BEFORE: I guess I'm in kind of a holding pattern here, I've got 30 more romance-based films to go, so unless I messed up the linking, nothing needs to change and I'm set for the next month. I've still got three days before my next shift so I guess it's a good time to get things ready for the Summer Doc Block, even though I don't know exactly when that will start. I suppose that's going to depend on how many films it turns out to be, and also I need to know a good starting point before I can figure out how to get there. Last year's Doc Block was a long one, 49 films in all, but I covered a LOT of ground and I cleared a bunch of films - the list of docs I did NOT watch dropped down to a dozen or so, which is now kind of making planning the next one difficult - I left myself only about 25 films to work with, and so they don't all link together yet. I need to add more films, and that means finding the docs, figuring who's in all of them, updating the IMDB cast lists if they're wrong, and I'll probably have to scan through 20 films this week just to get things rolling. Even if I can get everything to link up, it still might be a shorter Block this year.
Speaking of documentaries, the TCM "31 Days of Oscar" line-up for tomorrow, 2/19, has a bunch of them. The themes for Thursday are "Oscar Goes for the Facts" and "Oscar Goes to Prison". I don't see what those two things have in common, so I'm not really a fan of this year's organizational format. But here are the films:
10:30 am "The Secret Land" (1948)
12:00 pm "Festival" (1967)
2:00 pm "Freedom on My Mind" (1994)
4:00 pm "The Times of Harvey Milk" (1984)
6:00 pm "Inside Job" (2010)
8:00 pm "Papillon" (1973)
10:45 pm "The Longest Yard" (1974)
1:00 am "Midnight Express" (1978)
3:15 am "The Big House" (1930)
5:00 am "Weary River" (1929)
Well, I've seen ONE of those 5 docs, "Inside Job" - that helps, but it's still not great. I've also seen "Papillon" and "The Longest Yard", two classics that also had some popular appeal. So another 3 seen out of 10 brings my score up to 34 seen out of 82, I'm down to 41.4%.
Ayden Mayeri carries over from "Spin Me Round".
THE PLOT: An aspiring disc jockey falls for his mentor's young girlfriend.
AFTER: I'm definitely going to consider this film as mortar, it's only here to hold the bricks together and keep the wall from falling down. It's the second simplest romance film, which is a love triangle. The first simplest, of course, is just about two people coming together with no complications, and who the hell wants to see that? Even "Puppy Love" had complications... So the second simplest configuration is a three-point triangle, and one person has to be the focal point and make a decision between two lovers. That duty falls on Sophie tonight, who is dating James but then has feelings for Cole. Well, Cole is over at the house all the time, he's working with James on making better electronic music, so I suppose this was bound to happen. As soon as James' more difficult personality traits started to manifest themselves, Sophie chose Cole because, well, he was THERE.
I mean, the heart wants what the heart wants, but this one doesn't really make much sense, I mean James at least owns a house and seems to have some money, but Cole is an aspiring DJ with no job at first. Oh, he's trying, he and his friends get jobs working for a real-estate financial company, but they're just cold-calling people with properties in default, to find people that Paige can then offer to represent, and there's a good chance that Paige is running a scam and is going to end up saying "There's nothing I can do" and offer to buy the houses dirt cheap and re-sell them all for ten or fifty times what he paid. Yeah, that's not really a good career, so Cole better hope this DJ thing takes off. Sophie, what the heck are you doing here? Are you sure you don't want to think this through? Bear in mind that Cole would never have even thought to use your voice on his tracks if not for James.
Cole's friends are an even worse bunch of dirtbags than he is, so at some point he's going to realize those guys are dragging him down, and he'll never succeed or develop any kind of discipline if he keeps hanging around with them. Surprisingly, after they all work for a bit at Paige's real-estate scam company, Mason suggests they rent a house together, and of course he gets the biggest room. Guys, renting is for suckers, you pay every month and where does that money go, you're not building up any equity. If you guys came into some money you should try to put a down payment on owning a house, OK, maybe that's a bit out of your reach right now, but it makes more sense than renting in the long run, but you guys aren't really living long-term, now are you? You all just want to go to the club every Thursday night and party and do drugs and try to get laid.
Anyway, the first thing they do when they rent a house is throw a massive rager, and the house ends up getting trash - well, that's one more security deposit they won't be getting back - and worse, Squirrel ends up dead after an overdose, which really puts a bummer spin on everything.
But remember, this one's here because of the love triangle, so let me just pick that one apart before I move on and forget all about this movie. Cole escorted Sophie to her college reunion party, I guess James was busy that night. James gets into a fight with two guys who were bad-mouthing her - I mean, that's pretty typical for James and his friends, it seems that every party in this film turns into a fight, sooner or later, but at least this time he was standing up for Sophie. Then later the gang of friends goes to an electronic music festival in Las Vegas, but Cole gets a call from Sophie because James ditched her. So he ditches his friends so he can hook up with Sophie in a hotel. Well, James, this was maybe bound to happen if you stood up your own girlfriend. Just saying.
James cuts ties with Cole because of what happened, but then for some unknown reason once Cole finally has his track ready, James gives him another chance and gets him booked to play at another festival in L.A. - this does not logically work, it's like the plot points are in the wrong order or something. If somebody stole your girlfriend, why would you help them advance in their career, like the following week? That pain would still be fresh, so it would make more sense if James wanted nothing to do with Cole at all and it would be the easiest thing in the world to just NOT help him get the gig.
We went to Las Vegas in October 2019, a few months before the pandemic - we took a break from our BBQ Crawls and did a casino buffet crawl instead. Final score was FIVE buffets in a week, although my wife was sick during the last few days and I hit one of those buffets on my own. We did other things, of course, like my birthday dinner and we went to the Mob Museum and the Neon Sign Museum. But we hadn't checked out what other events might be going on in the city, so our first night coincided with THREE big music festivals taking place across the city, one was called Las Rageous and was taking place right outside our first hotel - so yeah, bad planning there, it was very hard to get to sleep that first night.
Directed by Max Joseph
Also starring Zac Efron (last seen in "The Iron Claw"), Wes Bentley (last seen in "The Four Feathers"), Emily Ratajkowski (last seen in "Lying and Stealing"), Jonny Weston (last seen in "About Cherry"), Shiloh Fernandez (last seen in "Cadillac Records"), Alex Shaffer (last seen in "Win Win"), Jon Bernthal (last seen in "The Accountant 2"), Alicia Coppola (last seen in "National Treasure: Book of Secrets"), Wiley M. Pickett (last seen in "Lakeview Terrace"), Jon Abrahams (last seen in "Boiler Room"), Molly Hagan (last seen in "Cinema Verite"), Brittany Furlan (last seen in "The Dirt"), Vanessa Lengies (last seen in "Still Waiting..."), Rebecca Forsythe, Joey Rudman, Kelsey Formost, Scarlett Benchley, Devon Barnes, Robbie Silverman, Timothy Granaderos, Raleigh Adams, Kerry Stein, Posso, Andrew Bachelor (last seen in "Family Switch"), Dillon Francis (last heard in "Trolls Band Together"), Casey James (last seen in "Elizabethtown"), Chiara Aurelia (last seen in "Luckiest Girl Alive"), Tara Beaulieu (last seen in "Think Like a Man"), Jan Broberg (last seen in "Darling Companion"), Shahine Ezell, Miranda Rae Mayo, Daniel Pinder, Korrina Rico (last seen in "Horrible Bosses 2"), Brittany Riley, Erika Wester with cameos from Nicky Romero, Nev Schulman.
RATING: 4 out of 10 pieces of birthday cake (consumed passive-aggressively)
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