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)
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
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