Paddington in Peru

Year 18, Day 93 - 4/3/26 - Movie #5,292

BEFORE: I went on a linking tear last night, and I found a path to Mother's Day - there may be more than one out there, but I have the one I found. There's a lot of flexibility in it, like there are three or four films that are in the middle of 3-film chains, so they can be dropped if those movies turn out to be suddenly unavailable on streaming or something. And then if there's a bigger gap than expected because I had to drop those films, I can add in the two "Machete" films or maybe even the four "Spy Kids" films - so I don't know exactly how it's all going to shake down but I have the basic structure I need, I can add to that framework when I learn what's new to streaming in April or take some movies out if I need breaks.

So here's the planned linking for the rest of April after today: Hayley Atwell, Margot Robbie, Simon Pegg, Reece Shearsmith, Lenny Henry, Eleanor Matsuura, Ed Skrein, Lucy Thackeray, Maisie Williams, Paul Walter Hauser, Marc Maron, Craig Robinson, Simu Liu, Sterling K. Brown, Regina Hall, John Hoogenakker, Michael Keaton, Sydney Miles, Robert De Niro, Tommy Lee Jones, John Heard, Jurnee Smollett, and Dwayne Johnson. I've got things set until two days after Mother's Day, this list just gets me to May 1. There are some BIG films in there, like "Mission: Impossible" and the latest "Jurassic World" and "One Battle After Another" which has been prioritized, of course. Animated features have also been fast-tracked.

And here I went into a blind panic, with my linking set to run out in just four days - but the path was there, it was just waiting to be discovered...

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Paddington 2" (Movie #3,198)

THE PLOT: Paddington returns to Peru to visit his beloved Aunt Lucy, who now resides at the Home for Retired Bears. With the Brown family in tow, adventure ensues when a mystery sends them on an unexpected journey. 

AFTER: March (after the romance chain ended) was just way to serious, if you ask me. People sent to prison, framed for murder. People held hostage to make mercenaries kill soldiers. People going to therapy because they believe they're bad parents just because their kid has an eating disorder. People holding a kid hostage so his grandparents can't even visit him. Then, in all instances, those things started out as bad and got much, much worse. Does anybody remember when movies used to be FUN?  Then at work they go and move me off the beer stand I've been working for months and tell me I have to work at the dessert stand, which is MUCH more hectic, and putting ice cream into little cups is harder than you think it might be, and I wasn't properly trained on the POS system, sure, just throw me into the fire, why don't you?  

So this is exactly the movie I need right now, a silly and adorable "Paddington" sequel, because two films in this franchise just were NOT enough, we need more ASAP. Especially with everything going on in the world right now, I mean a moon mission is very uplifting, but it can't really counterbalance a war, I think we all should have learned that in the late 1960's, right? Like Nixon pushed hard to get Apollo 11 to distract everyone from Vietnam, and now history's not really repeating itself, but it kind of rhymes, don't it? 

Meanwhile, it's been about 2,100 films since I last watched a "Paddington" movie on 4/10/19, that's just about 7 years (minus one week). I adored "Paddington 2", it had the absolute cutest prison-break EVER, and with a bear doing hard time I'd wished they could have subtitled it the "PAW-shank Redemption" but maybe that would be a little too cutesy AND on the nose. That film also had a treasure hunt in London, with the clues in a pop-up book, and this film kind of picks up on that same idea, with characters looking for a fabled lost city of gold, aka "El Dorado" and we've seen many films like that before, even Indiana Jones did one like that. But this one's different because everything in Peru seems to be bear-based, and also the search for El BEAR-ado dovetails rather neatly with Paddington and the Browns searching for his Aunt Lucy, who has disappeared from the Home for Retired Bears.  

There's a fair bit of "Jungle Cruise" and "The Lost City" in this one, too, both films drawing liberally from "The African Queen" and/or "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" as needed. There's a treasure map, there's a boat captain who offers to take the family up river, and of course the captain turns out to have a family history of people with "oro loco" or gold madness. The whole family sets out for Rumi Rock and Captain Cabot informs them that this is where people usually start their searches for the Lost City, but so few people manage to return alive, I wonder why that is...

But, of course, once on the river things start going horribly wrong. The Captain's daughter, Gina, tries to convince him to NOT search for the gold himself, please, just this once, and his response is to sail away without her after she casts off the line. Then HE gets knocked off the boat by the boom, and it's a long time before Paddington and his family realize that the crew is gone, and nobody is steering the boat. The boat turns the wrong way, encounters rapids, and breaks apart. Or maybe it had something to do with the boat being too heavy, like who brings a player piano on a jungle cruise? There's way too much other furniture, too, leading me to conclude this boat is somehow much bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. 

Paddington gets separated from his family but ends up at Rumi Rock with Captain Cabot, and he remembers the time that Aunt Lucy saved him after hearing him roar, and she told him that if he ever was in trouble, that was all he had to do. So Paddington follows the response roars he hears through the jungle, all the way to some Incan ruins - and it's very clever that those roars were NOT what he thought they were, and it's even more clever that they still somehow brought him to the right place. Meanwhile, Mrs. Bird, who had been left back at the Ursine Retirement Home with the very suspicious Reverend Mother, arrives by nun-flown plane and manages to rescue the rest of the family from the jungle, so they can all meet up at the Incan ruins. 

Yes, of course there was a reason behind Aunt Lucy's disappearance, you can say that it's far-fetched, or you can agree that it makes perfect sense in retrospect. Most things do, after all. And of course they find the lost city, but the treasure isn't exactly what you'd expect UNLESS you are a bear, that is. Mrs. Brown naturally assumes that Paddington, after finding his tribe again, would want to remain in Peru with them, but is overjoyed when he requests going back to London with his family. A happy ending is enjoyed by all, the captain gives up his quest for gold at long last, and the woman who had been pretending to be the Reverend Mother is punished for her mischief, as it should be. And in a delightful post-credits scene, a bunch of bears from Peru come to London to visit Paddington, and they all go to visit the villain from the last film, who is still in prison. But he is inspired to put on a musical production of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" upon his release. Despite how cute the whole rest of the film is, this ending scene might just be the best part. 

Directed by Dougal Wilson

Also starring Hugh Bonneville (last seen in "Breathe"), Emily Mortimer (last seen in "Lovely & Amazing"), Julie Walters (last seen in "Tom Hanks: The Nomad"), Jim Broadbent (last seen in "Enchanted April"), Madeleine Harris (last seen in "Paddington 2"), Samuel Joslin (ditto), Olivia Colman (last seen in "Wonka"), Antonio Banderas (last seen in "Babygirl"), Carla Tous, Joel Fry (last seen in "Love Wedding Repeat"), Robbie Gee (also last seen in "Paddington 2"), Sanjeev Bhaskar (last seen in "The Flash"), Ben Miller (last seen in "The Prince and Me"), Jessica Hynes (last seen in "Death of a Unicorn"), Hayley Atwell (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One"), Aloreia Spencer, Simon Farnaby (also last seen in "Wonka"), Ella Bruccoleri, Nicholas Burns (last seen in "The Lady in the Van"), Ashleigh Reynolds (last seen in "Empire of Light"), Amit Shah (last seen in "Ordinary Love"), Carlos Carlin, Orlando Estrada, Diana Payan, Sarah Twomey, with a cameo from Hugh Grant (last seen in "Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre")

and the voices of Ben Whishaw (last seen in "The International"), Oliver Maltman (also last seen in "Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre"), Peter Marinker (last seen in "Judge Dredd"), Joseph Balderrama (last seen in "Jack and Jill"), Emma Sidi, Nic Sampson

RATING: 7 out of 10 llamas who like marmalade sandwiches (who doesn't?)

Freedom Writers

Year 18, Day 92 - 4/2/26 - Movie #5,291

BEFORE: OK, so here's what happened. I tend to pair up my movies, not just because I like to have at least 2 movies on each DVD I make, which means a pack of blanks last twice as long, but also because then making the chains is sometimes half as much work, once I get to a film the next one is RIGHT THERE. Of course, it doesn't always work that way, and sometimes to get where I want to go I can only include one half of a (temporary) pair. So I had this one paired up with "Ordinary Angels", even though one was a Christmas-time film and the other was a "back to school" film, which usually ends up slated for June or September. To get to Easter, though, I need to go through this film, which also neatly gets it off the list, and really there's no telling how long it could hang around the list, waiting for a connection. So let's cross it off, it's going to feel so good...

Hilary Swank carries over from "I Am Mother". 

THE PLOT: Erin Gruwell, a young teacher in a racially divided school, inspires her class of at-risk students deemed incapable of learning, to learn tolerance, apply themselves and pursue education beyond high school. 

AFTER: I'm just going to treat this one like a little bit of mortar, something to hold the bricks together, because I want to get on to some animated films - mixed in with the action films, of course - so hopefully tomorrow's film is a brick, but I've got to endure this preachy high school film before I can get there. Nothing good ever comes without a little bit of pain, right? I really have to get back to my linking, so I'm going to try and keep this review really short, OK? 

This is based on a true story, there was a real teacher named Erin Gruwell who taught English class to at-risk teens in Long Beach, California, and then a book was written about her and her teaching methods and how she improved students' lives and got them to pay attention in class, and then based this movie on that book. Which means the movie is like review-proof, there's no way I can make fun of it or point out any logical problems without coming off like the bad guy here. It's a trap, and I'm just not going to fall into it. But it's not my thing, either, this is way outside my wheelhouse even though I've watched films like "Stand and Deliver" and "Lean on Me", and it's right in that same pocket. 

If I can complain about anything, it's the use of the Holocaust to try to get inner-city youth to pay attention, by drawing some kind of parallel between the plight of the Jewish people in Europe in the 1940's to the inner-city L.A. gang experience. Nope, those are two different things, and I'm not seeing a lot of parallels there. The at-risk teens were not hiding like Anne Frank was, they weren't being exterminated by Hitler, it's just not the same thing. OK, fine, if Gruwell discovered that her students never learned about the Holocaust it's fine that she should take it upon herself to clue them in, but this was English class, not history class. Also according to this there was something of an immediate effect, akin to "Oh, Hitler killed lots of Jews, I understand my own life so much better now." That's what I find flippin' unbelievable. Like I could get into other issues of cultural appropriation and comparing rap lyrics to actual poetry (again, two separate things) but the Holocaust Oscar-bait is probably the worst offense here, in my opinion. 

The other big thing is that one student sees a gang killing at a convenience store, and at first she's not going to testify in the case because the shooter was Latino and that's "her tribe", and you don't speak out about your tribe, but somehow by taking the English class she picked up the knowledge that the legal system is important and she should tell the truth on the stand, no matter what the consequences are. Again, there's something akin to a huge leap in logic there, it would have been great if the film could have somehow connected the dots and explained how she got from Point A to Point C. I mean I get how the classroom games like "The Line" got the teacher to earn the classmates' trust, but suddenly the kids in that class are not racist and trust the legal system implicitly, like those are some pretty big attitude changes to happen overnight. And it's all because they write in their journals now? Come on, pull the other one. 

I know we have a funding problem in our country's schools, and sure, it's great when teachers take it upon themselves to buy extra school supplies or even books. But did this teacher really take on TWO part-time jobs in addition to being a teacher, just to buy her class more or better books from the bookstore? That all seems rather stupid, like as a NITPICK POINT, how come they had a fund-raising event to bring a Holocaust survivor to Los Angeles (this could have been a zoom call...) but they couldn't do a similar bake sale or something to raise money to buy books? If I can't fault Gruwell's teaching methods I can at least find something wrong with her choices to work more jobs for no reason, and an inability to foresee what effect that would have on her relationship. 

She comes across as the kind of person who just wants to "fix" everybody, and some people, like her husband or her school administrators maybe don't want to be "fixed", because that would involve some kind of admission that they are "broken" in some way. You know what, just let me work on my own problems, and you work on yours. No, wait, I forgot, you're perfect and you just like to point out other people's faults. Well, either way, please stop helping me because maybe I need to do my own thing, even make my own mistakes and you're just making that more difficult. That's just the vibe I get from this character, she seems like a lot. Sure, go ahead, try to fix racism and gang violence in your corner of the world, if you want to waste your time, just please leave me out of it. 

Directed by Richard LaGravenese (director of "A Family Affair" and "The Last Five Years")

Also starring Patrick Dempsey (last seen in "Sweet Home Alabama"), Scott Glenn (last seen in "Greenland"), Imelda Staunton (last seen in "Much Ado About Nothing"), April Hernandez Castillo, Mario, Kristin Herrera, Jaclyn Ngan, Sergio Montalvo, Jason Finn, Deance Wyatt, Vanetta Smith, Gabriel Chavarria (last seen in "Hunter Killer"), Hunter Parrish (last seen in "Still Alice"), Antonio Garcia, Giovonnie Samuels, John Benjamin Hickey (last seen in "Barry"), Robert Wisdom (last seen in "Freelancers"), Pat Carroll (last heard in "The Little Mermaid" (1989)), Will Morales, Armand Jones, Ricardo Molina (last seen in "Spanglish"), Angela Alvarado (last seen in "Replicas"), Katie Soo, Liisa Cohen (last seen in "Rent"), Brian Bennett, Horace Hall, Tim Halligan (last seen in "The Island"), Lisa Banes (last seen in "A Cure for Wellness"), Giselle Bonilla, Earl Williams, Blake Hightower (last seen in "Imagine That"), Angela Sargeant, Robin Skye (last seen in "A Family Affair"), Chil Kong (last seen in "Too Big to Fail"), Juan Garcia (last seen in "Bounce"), Larry Cahn, Sharaud Moore, Cody Chappel, DJ Motiv8, Renee Firestone (last seen in "The Last Laugh" (2016)), Eddie Ilam, Elisabeth Mann, Gloria Ungar, Robert Gonzalez, Palma Lawrence Reed (last seen in "The Soloist"), 

RATING: 4 out of 10 glasses of sparkling cider (I know it's non-alcoholic, still, it's not a good look for a high school classroom)

I Am Mother

Year 18, Day 91 - 4/1/26 - Movie #5,290

BEFORE: Well, I could skip right ahead to my Easter film from there, but then I'd miss out on the chance to remove three other films from my list, which can fit in-between here and there. So Rose Byrne carries over again from "If I Had Legs I'd Kick You" and here are the links that will get me to Easter and a bit beyond that: 

Hilary Swank, Imelda Staunton, Hayley Atwell, Margot Robbie, Simon Pegg, and Reece Shearsmith. As you can probably tell, the final "Mission: Impossible" film is on the schedule somewhere in there. I'm working on the rest of April now, I think I've found a path to "Jurassic World: Rebirth" and then the Springsteen bio-pic and then "One Battle After Another", but I don't want to confirm this until I know I have a path to Mothers Day. 

I can't possibly schedule something appropriate for April Fools Day, there just wasn't enough time between St. Patrick's Day and Easter, I had to just take whatever chain I could find - I just have to put something on the big board and hope it somehow works out - this film sounds a bit like a good Mothers Day film, though, so maybe that's the trick?

THE PLOT: In the wake of humanity's extinction, a teenage girl is raised by a robot designed to repopulate the earth, but their unique bond is threatened when an inexplicable stranger arrives with alarming news. 

AFTER: Well, by now I've seen so many end-of-the-world or post-apocalyptic films that if we get anything like this in real life, at least I'll be prepared for it. Who knows how this "war" or "excursion" or whatever in Iran is going to escalate, plus everyone's all in a panic over A.I. too, I can't really say if those are two separate problems or two parts of the same problem, but we're all just headed for something, probably, right? I mean five years ago I would have said that global warming was due to end us all within the century, but know, who can say? If it's not a nuclear explosion it could just as easily be an asteroid striking the earth ("Don't Look Up") or some kind of SkyNet operation, or come on, how many alien invasions have been predicted by movies? We're prepared for those things though, so yeah, it'll probably be something else. 

This film very cagily does NOT tell us exactly what happened (past tense because we're in the future and it already took place) we only see the plans that humanity made to preserve the species if something were to happen. Namely a bunch of fertilized embryos were place in a well-protected storage facility, and there's a robot in charge of determining if and when it's time to re-populate the planet by birthing some new humans, then raising them to be their best selves. Sure, what could possibly go wrong with THIS process? Something tells me we're about to find out...

The head robot in charge goes by "Mother" of course, and starts simple with one baby girl who she names "Daughter". Most likely Daughter is a test case, because Mother is new at this and still learning how to mother. Finding out what music soothes the baby, reading stories to the baby, teaching the baby not only language skills but also science, medicine and even ethics. There's a rigorous training schedule, even if we and they are not exactly sure for what, what happened to the human race, how did it go extinct and what kind of world is there outside? Is there radiation, disease, or just a charred landscape? Knowing this might give us a clue what happened to humanity, so of course we're just not going to get it. 

Despite what Mother told Daughter, one day a woman does come knocking on the door of the bunker, and despite what Mother has told her, Daughter lets her in. I should point out that before this, a mouse somehow came in through a hole near the airlock, and while Daughter was looking forward to having a pet, Mother incinerated the mouse, just to be on the safe side. So, umm, what will Mother do to this woman when she finds out about her? (That's two films in a row with a dead rodent as a plot point, just saying...)

Surprisingly, Mother just wants to help the woman, who has been shot and needs medical attention - this maybe raises a few more questions about what might be going on outside. Who shot her, and why? So there must be multiple people still out there and alive, or something else entirely is going on. The stranger (or "Woman" in the credits) says there is no contamination in the outside world, but Woman could also be lying. For that matter, Mother could be lying about the entire extinction event, we all saw what happened in "2001" when a computer was asked to lie to a couple astronauts, it caused massive programming conflicts and the computer could not resolve them without killing crew members. 

Mother also says that Woman was shot by her own weapon, so Daughter is forced to investigate this herself, in an attempt to determine which entity might be lying to her. After finding out this information and a few other things, Daughter decides to leave the bunker with Woman, only Mother doesn't want to let them go. Yeah, things get complicated after that. Mother offers to start birthing a brother or sister for Daughter, but you know, the trust just isn't there anymore. But then learning what Mother really is and what the extinction event was is really the big reveal of the film, so no spoilers here. 

Surprisingly, this film played at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, although I don't remember hearing about it at the time, and I don't know exactly why it took me 5 or 6 years for me to even hear about this movie, I guess it flew under the radar for a long while. I guess I added it to my list when it hit Netflix in mid-2019, and it's just been there, not linked to for an even longer while. But I watch so many movies it's impossible for me to remember HOW I learned about them, it's really only important that I do, because learning about a movie is the first step toward putting it on my watchlist, and only then can I try to connect to it. The film is based on a novel called "The Final Version" from 2014, so yeah, it was pretty much a 12-year journey from that book to me watching the film today. 

Still, when it comes to apocalypses, I feel like this is all pretty basic stuff, there's not a lot of wow factor here that we haven't seen in films like "I Am Legend", "2012" or "Greenland", only the exciting bits concerning how the world dies and people panicking and trying to save themselves is absent, leaving behind only the much more boring tasks of trying to fix the world and repopulate it with humans. 

Directed by Grant Supore

Also starring Clara Rugaard, Luke Hawker, Hilary Swank (last seen in "Ordinary Angels"), Tahlia Sturzaker, Hazel Sandery, Summer Lenton, Maddie Lenton, Jacob Nolan, Tracy Britton, with archive footage of Johnny Carson (last seen in "Saturday Night"), Whoopi Goldberg (last seen in "Martha"), Steve Martin (last heard in "Love the Coopers"). 

RATING: 5 out of 10 ballet classes (taught by a robot who can't dance?)

If I Had Legs I'd Kick You

Year 18, Day 90 - 3/31/26 - Movie #5,289

BEFORE: Rose Byrne carries over from "Wicker Park" and I'm finally able to get to something else that was Oscar-nominated for last year. Another one is on the way this week, then I really have to find a path to Mothers Day and maybe try to work in "One Battle After Another" ASAP.

Here are the format stats for March, since we've come to the end of another month:

22 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Save the Last Dance, The Prince & Me, Enchanted April, Love Is Strange, Untamed Heart, Drop Dead Gorgeous, Fools Rush In, The Best of Me, Sweet Home Alabama, Life as We Know It, Small Town Saturday Night, Z for Zachariah, Austenland, Southside with You, Fight or Flight, A Working Man, Death Race, The Upside of Anger, Let Him Go, Draft Day, Wicker Park, If I Had Legs I'd Kick You

3 watched on Netflix: Irish Wish, Wrath of Man, Homefront

1 watched on Amazon Prime: Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre
1 watched on Hulu: Wildflower

1 watched on YouTube: Just My Luck

2 watched on Tubi: Serving Sara, Killer Elite

30 TOTAL

I'll post the April links tomorrow, as much as I can anyway.

THE PLOT: While trying to manage her own life and career, a woman on the verge of a breakdown must cope with her daughter's illness, an absent husband, a missing person and an unusual relationship with her therapist. 

AFTER: It's another film that I just don't know what to do with, because in some ways it defies any kind of categorization or classification. Is this a drama, a dark comedy, a weird sci-fi thing? It almost feels like the kind of film somebody puts into production once "Everything Everywhere All at Once" wins Best Picture, only they don't take things quite as far with this one. And I really was SO looking forward to this one, but unfortunately it's too tragic to be a comedy, and too weird to be taken seriously, but then somehow at the same time it feels like it didn't go far ENOUGH into absurdism to be the weird, wonderful film that it could have been. It's firing in too many directions at once without having a very clear purpose. 

I love Conan O'Brien, though, I'll support any film that casts him, and I usually like Rose Byrne, but I somehow couldn't stand her yesterday in "Wicker Park". That was VERY early in her career, though, it might even have been her first film. Nah, it came out after "Star Wars: Episode II", plus a few others so really, she should have known better. But what is today's film all about, or perhaps a better question is really WHY is today's film? Also, WTF?

This is a film about Linda, a therapist who has a lot of personal problems in her life - this is probably not uncommon, and I've heard that most therapists also see therapists, because they have to listen to people unpacking their problems all day long and that takes a toll on therapists, so they more than perhaps anyone else need someone to talk to. And the therapists that she unpacks her own problems to is a very sarcastic, dismissive one, also she has some weird attraction to him, and I've also heard that people having romantic fantasies about their therapists is quite common, too - that is at least one person in your life who has to listen to you, after all.

Linda has a daughter who has a feeding disorder, she has to be fed through a tube and is hooked up to a machine at night, Linda has to monitor the machine all night long, and as a result her sleep cycle is probably quite unusual, also her daughter needs to participate in a daily program at the hospital, where the doctors don't want to remove the tube unless her daughter reaches certain weight gain goals, and Linda suspects these goals are impossible, therefore she's being set up to fail. Linda's husband, by the way, works as a ship's captain, so he is away from home for weeks at a time, it's unclear what kind of ship he is on, but maybe it's a cruise ship, he talks about activities on an island at one point, and Linda is very jealous because he gets to travel and she doesn't, meanwhile her husband is envious of her because he thinks that therapists just "sit around all day". Well, clearly this isn't true because Linda has to drive her daughter around and also monitor her at night. 

Their life gets further imbalanced when the ceiling collapses in their apartment, supposedly from a burst pipe, and the place gets flooded. So Linda and her unnamed daughter have to relocate to a nearby hotel because the landlord claims to have found black mold or asbestos or something. Linda has even more trouble sleeping at the hotel, she tries wine and cannabis gummies, listening to music and eating junk food and sometimes she even leaves her daughter alone for hours, which leads her to conclude she's a bad mother and then she feels even more guilty. 

Another thing that goes wrong, and the movie is kind of full of them (par for the course, I know) is that one of Linda's clients also has trouble with boundaries and she brings her infant son to her therapy sessions. One day she says she needs to use the bathroom and just plain disappears, leaving her infant son behind. Caroline is another mother who for some reason doesn't feel up to the task, because raising kids is HARD, sure, and also we see frequent clips in the news in the background about another mother who just plain stabbed her kids to death. Look, I don't have any kids but I sure can maybe how some parents are driven to insanity, but perhaps for those people it's just not a long trip? Anyway Linda calls up Caroline's husband, who had no idea his wife was seeing a therapist, also he won't come and pick up the baby, so Linda is forced to call the police about the abandoned infant. 

One night Linda visits the apartment, after the construction workers take like a week off, and she gazes up into the hole in the ceiling, and she sees something bizarre, like a bunch of floating lights and the voices of people, I don't know if they're dead souls or Linda's tapped into the hive mind of the world like through a Cerebro, or if she's just going plain old insane in the membrane. It's too bad the film couldn't have explained this a bit more, or if not explained then at least just given us more, because I couldn't understand what they were shooting for here, not at all. Then there's some cross-symbolism between the hole in the ceiling and the feeding tube hole in Linda's child, something akin to what Darren Aronofsky showed us in "Requiem for a Dream", maybe, but the connection here was rather weak, and I still couldn't figure out what it all meant, so again, they just didn't lean in enough to the weirdness here.

Linda's husband, Charles, eventually comes home and he sets right to hiring more contractors to fix the hole in the ceiling, while Linda has taken it upon herself to remove the feeding tube from her daughter, theorizing that maybe she's never going to be motivated to get better as long as the tube is in place. This is probably backwards thinking, but, hey, you never know. I have a nephew who had digestive issues early in childhood, and the "solution" was to only feed him crackers and grapes, but then there never was any real motivation to even TRY any other foods, he just kind of fell into the pattern of "this is all that I eat" and I think the only other food added to his diet since then is McDonald's French Fries, once a day. Well, they are delicious, sure, but there's a whole wide world of food out there that he could probably try now, only he doesn't. 

Anyway, it's pretty obvious to everyone at this point that Linda has gone quite insane, also that she's been leaving her daughter unsupervised at night while she drinks or does drugs, so her "solution" to being revealed is a bad mother is to run down to the beach and throw herself into the ocean, but it's not only a cop-out, it's bad to treat suicide as a viable solution to one's problems. The movie doesn't go completely THERE, but she did try repeatedly, and that's no bueno. Surely there could have been a better resolution, somehow. I feel pretty let down by the ending here, and also no explanation about the surreal cosmic lights that she saw or maybe hallucinated. Even the title of the film is left quite open to interpretation, which means either that somebody was either being very "arty" or couldn't be bothered to tell us what it means. 

NITPICK POINT: Linda keeps referring to the hole in the ceiling in the family's "apartment", but when she approaches the residence before finding the workmen fixing the place, it looks from the outside like a private house. Can you have an apartment in a house? That was also pretty confusing to me. If it's a house, who lived upstairs, even in general, why don't we ever learn who lived upstairs? 

NITPICK POINT #2: I also didn't quite understand why the parking lot attendant was always mad at her. Was she doing something wrong, like not paying for parking? Or she was staying inside her car so she didn't have to pay for parking? Again, very confusing, please dumb it down for me if you want me to understand if that guy had a valid reason to be mad at her. 

Directed by Mary Bronstein

Also starring Conan O'Brien (last seen in "Please Don't Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain"), Delaney Quinn, Mary Bronstein, A$AP Rocky (last seen in "Dope"), Ivy Wolk (last seen in "The Bubble"), Christian Slater (last seen in "Untamed Heart"), Mark Stolzenberg, Manu Narayan (last heard in "The Assistant"), Danielle Macdonald (last seen in "Dumplin'"), Eva Kornet, Ella Beatty, Helen Hong (last seen in "Family Switch"), Daniel Zolghadri (last seen in "Eighth Grade"), Josh Pais (last seen in "The Friend"), Ronald Bronstein, Laurence Blum (last seen in "Good Time"), Lark White, Amy Judd Lieberman, Char Sidney, Jodi Pynn Gabree

RATING: 5 out of 10 screams into a pillow

Wicker Park

Year 18, Day 89 - 3/30/26 - Movie #5,288

BEFORE: Christopher Cousins carries over from "Draft Day". And Josh Hartnett is back in the countdown, after three action films earlier this month. Sometimes it just makes sense to split one film off from a mini-chain of films with the same actor, because I need to spread things out - look, if I'd come here right after "Fight or Flight" or "Wrath of Man" I would have missed out on a bunch of films, and I'd be too close to Easter way too soon. Easter is coming up this weekend, I better load up on some Reese's eggs or something. 

THE PLOT: A young advertising executive searches obsessively for his ex-lover Lisa who disappeared two years earlier. 

AFTER: Well, this film is a complete mess, I don't know how else to describe it. It looked like it was going to fit in with last week's theme about people being kidnapped or otherwise disappearing, only this one doesn't really go with that because here the missing woman just sort of moved unexpectedly. She got a job offer in London and just left, which is a thing that somebody might do, and it's not her fault if she just forgot to inform the man who was running around town trying to randomly bump into her. 

Let me back up a bit, because the movie does that frequently, it's way too flashback-y and it presents us with something of a split timeline, some events are in the present and others are in the past, and the film skips between the two without much warning. I had to re-watch the first half hour just so I could determine which scenes were the flashbacks, and I'm on a tight timeline, I can't be watching a movie one and a half times just because it's hard to understand. But we meet Matthew when he's moved back to Chicago, he's dating his co-worker and things seem to be going OK, and his boss has gifted him a new account, but the next meeting is in China because these people have never heard of Zoom meetings. Maybe in 2004 that wasn't a thing, but still, to fly to China for one meeting, when the clients are right THERE in Chicago seems pretty stupid. But, you know, business. 

Matthew seems like he has it all, great job, beautiful girlfriend, he even bumps into his old friend Luke on the street, and they look forward to getting into some trouble together. Yep, everything's coming together, so it's time for Matthew to shoot himself in the foot and tear it all down. The problem comes after the meeting in the restaurant when he overhears a phone call in the back and he goes into the apartment-sized phone booth (it must be a fancy restaurant, if the phone call room is bigger than the restroom, but you know, it was a different time, before everyone had cell phones) and he swears he can smell his ex-girlfriend's perfume. He rushes out only to see her from the back as she breaks a heel and almost falls down. But he can't catch up with her, it's maddeningly going to take the rest of the movie for that to happen. 

He then misses his plane to China on purpose (the first of many times) so that he can search Chicago for Lisa, who he has determined is back in town, only, how to find her? It's not like there's a thing called directory assistance or the internet, so instead he has to follow clues like a detective would, back at the restaurant she somehow left a folder with her hotel key, so OK, that might be a good place to start. He goes to her room at the Drake and searches her room, he even falls asleep there, which triggers another round of flashbacks or dreams. So this is a good chance for us to learn how he first met Lisa, which has something to do with a camcorder that won't record audio, him seeing her on video and then in person across the street while he's watching that video, then following her to a dance studio so he can watch her rehearse. This leads to her coming into Luke's shoe store so Matthew can pretend to work there and tell her that those red heels she wants aren't available in her size, but they can be ordered. But she knows he's been following her, and somehow that's not creepy at all to her, so they agree to meet the next day and kind of fall into a relationship.  

But you know, life happens and one day she disappeared, later we learn that Matthew had asked her to move in with him (after knowing her for what, three days?) and that's too fast, man. Who can blame her for running away from the guy who basically stalked her and then jumped the gun on living together? You know, sometimes we make choices and we have to live with them, but I guess maybe that erratic woman you slept with two years ago is always going to evoke that powerful fantasy even though you've got a beautiful girlfriend right next to you who will even drive you to the airport, and isn't that what love is all about? No, by all means, ditch the flight and go roam around Chicago's underworld trying to get lucky. 

When Matthew finally finds Lisa, she looks completely different - probably because she's not Lisa, she's a different Lisa who was also at the restaurant and seems a little sketchy, but what the hell, Matthew will sleep with her anyway. Wait, WHAT? Is she pretending to be Lisa, or was Lisa pretending to be her, what exactly is going on here? We see a lot of the same events again from a different P.O.V., but still nothing is starting to make sense. Meanwhile things seem to be going great for Luke, who's been dating this actress named Alex, she even forgives him when he doesn't show up for their date because Matthew borrowed Luke's car and didn't bring it back on time. Matthew also books another flight to China but fails to go to the airport again. 

The third time we jump back in time and go through this crazy exercise again, we learn that Alex and second Lisa look a lot alike, Luke and Matthew go to her play performance (she's terrible, at acting, BTW, and I'm not sure if this actress that I think is a good actress was a bad actress back then, or if she was acting like a bad actress would - I suppose it doesn't matter) and she's wearing a lot of make-up, so the two guys don't put it together that they've slept with the same woman. Matthew has to leave the play to NOT take the next flight to China, and you would think there would be some repercussions at his job that he's missed the meeting completely, but the explanation is somehow that an Italian businessman's wife died in a car crash. No, I don't understand that either. 

The "explanation" for all this is that Lisa and Alex were friends, except the "guy from the newspaper" (who I think was the Italian businessman) was stalking Alex, so she switched apartments with Lisa for a while. And Alex fell in love with Matthew, but he only had eyes for Lisa, the mystery woman he saw across the street. Or maybe Alex was in love with Lisa, that's all a bit unclear. Anyway, Alex was masquerading as Lisa so she could get Matthew's attention or something like that, but that seems very unhealthy, too, like why didn't she just keep dating Luke? It feels like everyone here wants what they can't have and nobody wants to be in the job or relationship that they do have. Alex was also deliberately keeping Matthew and Lisa from getting together, by not delivering hand-written notes and deleting voicemail messages. 

This feels a bit like bargain-basement David Lynch, like I'm thinking about "Lost Highway" where one character became a completely different person somehow and "Mulholland Drive" where two characters got so close to each other that they switched places, and the audience is just supposed to accept these things as if they could really happen. Like if you're going to go for it, really go for it, but "Wicker Park" has nothing but terrible reasons to explain why one person would impersonate another, and then there are also no repercussions for that. I've tried my best to make heads or tails out of "Wicker Park", but I think I've failed - or perhaps there's nothing there that does make any sense, in which case I'm exonerated. 

I think there are also maybe some translation errors, since this is based on a French film titled "L'Appartement", which in turn is loosely based on Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and all of that play's star-crossed lovers. I think maybe Billy Shakes invented "reductio ad absurdum" with regards to love stories, when you have fairies pouring love potions (ruffies) into people's eyes and giving people donkey heads, you're really exploring all the things that could POSSIBLY go wrong in relationships. But here in "Wicker Park" they changed the play-within-a-play to "Twelfth Night", which makes a bit of sense, because that play also has someone falling in love with someone in disguise. Still I stand by my initial ruling, that this is all one giant mess. 

Directed by Paul McGuigan (director of "Lucky Number Slevin" and "The Reckoning")

Also starring Josh Hartnett (last seen in "Wrath of Man"), Rose Byrne (last seen in "Ezra"), Matthew Lillard (last seen in "Five Nights at Freddy's"), Diane Kruger (last seen in "Marlowe"), Jessica Paré (last seen in "Another Kind of Wedding"), Vlasta Vrana (last seen in "French Exit"), Amy Sobol, Ted Whittall (last seen in "The Calling"), Joanna Noyes, Mark Camacho (last seen in "Shattered Glass"), Marcel Jeannin (last seen in "The Greatest Game Ever Played"), Stefanie Buxton, Stanley Hilaire, Zhenhu Han, Lu Ye, Christian Paul (last seen in "Death Race"), Gillian Ferrabee (last seen in "Secret Window"), Miranda Handford, Benjamin Hatcher, Richard Jutras (last seen in "Dream Scenario"), Mary Morter, Erika Rosenbaum (last seen in "The Hummingbird Project"), Jessica Schulte (last heard in "Megamind"), Paul Doucet, Jamieson Boulanger, Carrie Colak, Gordon Masten (last seen in "Stanley & Iris")

RATING: 3 out of 10 sleeping pills (maybe the whole film is just one long fever dream...)

Draft Day

Year 18, Day 88 - 3/29/26 - Movie #5,287

BEFORE: It's another film today that I just don't know what to do with - I mean, it's somehow an entire film about the NFL draft, which apparently is a big deal every year, it's televised and everything. Again, I'm not a sports guy, and I think big league sports might be a bit out of control, a film about the drafting process which is tangential to the sport itself only kind of proves my point. I get that there are movies about football, sure - "Any Given Sunday", "The Longest Yard", "Rudy" and so on. But did we need a movie about the NFL draft? Probably not, which is the main reason I've avoided it for so long. But the chain is the chain and I kept a little spot on the watchlist where I piled up three Kevin Costner movies, so while the clearance sale is still going on, I want to get rid of them all, they're just taking up space in the warehouse. 

This year's NFL Draft is longer than a day, it will take place April 23-25 in Pittsburgh - sorry that I couldn't arrange to watch this film any closer to this year's event. For someone who runs a calendar-based movie blog this might be the equivalent of watching a Christmas movie in August, I don't know. But I did what I could - the whole process is still a bit of a mystery to me, and by that I mean my own scheduling process, not the NFL draft process. But we live in a world now where everyone the ability to record videos and a place to post them, since joining Instagram I can't tell you how many people are making video lists of the best pastrami sandwiches sold in NYC or where to find the greasiest cheesesteaks or the most secret speakeasies, judging restaurants on the weirdest scales you can imagine. Like there's a guy who's a cab driver who reviews restaurants on his lunch breaks, popping in to get a table for one at some of the most exclusive restaurants you can imagine, and everyone can't wait to serve him because they know he overtips.  

But I'm sure there's someone out there who, for example, judges restaurants only on their decor, or their names or reputations. We've got Michelin-star ratings, celebrity chefs, and then there's being internet famous as opposed to being known for making good food. I have to wonder what's being lost in the process, because sometimes you just want to have a decent meal in a place that isn't too crowded. But judging a restaurant on anything other than the food seems a bit like making a movie about the NFL draft and not the sport itself. But let's find out. 

Kevin Costner carries over from "Let Him Go". 

THE PLOT: Cleveland Browns GM Sonny Weaver has the opportunity to rebuild his team when he trades for the number one draft pick. He must decide what he's willing to sacrifice on a life-changing day for a few hundred young men with NFL dreams. 

AFTER: Well, I was kind of right, this is a film that started at 8 on the ridiculous scale and then took it up to 11. Partly society is to blame, because we can't really do anything "small" here in America, everything that starts out small eventually gets overhyped to the point of madness, the Super Bowl is just one example, if you feel like spending six or eight hours watching a tribute to excess, to the point where there's so many food traditions or tailgating "rules" that there's a whole subculture just for THAT, then you've got the exorbitant amount of TV commercials and just the money spent on making and booking ONE of those ads is larger than the GDP of most countries, I'd say that things have gotten pretty far out of hand and they're not going back. There's a sponsor just for the COIN FLIP, and people are also betting on the coin flip (one of hundreds of things you can bet on). 

Another example is the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, like I imagine 100 years ago somebody just thought it might be a nice idea to inflate a couple balloons, book a marching band and entertain a few dozen people in the streets, and now look where it all is. It's a three hour mythic mash-up of product placements, musical numbers from Broadway shows, marching bands from all over the country, dance troupes and celebrities who drop by and comment for five minutes because they've also got something to promote. Whatever entertainment value a parade might have once had is now buried under a giant merchandising pile, but God help your Broadway show if you DON'T do a performance on 34th St. during the parade, you might as well just close down the theater because everyone will be going to the other show down the block that did perform. They have plenty of marching bands in the NYC area, I'm just saying, and they all pretty much look and sound the same, why do they have to fly an entire band plus parents and support staff in from Flagstaff, Arizona - it all seems very wasteful to me, but I guess then those teens get to say they were on TV and also they got to visit the big city. At the end of the day, does NBC get to air three hours of programming that means something, that they're proud of? Or is it just a tradition now, muscle memory and we keep doing what we're doing without thinking about why we're doing it? 

To be fair, sports movies only took things so far, because at one point somebody wrote the book "Moneyball" and regular people started to realize that there might be more to the game than what you see on the field, and every team has staffers who are even more obsessed with stats than the fans are, and they've also got researchers who dig into each player's personal history to try to determine not just what kind of player they're going to be, but what kind of person, what kind of teammate they're going to be, and for the team owners who are spending millions on THIS guy over THAT guy, maybe that all adds up to something, or maybe it doesn't, because nobody has a crystal ball that works 100% of the time. The best you can do maybe is spend your money wisely, make the best picks you can, cross your fingers and hope for the best - and STILL 100% of the people are going to get fired over time based on the decisions they made or didn't make. 

But still, I went in to this knowing almost NOTHING about the NFL Draft, and after I really don't know much more. I know that the team with the worst record each year gets the best (first) pick the next, so it's a bit like my father's family's old Christmas gift distribution. (We did the white elephant thing, where everybody got a number and then picked wrapped gifts in order, but you couldn't pick the gift you brought, and you had options to trade what you just opened for anything that had been unwrapped before. Other trades were negotiated afterwards, privately.) But then every team gets a pick in every round, unless they've traded away that pick to another team for something else in return. Is that about it? I have a feeling this system was designed to make things equitable among all of the NFL teams, but then the teams with the smaller budgets are free to negotiate with the teams with the bigger budgets, and that's not equitable at all. The teams in the larger markets might have more power and assets to negotiate with, so again, something about this very fair system doesn't seem very fair. 

We follow Sonny Weaver Jr., the GM of the Cleveland Browns, who receives directions from the team's owner to at least TRY to get the most coveted player in the draft, a QB named Bo Callahan, because he's going to put asses in the seats. After speaking with the also-struggling Seattle Seahawks, Sonny is able to trade for their #1 pick in the first round, but only by giving up the Browns' 1st-round pick for the next THREE years. This puts the Browns in the best position to secure Callahan, only it raises questions, why were the Seahawks so eager to give up their pick? I mean, they got something in return, but perhaps that was just a cover-up tactic, do they know something about Bo Callahan that the other teams don't? Sonny would rather draft a running back named Vontae Mack, or even a legacy player like Ray Jennings - but the owner wants the flashy new quarterback to replace Brian Drew, their sophomore QB who might have a bad knee, and who also seems to be demanding a trade IF the Browns take Callahan, because that town ain't big enough for the both of them. 

Meanwhile, everyone assumes that the Browns will take Callahan with their new first pick, so the head coach starts to revolt because he didn't plan for this, he likes Drew, the old QB just fine and he's got all his plays for the season centered around what Drew can do. Ali, the team's accountant, is called in to see if the team can even afford to draft Callahan, because of the salary cap (another thing that I believe is supposed to level the playing field, but I bet there are plenty of ways around it). Sonny starts re-reviewing all the footage of Callahan, too, to see if he's got a weakness they haven't discovered yet, and he has the team's security officer do another deep dive into Callahan's background to find any hint of scandal, other than the fact that there was an incident at his birthday party in college, and it seems none of his teammates were involved, but that also means they weren't THERE, and why weren't they? Did Callahan not have any friends on the team, or did he have bad B.O., or were the local cops inclined to hide the fact that team members were there? Anyway you try to explain it, it doesn't make much sense. 

Also meanwhile, the film needs to pile on all this other personal drama, to hide the fact that this is a football movie where nobody plays any football - sure, it's the off-season and Draft Day, but maybe you came here for a football movie and not a negotiation movie. So for some reason that accountant, Ali, is in a situationship with Sonny, and they have to keep it quiet because that's probably an H.R. violation. But, Ali is pregnant so they're going to have to disclose sometime soon. And on top of THAT, Sonny's father died like a week ago and he was the GM before Sonny was, and in his will he had a request that his ashes be scattered on the team's practice field, and Sonny's mother wants to do this TODAY, right now, while she's there, and Sonny for some other reason doesn't have the stones to say, "Mom, today's just not a good day for this, I'm very busy, how about tomorrow?"

I mean, it's really like "What could POSSIBLY go wrong on Draft Day", only heightened beyond the absurd. There are 365 days in a year, but every problem in Sonny's life seems to have come to a head on Draft Day, of course. How is a man supposed to conduct trading business, research a player again at the last minute, keep the coach from quitting, keep the team owner from firing him, and try to figure out who the other teams are going to pick while also trying to figure out who HE is going to pick? It's a lot. Also it's worth considering that you may draft a player you really want, or you may draft a player to keep him from another team that needs him, or you may just draft a player for the hell of it so you can trade him later to another team. This is worse than 3-D chess, this is like doing a jigsaw puzzle in the dark when you can't even feel the shapes of the pieces. 

It's also possible that all of the team's research isn't worth a damn.  People always point out that Tom Brady, one of the greatest if not THE greatest, was picked like 140th in his year. Some stats will tell you a player is really great, and then you still have to cross your fingers and hope he lives up to the hype, while other players you may draft just to round out the team, and one of those guys can really surprise you one day. Or so I've heard. Anyway, I don't know what all the fuss is about, because at the end of the day, this is still drafting for the Cleveland Browns, one of the worst teams in the NFL on a perennial basis. I've spent time in Cleveland, and I can tell you their fans are some of the most loyal there could be to a team that has just never delivered for them, not even a bit. Yet we're supposed to believe here that there are players somewhere who are ECSTATIC to be drafted by the Browns. I refuse to believe it, except that playing for Cleveland might be slightly better than digging ditches in Kuala Lumpur. 

It's just my feeling here, but I speak as someone who's gotten a behind-the-scenes look at hypefests like San Diego Comic-Con, and now I've peeked behind the curtains of NBA games, while I'm selling beer at Nets games. My strong suspicion is that simply everyone is just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. Certainly nobody knows for sure what movies are going to be successful, what children's TV shows are going to catch on, and which players are going to coalesce into a successful team of contenders in any sport. Everyone's running around trying to get maximum eyeballs on their product, whether that's at live events, on TV screens or on social media. But I think mostly the thing to remember is that nobody has a clue, not at all, not from what I've seen. Creative people just keep putting stuff out there and hope that other people find it and enjoy it, but sports is really its own thing, teams just have to keep practicing and playing the games and trying to win, but then there's this whole ridiculous culture (or cult) built up around each team and each sport. 

Directed by Ivan Reitman (producer of "Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire" and producer of "Space Jam: A New Legacy")

Also starring Jennifer Garner (last seen in "Family Switch"), Denis Leary (last seen in "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work"), Frank Langella (last seen in "Sweet November"), Sam Elliott (last seen in "The Company You Keep"), Sean "Diddy" Combs (last seen in "Girls Trip"), Terry Crews (last seen in "Serving Sara"), Ellen Burstyn (last seen in "The Tale"), Chadwick Boseman (last seen in "Stan Lee"), Rosanna Arquette (last seen in "Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary"), W. Earl Brown (last seen in "The Unforgivable"), Kevin Dunn (last seen in "King Richard"), Arian Foster (last seen in "Baywatch"), Brad William Henke (last seen in "The Frozen Ground"), Chi McBride (last heard in "Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe"), Griffin Newman (last heard in "Disenchanted"), Josh Pence (last seen in "La La Land"), David Ramsey (last seen in "A Very Brady Sequel"), Patrick St. Esprit (last seen in "Acts of Violence"), Timothy Simons (last seen in "Don't Worry Darling"), Tom Welling (last seen in "The Fog"), Wade Williams (last seen in "Message from the King"), 

Dave Donaldson, Jordan Harris, Zachary Littlejohn, Enre Laney, Laura Steinel (last seen in "Babylon"), Wallace Langham (last seen in "Daddy Day Care"), Christopher Cousins (last seen in "Untraceable"), Erin Darke (last seen in "The Drop"), Quincy Dunn-Baker (last seen in "A House of Dynamite"), Gregory D. Rush, Tom Headlee, Patrick Breen (last seen in "The Assistant"), David Dunn, Stephen Hill (last seen in "Widows"), Jim Brewer, Margot Danis, Leanora Haselrig, Jennifer McMahan, Brenda Adrine, Edwina Hadley, Pat Healy (last seen in "Killers of the Flower Moon"), Andre Bello, Jacob Bertrand, John Dannug, Shannon Edwards, Mike Karban, Annette Lawless, Gil O'Brien, Nathan Andrew Read,

with cameos from Chris Berman (last seen in "Happy Gilmore 2"), Russ Brandon, Jim Brown (last seen in "Ali & Cavett: The Tale of the Tapes"), Monique Brown, Joel Bussert, Sammy Choi, Jeff Darlington, Rich Eisen (last seen in "That's My Boy"), Ken Fiore, Mike Florio, Aaron Goldhammer, Roger Goodell, Jon Gruden, Rebecca Haarlow, John Heffernan, Marc Honan, D'Qwell Jackson, Mel Kiper, Bernie Kosar, Ray Lewis, Alex Mack, Alex Marvez, Mike Mayock, Tony Rizzo, Deion Sanders, Frank Supovitz, Phil Taylor, TJ Ward, Seth Wickersham, 

and archive footage of John Candy (last seen in "Once Upon a Crime...")

RATING: 5 out of 10 retired jersey numbers

Let Him Go

Year 18, Day 87 - 3/28/26 - Movie #5,286

BEFORE: Out working last night, an animation event and thanks to my previous life, I'm pretty good at identifying animation VIP's, who tend to show up late for events and often they can't find their QR codes, which are on their tickets, which are somewhere in their e-mail, only they can't find the e-mail or the paper ticket their assistant printed out. Yes, I know the type, I spent 30 years working for somebody just like that. At some point it's easier if they just tell me their name, because I've watched SO many animated films and read SO many credits that I'm probably going to know exactly who they are, or I may have dealt with them at some point via e-mail in that previous life. So yeah, this guy told me his name, I knew who he was, and I let him in the event, 99% sure he was probably on the VIP list, which I didn't have access to at that point, because the screening had begun. After the event, I told the host who I let in without a ticket, and he told me that I made the right call. Yep, I figured that. I had Googled the guy, essentially confirming he was who he said he was, and his producing credits let me know he belonged there. The event host was once my counterpart at the animation studio across the street (literally) and so we had a lot to talk about, for two people who had never met before. 

Kevin Costner carries over from "The Upside of Anger". 

THE PLOT: A retired sheriff and his wife, grieving over the death of their son, set out to find their only grandson. 

AFTER: Well, we've really got a running theme this week, and it's got a lot to do with kidnapping - I mean, that's kind of a no-brainer for a Jason Statham film, but I thought the theme would kind of end there. In "Homefront" his character's daughter was held by drug dealers, and then in "A Working Man" he rescued his boss' daughter who had been kidnapped by the Russian mob to become a sex slave. Then in "Killer Elite" his mentor, played by De Niro, was being held hostage by an Omani sheik. In "Death Race" he went to prison, that's not exactly the same thing, and "The Upside of Anger" had a husband who disappeared, that's sort of its own thing too. But now we're back on kidnapping of an actual kid - OK, again sort of. But you see how the whole week has been about people vanishing or being made to vanish, right? 

The situation with this one is that the Blackledge family is going well, their son James has married Lorna and they have an infant son, Jimmy. Maybe Margaret is just a bit too into the grandmothering thing, we see her push Lorna out of the way so she can give Jimmy a proper bath in the kitchen sink. Not long after that, James apparently falls off his horse while out doing chores on the Montana ranch, and breaks his neck. When his horse returns to the stable without him, George has to ride out and bring his son's body home. Well, as a former sheriff he's probably seen his share of dead people, but still, the loss is devastating to the family. 

The film fast-forwards a couple years, and Lorna marries Donnie Weboy, but the Blackledges are still looking forward to being doting grandparents to little Jimmy - but Margaret sees Lorna out walking with Jimmy and her husband, and when Jimmy drops his ice cream cone, Donnie grabs the kid to make him stop crying, then he hits Lorna. (NOTE: this part of the film is set in 1963, and it was a different time, but this behavior is NOT OK by modern standards, nor was it OK to Margaret back then.) Margaret decides to drop in and talk to them, only to find they've left town with no forwarding address.

But since it's 1963, there's no way to look somebody up on the internet or call directory assistance even, and phone books were only published like once a year so there really was no quick way to track somebody down, it's easy to forget that we live in the information age now and back then, things didn't get updated often, except at a snail's pace. Margaret wants to pack her bags, load up the truck and drive around until she learns where her grandson is, whether George joins her on her quest is really up to him. But as a former sheriff, he's got some contacts in law enforcement, so the police station is their first stop, not a terrible way to go because maybe Donnie Weboy has some outstanding warrants or something, they can also maybe issue an APB or something. But again, no computers to trace his credit cards, no street cameras to tie into, no nationwide database of traffic tickets or anything like that. They spend the night in an empty jail cell (umm, how is that better than a hotel room?) and the sheriff gets them a lead on a shop in Forsyth that might be owned by the Weboy family. 

The Weboy cousin in the Forsyth shop tells them the family is mostly based in Gladstone, North Dakota, so that's where they head next. Along the way they meet Peter, a young Native American who lives out in the middle of nowhere, away from society for some reason. It's noted that much like the times it's set in, the film also tends to move at a snail's pace. You can really feel the time that it probably takes to drive across the big state of Montana... Peter does know the name Weboy, at least, and suggests they look for Bill Weboy when they reach town. 

Bill Weboy seems helpful, but also a little shady at the same time. He'll drive them out to the main Weboy farm, but only if they come back at 4 pm and they agree to stay out there for dinner. Also he wants one of the Blackledges to ride in his truck, why exactly is a bit unclear - but it seems he doesn't trust the Blackledges, and if he can't trust them, how can they trust him? Donnie's mother does make pork chops for dinner, but she's also rather forward and rude and when Lorna, Donnie and little Jimmy arrive, something still seems a bit off, and the Blackledges don't really care for how they talk to little Jimmy and send him to bed without dinner just because he wouldn't eat a hamburger with mustard for lunch. 

The next day, the Blackledges visit Lorna at work and ask her to return to Montana with their grandson, she agrees to do so, but she's also concerned what this family will do to her if she leaves, probably track her down. So instead of Lorna showing up at their hotel, the Blackledges are visited by Blanche, Donnie and Bill, plus a couple other tough-looking family members, and things don't go well. George pulls his gun, but come on, he's getting on in years, so he ends up in the hospital, and the local sheriff who investigates the incident sides with the Weboys, pointing out that these out-of-towners came to Gladstone to try to get their grandson back, then they pulled a gun on the Weboys while in their hotel room, but the good news is that the Weboys have agreed to not press charges, provided George and Margaret leave town and forget about their grandson. 

Well, that probably would be the smart thing to do, only Margaret can't seem to give up. George sneaks out to return to the Weboy ranch with a shotgun, and he tries to either take the boy or go all one-man-army on the Weboys. Well, he's not exactly Jason Statham so there are some disastrous consquences, to say the least. I guess at some point you have to cut your losses and accept that even family members are going to come and go. At that point, even if they could get little Jimmy back, would it be worth the cost? 

Sure, the Jason Statham films are mindless, feel-good action films where the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice, and the good guy with a gun usually beats a biker gang with guns because he's got the moral high ground, also he exercises and knows MMA stuff. But if a normal person went up against a whole family full of tough guys, this film's result is at least a bit more believable, even if it's not exactly the outcome the audience wants. Even when Margaret gets more help from Peter, by the time she arrives at the Weboy house, well, no spoilers here. 

But these actors played Superman's earth parents in the previous round of DC superhero films, maybe that's why it feels like they're the moral people with justice on their side. Why couldn't they have tried to go about things the legal way, instead of playing vigilante, maybe file some lawsuit to get visitation rights so they could see their grandson? That might have taken a bit longer, especially if they didn't know where he was, but ultimately that could have been more successful. Just saying. 

Directed by Thomas Bezucha (director of "The Family Stone")

Also starring Diane Lane (last heard in "Inside Out 2"), Kayli Carter (last seen in "A Complete Unknown"), Ryan Bruce, Lesley Manville (last seen in "Ordinary Love"), Will Brittain (last seen in "The Forever Purge"), Jeffrey Donovan (last seen in "Wrath of Man"), Connor Mackay, Adam Stafford, Booboo Stewart (last seen in "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2"), Greg Lawson, Bradley Stryker (last seen in "Cold Pursuit"), Will Hochman, John Treleaven, Heather Lea MacCallum, Ryan Northcott, Otto Hornung, Bram Hornung, Ravonna Dow, Judith Buchan, Marilyn Potts, Vanessa Holmes, Bryn Roy, Finn Lee-Epp

RATING: 6 out of 10 slices of coffee cake

The Upside of Anger

Year 18, Day 86 - 3/27/26 - Movie #5,285

BEFORE: Joan Allen carries over from "Death Race", to a film that I'm not quite sure how to handle, because it seems rather relationshippy, if not outright romance-y. That usually would reserve a film for February, however I tried other outros from the Jason Statham block, and this was really the only one that worked, in that it gets me to Easter in the proper time frame. If I read the signals correctly, this film does NOT connect to anything else on the romance list, so it's OK to split this one off from the herd, otherwise it's just going to sit on the watchlist for a few more years maybe, or never get watched at all. 

I've also just realized it's a prime candidate for a Mother's Day film, perhaps similar to "Because I Said So" or "Lovely and Amazing", which were both about families with several teen/twenty-something females and their relationships to their mother. So this film is arriving either two weeks too late for the romance chain or two months early for Mother's Day, I can't really tell before I watch it, but I really need it for the linking so I'm going to just watch it and hope the chain knows what it's doing. 

THE PLOT: When her husband unexpectedly disappears, a sharp-witted suburban wife and her daughters juggle their mom's romantic dilemmas and family dynamics. 

AFTER: Yeah, it's kind of what I figured, I don't know what to do with this film, like forget putting it in the right category, I want to know where the heck this story came from, like is this based on a book or a true story, did all of this really happen to a Detroit family with four teen daughters, or is it all just a made-up story meant to make some kind of point about life, and if so, what is that? Apparently this all comes from the mind of writer/director Mike Binder, but Kevin Costner's ex-baseball player is believed to be based on retired Detroit Tigers pitcher Denny McLain, who had a radio talk show but maybe didn't like to talk about his baseball career all that much. Think of that as maybe an early example of a podcast, then, one where the host can talk about whatever he wants, because it's not like the audience has any say in the matter. Any way you slice it, though, this definitely feels like a mortar-type film, there's no way this is a brick, even if I'd scheduled it on Mother's Day, that might have made it a little more relevant and topical, but I'm guessing still it's more valuable to me as a film that links other films together and keeps the chain going. 

The poster finishes the title "The Upside of Anger" with "is the person you can become." And I have no idea what that is supposed to mean. Anger is a good thing because it turns you into a different person? Certainly not a happier person, but I guess an angrier person is technically the same person, just angrier. Right? Like I can have a lot of emotions, angry or sad or ecstatic or regretful, but I'm STILL ME. The upside of anger is the person you can become - it feels like one of those phrases that you might overhear and it will bounce around your brain for a couple hours before you scream, "No, it's fucking NOT, that doesn't make any sense." Lewis Black once said this after overhearing someone say, "If it weren't for my horse, I wouldn't have spent that year in college..." and you can probably go crazy thinking about what that sentence might mean. 

The movie starts off with a funeral, but it fails to mention who is being buried - we can eliminate a couple of the characters because they're seen AT the funeral, but the identity of the corpse is going to remain secret for most of the movie. Then the movie flashes back three years to Terry Wolfmeyer telling her four daughters that their father has left the family, most likely to live with his younger secretary in Sweden. Terry starts to drink heavily to cope with her anger and pain, and when she confides in her husband's friend and their neighbor Denny, they start to drink together. Spending time together, though, even if they're mismatched, well, we all know where this can lead - but Terry is still going through the stages of grief. 

The meat of the film is about Terry's relationship with her four daughters - Hadley, Emily, Andy and Popeye - and how that relationship is affected by their father's absence, their mother dealing with that absence, and also her budding relationship with Denny. Denny's never been a father figure before, but is willing to take a stab at it - as a former baseball player maybe he's dated a bunch of MLB groupies and might finally be ready for a real relationship, later in life. Stranger things have happened. 

Hadley graduates from college and then introduces her mother to her boyfriend of three years, only to reveal that she is pregnant, and they are engaged. Terry reacts with anger because all of this is being sprung on her kind of after the fact, and she embarrasses herself at a luncheon with her future in-laws because she is having trouble dealing with the influx of all this news and change. Emily, the second daughter, wants to pursue a career as a ballet dancer, only her mother makes her go to U. Michigan in Ann Arbor and pursue something more traditional. But when she is hospitalized for some kind of eating disorder, caused by stress, she comes home to recover and (eventually) Terry accepts her decision to pursue dance as a career. She had to get there the hard way, though, nearly everything in the film seems to move in that direction. 

Andy, another daughter, accepts a job from Denny at the radio station where he has his talk show, his producer, Shep, is reluctant to hire her at first, but then is attracted to her, so he has her producing radio shows while he's also sleeping with her, that's probably an H.R. violation, even back in 2005, but people became more aware about such things later on. Meanwhile, Popeye pursues a relationship with her high-school classmate while she makes documentary films, but after she kisses him, he tells her that he's gay, and she doesn't want to believe it. It happens, sure, and what high-school girl couldn't use a gay male best friend? Gorden's dad likes bungee jumping and he claims to like it too, but I think this was just a big fad back in 2005, anyway I don't think anybody LIKES it, so I really don't understand why this was ever a thing. 

Also meanwhile, Terry and Denny have kind of an on-again, off-again thing going on, they have sex but then they don't know where to take things next, like marriage is probably off the table, but why not just try to enjoy it for whatever it is?  Terry wants to micro-manage the relationship just like she does with her daughter's lives, and that's probably very annoying. Terry gets mad at him over the whole thing with her daughter dating his older radio producer, but then when she and Denny separate for a while, she finds that she misses him, and they get back together. Denny just likes being some part of this big family, coming over for very delicious dinners, and giving advice to the daughters when he can. Sure this life's not perfect, but then nothing is. 

There's a final twist to the story, and it's got a lot to do with that funeral from the opening, but I'm not going to spoil it here. Whether the twist is believable or not, well I suppose that's up to you. I guess maybe this is all about how our anger and frustration over things not happening the way we would like them to is probably the simplest reaction we could have, but is being angry really the best way to spend our time, or is it a lot of misplaced and sometimes unnecessary emotion? Sorry, that's really all I have tonight, the film doesn't even connect the dots that well in trying to have some meaningful words of advice for all the folks at home. Would that really be so much to ask for here?

Directed by Mike Binder (director of "Reign Over Me")

Also starring Kevin Costner (last seen in "3 Days to Kill"), Erika Christensen (last seen in "Swimfan"), Keri Russell (last seen in "Austenland"), Alicia Witt (last seen in "Citizen Ruth"), Evan Rachel Wood (last seen in "The Life Before Her Eyes"), Mike Binder (last seen in "Robert Klein Still Can't Stop His Leg"), Tom Harper, Dane Christensen, Danny Webb (last seen in "The Dig"), Magdalena Manville (last seen in "Monster' (2003)), Suzanne Bertish (last seen in "The Wife"), David Firth, Rod Woodruff, Stephen Greif (last seen in "Boogie Woogie"), Arthur Penhallow, Richard Mylan, Robert Perkins, William Tapley (last heard in "V for Vendetta"), Owen Oakeshott, Bella Sabbagh, Gavin Munn

RATING: 5 out of 10 wedding band songs