BEFORE: It's Sunday and the blizzard has hit, so I'm housebound again - but this allows me to watch a rare DAYTIME movie and then catch up again, as Nick Jonas carries over from "You're Cordially Invited".
Over on TCM, it's day 10 of "31 Days of Oscar", but let's look at the line-up for Day 11, Monday, 2/23, and the two themes are "Oscar Goes to the Islands" and then "Oscar Goes to the Dogs":
7:30 am "White Shadows in the South Seas" (1928)
9:15 am "All the Brothers Were Valiant" (1953)
11:15 am "Gulliver's Travels" (1939)
12:45 pm "Robinson Crusoe" (1954)
2:30 pm "Hawaii" (1966)
5:15 pm "South Pacific" (1958)
8:00 pm "Lassie Come Home" (1943)
9:45 pm "Come Back, Little Sheba" (1952)
11:30 pm "The Awful Truth" (1937)
1:15 am "Umberto D." (1952)
3:00 am "Sounder" (1972)
OK, I suppose if you get snowed in tomorrow you can do a lot worse than watch a few films set in Hawaii or the South Pacific. But really, who picked these movies, because most of them are ones I wouldn't even want to watch. That means I'm only hitting with one today, I've seen "South Pacific" and now my stats will drop again. 1 seen out of 11 brings me to 49 seen out of 121, and that's just over 40%. I should do a bit better on Tuesday. I have not recorded any of TCM's films yet, but I think I will record "Das Boot", one of the "Oscar Goes to War" films, because I've never been able to cross that film off my list, and maybe this is my chance.
THE PLOT: A young woman tries to ease the pain of her fiancé's death by sending texts to his old cell phone number, and forms a connection with the man the number has been reassigned to.
AFTER: It's a new world out there, technologically speaking, and I think in the last couple of weeks I've seen a lot of that reflected in the romance films that are only a year or two old - the bar pick-up scene of "Roger Dodger" is essentially gone, replaced by the online dating and text flirting seen in "Puppy Love" and "Cat Person". Man, and things are SO easy for screenwriters now, if they want to get two people to meet all they have to do is have them join an app, or have another character who is their friend do that for them, and boom, we're off to the races. No more writer's block over questions like "How are these two characters going to meet?" Well, duh, they just joined the same app and one swiped right on the other one's picture, or the software's parameters said they'd be a good match. By comparison, yesterday's chance meeting that came about through an accidental double-booking at a wedding venue seems like such a total stretch - to say nothing of meeting somebody when he's the union rep at the Minnesota yogurt factory that you just got put in charge of...
But in that vein, I now have to take a look at "Love Again", which allows two people who no longer believe in romantic love meet by chance when he's assigned a new company cell phone, and right after that, the girlfriend of the dead boyfriend who USED to have that phone number starts texting it as a form of therapy. Right. Mira didn't do this for two whole years, and then as soon as Rob gets that phone number, she starts texting it? I have to call B.S. on this - if she'd done this before, texting a "dead" number the texts wouldn't have gone through - but this leads me to a NITPICK POINT, wouldn't she see that the texts are being marked as "delivered" or "read", and wouldn't that seem a little odd, that the texts sent to a dead person are being read?
Mira's obviously still grieving, after two years, but come on, she did watch as her boyfriend was hit by a car, two years doesn't even seem like enough time to get over that, which it clearly isn't. But Rob's been through another kind of grief, where he was engaged and his fiancée called off the wedding, very publicly, and so he's also determined that love is a delusion that is shared by two people who are using it so they don't have to face the reality that everyone dies and every relationship ends at some point. Well, he's not exactly wrong, but this is a rather bleak way to view the world of the hoo-mans. Rob gleans enough information from Mira's texts about her upcoming date to determine where she's going to be, and he even GOES there so he can figure out who's been sending him these texts, and find out if they're just spam or a catfishing exercise or what. To his credit, he never answered any of her texts, but maybe he should have? You know, just say, "Excuse me, wrong number, clearly you're hurting and trying to talk to your dead boyfriend, but I'm not him, so please update your list of contacts.
Instead, he's intrigued and also he finds Mira beautiful, so when he learns that one of her texts is a reference to the opera about Orpheus, he goes to that opera every night in the hopes that she will show up, and eventually he does. This is very stalker-y, sure, but he does at least gain an appreciation for opera from doing this, and he DOES meet Mira in the real world, and they do form a connection, however it all goes back to that phone and those texts, and him not telling her about that is still a lie of omission, so their whole relationship is kind of based on a lie. But of course he waits too long to tell her, and then when they seem to have a good thing going, it's kind of too late to tell her, because he doesn't want to spoil it. There really shouldn't be a window on telling the truth, but sure, I get it. In the case of "Fake it 'till you make it", once somebody makes it, it's very rare for them to admit that they faked it. Why would they?
In the meantime, Rob's career as a music journalist puts him in a position to interview Celine Dion, who's got a concert coming up at the Barclay's Center (hey, I know that place) in Brooklyn. Celine Dion, of course, in addition to being a known popular recording artist, is also apparently an expert on all things romantic - and I don't know how I feel about that. My wife watched that documentary about her, and I'm sure that maybe she thinks this about herself, but she did marry her manager, who was a few years older than her, and their relationship was completely professional until it wasn't, and well, no judgments here but I don't think any of that makes her an expert on finding love or maintaining relationships. I probably need some more information - but in addition to being a recording artist AND a love expert, Ms. Dion is also an executive producer on this film. There's a conflict of interest in there somewhere, I'm sure.
So I really should HATE this film because it feels so manipulative - the storyline feels very forced, the way that Celine Dion is written into the film feels very contrived, and then there's the dialogue, which is often horrible. Every single plot point is belabored and mentioned at least three times, so it feels like the director thought the audience was full of idiots, and if we don't make this extremely simple for everyone to follow, we're going to be in serious trouble. But then naturally it takes three times longer to GET anywhere, and each time it's the emotional state of Mira that seems to be to blame. Everytime there's a new milestone in her new relationship with Rob, she pushes him away and he's got to find another way to try and reach her. Sure, she's fragile, sure, she's been through some bad stuff, but also she's A LOT and that's going to be a hard shell to crack.
And then once she spends the night and "accidentally" sees her own text chain to her dead boyfriend on his computer, well, geez, the whole thing blows up, as it inevitably had to. She breaks things off and Rob's back to square one, but still he thinks this relationship can be fixed, if he could just explain himself a little better and then have another private conversation with Celine Dion, then everything will be fine. Ugh, again I should hate that Celine Dion is the "deux es machina" who can improve Mira's outlook on life just by offering her a job designing the poster for her current tour. (Sorry, another NITPICK POINT here, Ms. Dion is already out on tour, and she started her tour without a poster? No way, this is definitely something that her record company would have taken care of before she'd be doing her sound-check at Barclay's. Prove me wrong, I dare you.)
I want to root for these crazy kids, I want them to build on the fact that they both put their fries in their cheeseburgers and they both like basketball and build on that, and I know you don't have to like all the same things to be in a relationship, but they've got the opera and they've got Central Park and neither one can cook worth a darn, isn't that enough? Anyway, Rob has to do a publishing "Hail Mary" play and make the Celine Dion article all about himself, how he got love advice from her and how he believes that "It's All Coming Back to Me Now" is his new mantra, because he didn't believe he'd find love again until he got Mira's texts and then got to know her after cyber-stalking her. I know that sounds wrong and so maybe this relationship can't be saved, unless he takes this whole dilemma public and writes about it in the newspaper, where millions of people can then weigh in on it.
You might remember a couple of weeks ago, there was this Norwegian skier who got a bronze medal in the Olympics - when the news interviewed him after he got his medal, all he could talk about was what a mess he made out of his life, because he met this great girlfriend four months ago, but cheated on her two months ago. Now he's filled with regret, and this had basically ruined his whole Olympic Games - so he used the interview to go public, thinking that if millions of people could just hear his story, this would somehow put pressure on the ex-girlfriend and then solve his little romantic problem, umm, which he caused. Well, the journalists tracked down his ex, and basically asked her if she would take him back, and she replied with a "HELL, no." Her reasoning was that he did what he did, and then added insult to injury by telling the whole world about it during the Olympic broadcast.
Realistically, this is what maybe SHOULD have happened to Rob here - I would imagine that presenting his situation with Mira to the public could easily have had a negative effect. Mira was already a noted author of children's books, and now Rob basically embarrassed her in print by telling a story about her grief, and sending texts to her dead boyfriend's phone, and then his own misdeeds by not telling her about the phone thing, using the texts to stalk her in real life and then going to the opera obsessively (sorry, another quick NITPICK POINT, a journalist would probably not be able to afford opera tickets in NYC for 30 days straight, or however long it took) until she showed up. But, you know, this is a rom-com movie so it needs to have a happy ending of sorts, and so somehow his article breaks through and Mira forgives him, and they get back together, with conditions, of course.
I don't hate the ending, it's just that this film is very clunky and also has no basis in reality, in addition to relying on Celine Dion, relationship expert, to fix everyone's problems everywhere. Jeez, if Rob had to interview a therapist or a counselor it might have made sense. I do appreciate the casting of Nick Jonas as one of Mira's "bad dates", which is only funny because the actress is married to him in real life. He probably wasn't a good enough actor to play the lead here, and it might have killed the film if he had - but a smaller part and a comedic role was probably better.
Directed by Jim Strouse (director of "People Places Things")
Also starring Priyanka Chopra Jonas (last seen in "Heads of State"), Sam Heughan (last seen in "Bloodshot"), Celine Dion (last seen in "Little Richard: I Am Everything"), Sofia Barclay (last heard in "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse"), Russell Tovey (last seen in "The Lady in the Van"), Lydia West, Steve Oram (last seen in "Man Up"), Omid Djalili (last seen in "Deep Cover"), Celia Imrie (last seen in "Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy"), Arinzé Kene (last seen in "How to Build a Girl"), Tom Blake, Laurence Varda, Harry Attwell (last seen in "Breathe"), Amanda Blake, Daniel Barry, Camille Hatcher, Nisha Chadha with archive footage of Julia Roberts (last seen in "Blake Edwards: A Love Story in 24 Frames").
RATING: 5 out of 10 "Would you rather?" questions (it's great that they connect over these, but can you really base a whole podcast on them?)
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