BEFORE: OK, some quick thoughts on the Oscars, which I sped through on DVD yesterday in the early afternoon, which is really the only way I can do it. Got through the whole thing in 90 minutes because I didn't watch any acceptance speeches or commercials. Unfortunately I didn't get the jokes about "Weapons" or "One Battle After Another" because I haven't been able to watch those yet. But I need to figure out my post-romance chain TODAY, so now I've got new goals. Both of those films are on the DVR right now, and maybe I can link to one, but the other one might be a horror movie, I'm not sure. Anyway, congrats to Paul Thomas Anderson for "One Battle After Another", I sort-of met him when he was on tour with "Licorice Pizza" and I had to cue him to go on stage for the Q&A. Give this guy whatever he wants so he can keep making great films.
I was rooting for "Sinners" because it's the one I'd seen, and it did fine - Best Actor, Best Original Screenplay, Cinematography and Original Score, that's nothing to sneeze at. "Hamnet" and "Frankenstein" also did fine, those are going on my list, too and I'll be playing catch-up, as usual when October comes around, or whatever time the chain deems appropriate. I don't mind Conan O'Brien, he's a bit silly and over-the-top, but sometimes that's what you need in this crazy world. The filler was mostly kept to a minimum, but still, so much over-explaining about what editing and sound design are, didn't they over-explain these things last year, and also the year before? I didn't know anything or anyone from the animation categories, so I guess I'm out of that world now, but I did find out from the "In Memoriam" segment that one of my teachers from NYU passed away - Christine Choy the documentary filmmaker. That segment hit harder than most, what with all the film legends that passed away recently, Redford and Duvall and Keaton and those are just the headliners. The list of deceased stars had a cast better than any movie ever.
Chris Pine carries over from "Z for Zachariah". Tonight's film is another one that was available on Hulu until JUST a couple of weeks ago, yeah that seems about right. This happened with "17 Again" too so it seems like maybe they're doing a bit of house-cleaning over there at HuluDisney. When you pay for 4 or 5 streaming services like we do, you kind of expect that every movie will be available to you at every time, and, well, it just ain't so. Now I can set up a chain with available movies, but if I do that too far in advance, something I need as a link in the chain could be GONE by the time I get to it. C'est la vie, I suppose, but the chain needs to continue - usually I can just follow the film to another format, but tonight that didn't want to happen. I used to fall back on iTunes when this happened, and just pay $1.99 or $2.99 to keep the film alive, but I think iTunes has one foot in the grave and I expect the service to be cancelled any day now, they've pushed everyone but me over to AppleTV or ApplePlus. So I didn't want to pay $4.99 to watch "17 Again", I sure wasn't going to rent THIS one for anything over two bucks - I found it on YouTube posted by a random person who flipped a couple scenes and added a border so the corporate spies wouldn't find it and have it un-posted. I'll just put this on my list and record it the next time it airs on cable, which could be never. Anyway, tonight's film is therefore FREE and yet somehow I probably also paid too much.
THE PLOT: Ashley is known to many as the luckiest woman around, but after a chance encounter with a down-and-out young man, she realizes that she's swapped her fortune for his.
AFTER: Let me get through this one quickly so I can catch up a bit, I'm still behind after working Sunday day and now Monday night, then speed-watching the Oscars, and this is NOT my St. Patrick's Day film, though it is all about being lucky. No, since I've circled back to Lindsay Lohan it's pretty clear what the next film in the chain is going to be.
What's clear is that nobody knew quite what to do with Lindsay Lohan after the "Freaky Friday" reboot, of course she had kind of developed this reputation for being difficult to work with or handle, but she also got a bad deal because, well, maybe there was nowhere to go but down. Look at her on this film's poster, she looks like she's 12 years old, and what movie do you make with someone in their 20's when they look like they're 12? You can't put them in an adult relationship film because it's going to look like an exploitation film - but really, isn't it?
After a week's worth of semi-romances featuring deaths, divorces, disabled people and ex-cons doing nothing in a small town, it's very weird to have to go back to a silly, stupid rom-com. But the road OUT of this chain unfortunately leads right through a couple of them. This one hits on the conventions of a rom-com SO damn hard that it nearly becomes a parody of them, like one that obviously was taking those tropes just a bit too far, every single time. We have the mismatched couple, and they end up at odds with each other but they HAVE to work together to solve this very particular problem, so OF COURSE that's a recipe for falling in love with each other.
But there are things here that didn't age well - Ashley has a list of people who worked at the party, so she has to somehow track them down and kiss them to maybe get her good luck back, but this means kissing a bunch of men without consent, and if that would be wrong for a man to kiss women without consent, the reverse should be equally frowned upon. She manages to disrupt all their lives in the process, like by kissing a groom on his wedding day, not cool. Plus based on the credits, it seems like a lot of the guys who she has to stalk and ambush-kiss were played by crew members, so that means the lead actress of the film was required to have intimate contact with the key grip, the sound guy, and one of the P.A.s - this is not a good look, it's a long series of H.R. violations.
There are more stereotypes, like a black lesbian in prison who will punch you in the face for no reason. Gypsy fortune-tellers are pretty much off-limits these days, too. Gay guys in steam rooms, modern artists who make art that looks like literal crap, and rich black music moguls who for some reason use $100 bills to pick up their dog's poop. Umm, nobody does this, nobody has ever done this. All the other kids with their pumped-up kicks are struggling musicians who are THISCLOSE to being famous, if they could just get their CD in the hands of a record executive, everything's going to be cake after that. Because you just need to go from loser band to famous band in an instant by saving some record maker from getting run over, sure you can work small gigs for years, build up a fan base, promote yourself on social media but that takes TIME, so really if you can't become superstars in a matter of weeks, like what's the point?
Everything is super-simplified here, to the point of absurdity - Ashley uses her super-good-luck powers to move up rapidly in the world of event planning, and really, she's like the film version of Marvel's "Black Cat" character, it's not just that she has good luck, but everyone around has to eat up all the bad luck, like all of her co-workers get trapped in an elevator so she has to handle the promo pitch meeting all by herself, and wouldn't you know the music mogul just LOVES her one idea, which is to throw a party. But within the "good idea" are a dozen little "bad ideas", like hiring an escort to date her boss and having little rooms at the party where people can close the curtain and have sex. This is kind of "what could POSSIBLY go wrong" brought to the extreme, because once her good luck powers go away then everything needs to fall apart very quickly.
Then we have Jake, who has the opposite "bad luck" power, he's the manager of the band and his power to fall down, lose his pants and short out the band's electrical system all at the same time seems to be the only thing holding the band McFly back. When he kisses Ashley at the party it's another form of "Freaky Friday" body-swapping, only it's the luck power that swaps, now he gets all the good luck and the band becomes a hit, they get a record contract in days and they somehow sell out the Hard Rock even though nobody even knows who they are. Yeah, even in a fantasy movie it feels like they skipped a few steps. Ashley gets arrested for running a prostitution ring at the party, and this leads to her getting punched by the black lesbian in jail - TWICE - and then fired. So she has to get Jake's old job at the bowling alley where the band played forever, changing lightbulbs, fixing bowling machines, unclogging toilets and spraying bowling shoes, which is Hollywood's version of the worst job ever.
Jake takes pity on the luckless Ashley, gives her his "bad luck" backpack that has a first aid kit, an emergency umbrella and an extra pair of socks (don't ask) but really, giving her some practical advice to not be such a spaz would have also gone a long way. Also maybe stop being such an entitled millennial, just saying. A lot of people work in bowling alleys, movie theaters and sports stadiums doing menial labor and mostly it's good honest work, not career jail. Oh, sorry that we can't all be executives working on the 30th floor who make six-figure salaries hiring dancers and waiters to work at parties.
Eventually, since Jake and Ashley are still in the same orbit, she puts two and two together and determines that HE is the masked guy who kissed her during the party, and HE is also the guy who her good-luck powers were transferred to, so HE should be the guy she needs to kiss to get the power back, and she does, but then she feels guilty about it. By this time she's in love with him, but now she feels they need to break-up, because if she kisses him again he'll be unlucky again, but she's so stupid she can't think more than five minutes into the future, where maybe if she kisses him several times a day the power's going to go back and forth so many times that it really won't matter any more, and life will become a never-ending series of good things and bad things happening alternately, or, you know, just life. Everything will even out over time if she could just roll with it, but that's apparently not where we find ourselves.
Directed by Donald Petrie (director of "Little Italy" and "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days")
Also starring Lindsay Lohan (last seen in "Freakier Friday"), Samaire Armstrong (last seen in "Not Another Teen Movie"), Bree Turner (last seen in "The Ugly Truth"), Faizon Love (last seen in "Life as We Know It'), Missi Pyle (last seen in "Just Before I Go"), Makenzie Vega (last seen in "The Family Man"), Carlos Ponce (last heard in "Free Birds"), Tom Fletcher, Danny Jones, Harry Judd, Dougie Poynter, Tovah Feldshuh (last seen in "Armageddon Time"), Jaqueline Fleming (last seen in "The Tale"), Dane Rhodes (last seen in "Where the Crawdads Sing"), Mikki Val, Ira Hawkins (last seen in "Freedomland"), J.C. Sealy, Marcus Hester (last seen in "Runaway Jury"), Loren Kinsella (ditto), Strawn Bovee, Gerry Vichi (last seen in "Coma"), Dennis Wit, Kenny Alfonso (last seen in "Pain Hustlers"), Ray Garvey, Larry Gamell Jr., Rome Kanda (last seen in "The Informant!"), Al Roffe, Dean Cochran, Mary Firestone (last seen in "National Treasure: Book of Secrets"), Matthew Morgan, Dariush Vollenweider, Denis Gawley, Russ Klein, David Jensen (last seen in "The Best of Me"), Loring Murtha, Kevin Scanlon, Frank Ferrara (last seen in "A Shock to the System"), Kasie Head, John Bernard Martin (last seen in "The Irishman"), Chris Carmack (last heard in "Alpha and Omega"), Leanne Cochran (last seen in "Green Lantern"), Kayla Ewell, with a cameo from Craig "Radio Man" Castaldo (last seen in "No Pay, Nudity")
RATING: 3 out of 10 scratch-off tickets (which apparently is the only way to determine if your good-luck powers are back?)
No comments:
Post a Comment