BEFORE: No rest for the weary - I spent the last two nights working at Brooklyn Nets games, working the beer stand for the first three quarters of the game, though the season is drawing to a close, and there's going to be about two weeks of down time in April before the NY Liberty games start up. My plan is to have another job in place by then, or if that's not possible, spend two weeks working the focus group circuit, because I can't afford to be not working for that long. Medical research is another option, if I'm desperate, that money I got in December for the Alzheimer's study sure came in handy. I'm still looking... But after tonight's film screening I've got like three days off, a chance to catch up on TV shows and then figure out how the movie chain might lead me to something for Easter and/or Mother's Day.
Sean Bridgers carries over from "The Best of Me". I know what you're probably thinking, why didn't he put the two films with Reese Witherspoon NEXT to each other? Well, I tried that, the chain wouldn't have been as long if I did that, also I wouldn't have the most appropriate films landing on both Valentine's Day AND St. Patrick's Day. This thing is not that easy sometimes.
Tomorrow, Thursday, March 12, is Day 28 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, and the themes will be "Oscar Goes Off the Rails" and "Oscar Goes South". After two films set in New Orleans and Alabama, I'm down for a trip to the South. Here's the line-up:
6:00 am "The Narrow Margin" (1952)
6:00 am "The Narrow Margin" (1952)
7:30 am "Union Pacific" (1939)
10:00 am "Closely Watched Trains" (1966)
11:45 am "The Train" (1964)
2:15 pm "Travels with My Aunt" (1972)
4:15 pm "Brief Encounter" (1945)
5:45 pm "Some Like It Hot" (1959)
8:00 pm "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1951)
10:15 pm "Selma" (2014)
12:30 am "To Kill a Mockingbird" (1962)
2:45 am "Jezebel" (1938)
4:30 am "The Great Santini" (1979)
I'm holding down the middle of the line-up again, as I've seen everything from "Some Like It Hot" to "To Kill a Mockingbird", 4 films. But I'm not counting "The Great Santini" twice, because they also played it a couple days ago in the Robert Duvall tribute. So 4 seen out of 11 brings me to 132 seen out of 317, or 41.6%. 3 days left.
THE PLOT: A young woman who has reinvented herself as a New York City fashion designer must return home to Alabama to get a divorce from her husband after seven years of separation.
AFTER: I'm getting the same vibe that I got from "Untamed Heart", which is the feeling that I MUST have watched this film before at some point during the 1990's, but I've got no direct or even indirect memory of doing so. The plot seems very familiar, but my records that prove what movies I've seen only go back as far as 2009, I mean, sure, if it's "Star Wars" or "Jaws" or something, of course I remember watching it, but then with these throwaway rom-coms things can get a bit fuzzier, like maybe I remember the general plot but none of the specific details. Anyway if I did watch this one it was so long ago that I forgot everything about it, so why not watch it again for the first time just to be sure about it, especially if it's got the linking I need to get me one step closer to the end of the romance chain. For now.
But I'm also getting a very similar vibe as "Fools Rush In", because this is from the same director, and you can see some of the same trademarks - two people who got married young, they both needed to learn about communication skills and compromise, so they spent time apart, however fate (and thunderstorms) seem to draw them back together again. There's a pregnancy with a fake miscarriage in one and a real miscarriage in the other, and there's hurt feelings and a healing process, a divorce that exists in the middle of everything but by the time the divorce takes effect, the couple wants to get back together again. Look, I'm not saying they're the exact same film, but some of the same themes are in play. And both films explore the cultural differences between two cities or two cultures, in one it's a New Yorker who gets married to a Latina from Vegas, and in the other it's two people from Alabama, only one has become a transplanted New Yorker, she's not the same person who left Alabama years ago.
Also in both films, one person in the couple refuses to get in touch with their parents to tell them about the new relationship they're in. For different reasons, of course, but that's an unusual major plot point to appear in TWO movies from the same director, almost back to back. Some strange forces are at work here. "Fools Rush In" came first, and you can see some similarity between Matthew Perry's character, who's afraid to tell his wife that he wants to move back to New York, and Reese Witherspoon's character tonight, who's afraid to tell her new fiancé that she's technically still married to a guy in Alabama. Sure, lie of omission, who does that hurt? Being afraid to have the most basic discussion over these matters, that's normal, right? You don't have to tell your spouse everything, right? It's not like they're going to be even MORE mad when they finally learn the truth...
Melanie has re-invented herself as a NYC fashion designer, with a new last name, Carmichael instead of "Smooter", so when she gets engaged to the son of New York City's female mayor (sure, like THAT could happen...) the news reporters and the mayor's assistant simply can't find ANYTHING out about the Carmichael family in Greenfield, Alabama, because that family does not exist. So she tells her intended that she's going to travel back to Alabama to inform her parents in person about her engagement, but really she's going back to get her husband to sign the divorce papers, after seven years of separation. She's been sending them regularly, but Jake keeps sending them back unsigned, which costs Melanie legal fees each time. Asking in person doesn't help the situation, because their relationship is so contentious that just by asking, Jake wants to refuse only because it's something she wants him to do. NITPICK POINT here, in a lot of places a separation of seven years would kind of force a no-contest divorce, I'm not really up on the divorce laws of each state but I think one party can cite "abandonment" or just the fact that they've been apart for so long and some kind of divorce should kick in, semi-automatically.
Melanie even tries reverse psychology, she says she's moving back to be his "trad-wife" and she cleans up the house and buys him healthy food for dinner, she even empties the joint checking account (why is there still a joint checking account?) and offers to give him all the money back if he'll just sign the divorce papers. But somehow it's a drunken night out with their old friends, where she accidentally outs a mutual friend as gay, and insults a bunch of their old schoolmates and passes out, somehow all of that motivates Jake to sign the papers. Well, she was very annoying that night and I can kind of see the benefit of just giving her what she wants in order to make her go away.
But nothing's that easy here, everything is in fact much much more complicated than it needs to be. Melanie goes to the plantation where Bobby Ray lives, to apologize for outing him, and that's when the mayoral assistant, posing as a New York Post reporter, arrives to gather information about about Melanie's background for the mayor. During his tour of the plantation, Melanie has to steer him away from seeing the African-American servants, and really, all of this is quite unnecessary and serves no purpose but to kill time and fill up the movie. Same goes for all the Civil War re-enactments, the local Catfish Festival, and also Jake's side-hustle as a wanna-be resort owner with a glass-blowing gallery. These are all really just story-filler, except the glass gallery thing kind of indicates that Jake is a lot more "arty" than he used to be, plus there's a tie-in to lightning striking the beach when they were kids, which I guess has some sentimental meaning to it. But mostly this is all just filler.
Andrew, the new fiancé, arrives in town, though, and they can only hide the fact that Melanie is married for so long, and he leaves angry - well, she did LIE to him - but he comes back, willing to still marry Melanie. This does not really count as character growth if he's ONLY doing this to piss off his mother, though. Just saying, he seems like a very shallow person. But the mother/mayor is even worse, she's only concerned with the optics of everything, she's all about doing enough publicity for her son to become President someday, which doesn't really make any sense because while the office of NYC Mayor MIGHT be some kind of stepping-stone to national politics, the Presidential campaigns of Giuliani, DiBlasio and Bloomberg all failed spectacularly, and those were the mayors, not SONS of mayors. Sons of mayors running for President isn't even a thing, nope, no way.
Bottom line, just like in "Fools Rush In", we're told to watch for signs, they're everywhere and they have meaning, so when the attorney crashes the wedding to let Melanie know that she forgot to sign the divorce papers herself, well, that's a sign, isn't it? Also she can't sign them then and there now that she knows that Jake has an artistic side, and then also did some healing and communicating in the dead coon dog graveyard. Yes, that's a thing. But maybe after seven years apart they can start to talk again and even fall back in love. Andrew was only marrying her to get back at his mother, anyway. Right? He can find another woman to marry that will piss her off even more, that should be easy. enough to do...
And yes, the song "Sweet Home Alabama" is played in this movie, a couple of times I think. But a cover version, not the original Lynyrd Skynyrd version. Whatever. But they filmed a lot of this in Georgia, not Alabama, for tax reasons. Again, whatever.
Directed by Andy Tennant (director of "Fools Rush In")
Also starring Reese Witherspoon (last seen in "You're Cordially Invited"), Josh Lucas (last seen in "The Forever Purge"), Patrick Dempsey (last seen in "Sr."), Candice Bergen (last heard in "Belushi"), Mary Kay Place (last seen in "Citizen Ruth"), Fred Ward (last seen in "Feast of Love"), Jean Smart (last seen in "Babylon"), Ethan Embry (last seen in "First Man"), Melanie Lynskey (last seen in "I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore"), Courtney Gains (last seen in "Queen Bees"), Mary Lynn Rajskub (last seen in "The Tomorrow War"), Rhona Mitra (last seen in "Shooter"), Nathan Lee Graham (last seen in "Zoolander 2"), Fleet Cooper, Kevin Sussman (last seen in "Ira & Abby"), Thomas Curtis (last seen in "The Chumscrubber"), Dakota Fanning (last seen in "The Benefactor"), Mark Skinner, Michelle Krusiec (last seen in "Daddy Day Care"), Phil Cater, Michael Snow, Bob Penny (last seen in "The Legend of Bagger Vance"), Mark Matkevich, Lee Roy Giles, Afemo Omilami (last seen in "Runaway Jury"), Ted Manson (ditto), Kevin Hagan (last seen in "Rent"), Leslie Hendrix, Kelsey Lowenthal, Jen Apgar (last seen in "Cold Mountain"), Sarah Baker (last seen in "Paint"), Deborah Duke (last seen in "A Simple Twist of Fate"), Sharon Blackwood (last seen in "Poms"), Suzi Bass, Jody Thompson (last seen in "One Missed Call"), Colin Ford (last seen in "The War with Grandpa")
RATING: 5 out of 10 deep-fried pickles
No comments:
Post a Comment