keith Urban was out on tour making music, and you know, two people grow apart if they're not spending that much time together. Nicole's character here in "Babygirl", of course, has a much different problem. She clearly wants something sexual that she's not getting from her husband, though the film opens with them having sex. So, umm, what exactly is the problem? It's got something to do with her wanting or needing to be told what to do, like OK, maybe I can understand that? But if you can't communicate that in bed with your husband, the person you're already closest to, how are you going to justify getting that from a relative stranger? More to the point, how did that stranger know that was what she wanted, that the boss wanted to be bossed around? 

I guess we have to assume that Samuel the intern is some kind of mind-reader, or human psychology expert? He's somehow an innate dog trainer, what does that mean, or is that part of the fantasy? He ends up telling CEO Romy to get down on all fours, so there's that. I have to think this is not a serious drama or even a think-piece on relationships, it's just like the next "50 Shades of Gray", women want to see a film about some man who's going to order them around sexually and it's going to touch some nerve, some secret desire to be dominated, when that's just NOT the energy they're giving off in the workplace, where they worked so hard to become the boss. How is this NOT a giant step backwards for women's rights? I don't think "equality in the workplace" should extend to women taking advantage of male interns, sorry - and this can't be anything but if she's in a position of power over him and they have sex. Even if she surrenders power in the bedroom and tries to retain it in the boardroom, it's still not OK.  

Samuel keeps working his way into Romy's life, finding excuses to deliver things to her from the office. OK, maybe she DID forget her laptop that day, but him turning up there because he was the one tasked with delivering it to her house, that's a pretty big coincidence. Maybe Samuel DOES hold some kind of power over her, because he can get her in trouble with just one phone call to HR, and she caves every time he threatens to transfer to another job in the company that's not directly under her. Well, file this one under "It's Complicated", I guess. 

And things get even more complicated when Samuel starts dating Romy's assistant, and that assistant is the one who wants to blackmail Romy to get ahead. Romy is forced to confess to her husband that she's been having an affair, though she's light on the details regarding who it's with, how long it's been going on, and what she's getting out of the affair that she can't get from her own husband. Perhaps it's better that way. Romy ends up learning a valuable lesson from her lesbian teenage daughter, who's in a committed relationship with one girl but is "having fun" with another one. OK, so maybe that's all this was, an older woman "having fun", sure, let's just sweep this all under the carpet, it's not like everyone involved has been psychologically damaged and probably needs to be in therapy. You know what, just to be on the safe side...

Really this is a throwback to the erotic thriller films of the 1980's and 1990's, like "Fatal Attraction" and "9 1/2 Weeks" and "Indecent Proposal" (which all came from the same director, Adrian Lyne). This theory is backed up by some of the songs used in the film, like George Michael's "Father Figure" and INXS's "Never Tear Us Apart". But bottom line while I applaud the depiction of older women still being interested in sex, I think that if they have to drink milk out of a saucer on the floor just to feel something, I'm not sure they're doing it right. 

Directed by Halina Reijn

Also starring Nicole Kidman (last seen in "Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story"), Harris Dickinson (last seen in "The Iron Claw"), Antonio Banderas (last seen in "Bullet Head"), Sophie Wilde, Esther McGregor, Vaughan Reilly (last seen in "The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes"), Victor Slezak (last seen in "That Awkward Moment"), Leslie Silva (last seen in "Vox Lux"), Gaite Jansen, Robert Farrior (last seen in "Stop-Loss"), Bartley Booz, Anoop Desai, Mary Ann Lamb (last seen in "Rock of Ages"), Gabrielle Policano, Michael Kirchmann, Mareau Hall, Tess McMillan, Molly Price (last seen in "The Life Before Her Eyes"), Maxwell Whittington-Cooper (last seen in "Rustin"), John Cenatiempo (last seen in "Mechanic: Resurrection")

RATING: 5 out of 10 Botox injections

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy

Year 18, Day 45 - 2/14/26 - Movie #5,245

BEFORE: Renee Zellweger carries over from "New in Town", and really, it was always going to be this one for Valentine's Day. My chain this year got re-structured and re-purposed a couple times, but this one was always the focal point, I think. Partially that's because it connects to so many other romance-based films on my list - I've got more films coming up with Emma Thompson, Jim Broadbent and Celia Imrie, that's just a few of the connections that were NOT needed as links. So I had some flexibility just by putting this one in the middle and then expanding out from there. Sure, I couldn't put all the Nicole Kidman films together - OK, so I'll have to split one Isabella Rossellini film off from the herd. It doesn't matter, as long as I can stick the right film on Valentine's Day - that's what it's all about, right? I mean, I'm not watching films about Christmas in April, unless one manages to sneak by me. By the same token, I'm not going to miss checking in with Bridget Jones on V-Day if there's an update on her life to be watched.

I'm getting a late start keeping track of Turner Classic Movies programming, since "31 Days of Oscar" started on February 13, in the middle of the month, which is very weird. I guess 31 days of something can start any time, but a month is still a month, right? I guess since the Oscars will be airing on March 15 they had to count back 31 days from that, but why not just celebrate the Oscars in March, if that's when the ceremony is? OK, let's play catch up, here are the movies TCM screened on February 13: 

The first theme is "Oscars Go to a Fantasy World":
6:00 am "Cabin in the Sky" (1943)

7:45 am "The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm" (1962)

10:15 am "The Thief of Bagdad" (1940)

12:15 pm "Juliet of the Spirits" (1965)
2:45 pm "Lili" (1953)

4:15 pm "7 Faces of Dr. Lao" (1964)

6:00 pm "Brigadoon" (1954)

followed by "Oscar Goes to a Wedding":

8:00 pm "Father of the Bride" (1950)
9:45 pm "Four Weddings and a Funeral" (1994)

12:00 am "The Graduate" (1967)

2:00 am "High Society" (1956)

4:00 am "Smilin' Through" (1932)

I think I've seen only 4 of these - "Father of the Bride", "Four Weddings and a Funeral", "The Graduate" and "High Society", so that's 4 out of 12, or 25%. Not a great start. 

Today, the big day, Valentine's Day, the theme is "Oscar Goes to Paris":

6:00 am "Roberta" (1935)

8:00 am "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" (1939)

10:00 am "Ninotchka" (1939)

12:00 pm "Casablanca" (1942)

2:00 pm "Midnight in Paris" (2011)

3:45 pm "Gigi" (1958)

6:00 pm "Charade" (1963)

8:00 pm "An American in Paris" (1951)

10:00 pm "Moulin Rouge!" (2001)

12:15 am "Amelie" (2001)

2:30 am "Irma La Douce" (1963)

I've done a little better on these, I've seen 8 of today's films - "Roberta", "Casablanca", "Midnight in Paris", "Gigi", "Charade", "An American in Paris", "Moulin Rouge!" and "Irma La Douce". So that brings me up to 12 seen out of 23, which is 52%, a lot better than yesterday. I'll keep track for the next month, unless this bores me. If you want to catch "An American in Paris" or "Moulin Rouge" tonight with your sweetie, well, you could do a lot worse. 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Bridget Jones's Baby" (Movie #2,859)

THE PLOT: After jumping back into the dating pool, widowed mother Bridget Jones finds herself caught between a younger man and her son's science teacher. 

AFTER: It's been nine years since the last "Bridget Jones" film, so long that I had to go back today and re-read the Wiki summary for "Bridget Jones's Baby" to remind myself about what happened. Bridget slept with two men and got pregnant, then while she was unsure of which one was the father we had kind of a love triangle thing going on. Bridget ended up marrying Mark, who I guess was the father, and had just split from his wife? And then suddenly Bridget's ex, Daniel, who was thought dead, was found alive - so it sure seemed like they were going to be setting up another boring love triangle for the next film. Yawn...

Well, thank God, that's not the way the story played out - whatever repercussions there were from Daniel being alive again didn't seem to affect Bridget's marriage to Mark, because they had a daughter in addition to that son, and things were apparently fine for a long while, until they weren't. We rejoin the story four years after Mark was killed on some kind of humanitarian mission to the Sudan, and Bridget's getting dressed up to attend some kind of anniversary memorial for Mark, with all of their friends. The weird thing is, Mark still seems to be hanging around, because the memories are that strong, Bridget sees him everywhere she goes, and so we see him too, just to drive that point home. Well, this isn't a movie about ghosts, except that it sort of is, I mean, how else can they depict a character's absence, outside of showing him? I mean, you can't really film him NOT being there, so we kind of have to allow this. Well, we have no choice. 

In another flashback with a dead person - Bridget's father - she remembers that she promised that she wouldn't just survive after he was gone, she would remember to live. Also, her doctor gives her the advice that she should return to work as a form of therapy, which doesn't really seem like a medical opinion, but whatever. The writing's on the wall, what with everyone giving Bridget advice from every direction, it's time to go back to work and maybe even start dating again. Also, her old boss keeps calling her for advice on how to do stuff, so yeah, maybe it's time. 

Bridget meets a park ranger who helps rescue her kids from a tree, and really, that's as good a place to start as any - Roxster is 29 and thinks that Bridget is 35 (I'm not sure how old the character is supposed to be, but Zellwever was like 54). Well, why should she correct him, OK, I guess we're going with 35. The contact with a younger man leads her to join Tinder and learn what sexting is, and how to send emojis of the Greek flag and a duck, whatever that means. (she wants to "duck" him?) Bridget's daughter is eager to call Roxster their "new daddy", and I bet Bridget's calling him "daddy" too, but her son is still coping with his father's death, so he's not really on board. However, eventually the age difference eventually becomes too much for Roxster to handle, and he "ghosts" her - I guess he finally figured out she wasn't 35? 

Meanwhile, Daniel has a health emergency, and had listed Bridget as his "next of kin", even though she's not. Daniel's in a situation-ship with one of his many younger girlfriends, so there's no chance of Bridget getting back together with him, however she urges him to get back in touch with his teenage son, now that he's alive again. It's, you know, not a terrible suggestion. 

An encounter on Career Day at school with her son's teacher, Mr. Walliker, leads her to consider him the next link in her chain, and a camping trip where she gets to see him without his shirt on kind of seals the deal, but there are still issues to work out. He's a pragmatic scientist, for one thing, who believes that when we die, that's it, there's no heaven, no soul left behind. Roxster comes back at one point, so we do have a love triangle here for like one brief moment, but it's too late, Bridget's moved on and doesn't think they can overcome the age difference. Can she finally be smart enough, for once, to only date one man at a time? So after a winter school concert, Bridget invites Mr. Walliker out to join them at the pub afterwards, and he almost doesn't, because he's socially awkward and more used to dealing with school children than other adults. 

Fast forward a whole year, and Bridget throws a New Year's Eve party for everyone, all family and friends, except maybe no ghosts this time? She's in a relationship with Mr. Walliker, now calling him "Scott", and Daniel has been re-united with his son, Enzo. Everything's seem pretty settled, at least until the next sequel. If they were going to stop making more entries in this franchise, this wouldn't be a bad place to call it. 

NITPICK POINT: Did we really need to check in with ALL of Bridget's friends, accumulated over the course of all three previous movies? That's like a LOT of people to keep track of, I certainly can't remember them all or recall what their back-stories are. OK, it's great that the actors are probably also friends and they get sandwiched into one of these films every few years when another one comes around, but who really cares about all 47 minor characters? Can't we assume that maybe over the years Bridget Jones was a busy mother and maybe lost touch with a few of them? Please? 

On the flip-side of that, what the heck was Isla Fisher doing in this film? She played some foil character who was also a mother, but one who threw her kids' video games out the window for some reason. Was her character some famous person that Bridget once interviewed or something? I'm just going off the fact that when her kids ask her who that is, Bridget says "Never meet your heroes..." and I just didn't get the joke. What was going on there? Who was this character supposed to be, because it was never explained? 

Directed by Michael Morris (director of "To Leslie")

Also starring Chiwetel Ejiofor (last seen in "Venom: The Last Dance"), Leo Woodall, Jim Broadbent (last seen in "The Lady in the Van"), Gemma Jones (last seen in "Ammonite"), Colin Firth (last seen in "Hope Springs"), Hugh Grant (last seen in "Unfrosted"), James Callis (last seen in "Bridget Jones's Baby"), Neil Pearson (ditto), Shirley Henderson (last seen in "See How They Run"), Sally Phillips (last seen in "Blinded by the Light"), Jeff Mirza (ditto), Sarah Solemani (last seen in 'How to Build a Girl"), Celia Imrie (last seen in "The Thursday Murder Club"), Leila Farzad (last seen in "The Marvels"), Josette Simon (last seen in "The Witches"), Nico Parker (last seen in "Reminiscence"), Dolly Wells (last seen in "I Do... Until I Don't"), Claire Skinner (last seen in "Bridget Jones's Diary"), Anat Dychtwald (ditto), Ben Illis (ditto), Toby Whithouse (ditto), Casper Knopf, Mila Jankovic, Ian Midlane, Emma Thompson (last seen in "Tom Hanks: The Nomad"), Isla Fisher (last seen in "The Present"), Joanna Scanlan (last seen in "Kinky Boots"), Alessandro Bedetti, Elena Rivers, Neil Edmond (last seen in "Johnny English Strikes Again"), Mark Lingwood (last seen in "Into the Storm"), Penny Stuttaford, James Rawlings (last seen in "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel"), Ruth Gibson, Jane Fowler (last seen in "The Dig"), Ellie White (last seen in "Wonka"), Marina Bye (ditto), Rohan Berry, Seb Cardinal, Harry Goldsmith, James Goldsmith, Isla Ashworth (last seen in "Here"), Laura Bailey, Lin Yap, Rosie Holt, Naveed Khan (last seen in "Death on the Nile"), Kath Hughes, Oli Green (last seen in "Lift"), Julie Bartlett, Paul Hunter (last seen in "Cyrano"), Daisy Duczmal (last seen in "Barbie"), Zheng Xi Yong (ditto), Maggie Livermore, Sebastian Dunn, Lucille Ferguson,

RATING: 6 out of 10 condom choices