BEFORE: Jean Smart carries over again from "Life as We Know It". Her performance in yesterday's film was uncredited, however it was confirmed on the IMDB - which is something of a contradiction (but, you know, I SAW HER, so I know she was there). The actress in today's film who will be carrying over to tomorrow's film is also uncredited, which really kind of makes me nervous. I'd hate for someone else's mistake in keeping track of who appeared on-screen in their film to break my chain after all this time. Until I watch tomorrow's film I'm not 100% sure of my connections here, and it's too far into the romance chain to move anything around and make changes.
I should be focused on a chain for the Doc Block, because that's coming up over the summer, and before I know WHEN I can place it, I have to know exactly how big it's going to be, and at least where it starts, even if I don't yet know how it's going to end. Ideally I should know both, but I'll settle for one. But right now horror films are making themselves known to me, so I have to think in that direction, too. I've got two large chains, one is very Bruce Campbell-focused, and I'm leaning that way because he was just in "Serving Sara", but it that doesn't work, I'll just go with the other one. Films like "Weapons" and "I See You", "The Bye Bye Man" and "The Empty Man" are being added to the list, and I need to see where they might fit in, or if they'll push the chain into a direction that I need to account for. There's plenty of time to figure this out, but the process still needs to start now if it's going to work out then.
Right now I'm removing all of the connections between the romance films and the horror films, it's great that there are some actors who work in both genres, but those connections are useless to me because I schedule according to the calendar, so I'd never link from a February film to an October film. The connections to Christmas films are similarly useless right now, so I can ignore them too as I schedule films for late March and April.
But first we've got Oscar weekend to deal with, it's your last chance to catch some of the nominated movies - and just 2 days left in TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming. The theme for tomorrow, Saturday March 14, is "Oscar Goes for the Laugh" and here are the films:
6:00 am "The Great Dictator" (1940)
8:15 am "A Day at the Races" (1937)
10:15 am "It Happened One Night" (1934)
12:15 pm "Annie Hall" (1977)
2:00 pm "Lover Come Back" (1961)
4:00 pm "The Producers" (1967)
5:45 pm "The Fortune Cookie" (1966)
8:00 pm "Tootsie" (1985)
10:15 pm "My Man Godfrey" (1936)
12:00 am "The Philadelphia Story" (1940)
2:00 am "Monseiur Hulot's Holiday" (1953)
3:45 am "10" (1979)
Hmm, there are few films here about working in the entertainment industry, whether it's theater or TV making or filmmaking, it's almost like somebody knew what they were doing here. The last day is also Hollywood-centric, appropriately enough, but this is a good warm-up and it's a topic I've come back to again and again, so I should do well here at the end of the countdown. I did Chaplin and Marx Brothers blocks years ago, so that's all paying off now. I want to say I've seen NINE of these, the first four above plus "The Producers", "The Fortune Cookie", "Tootsie", "The Philadelphia Story" and "10", so another 9 seen out of 12 takes me up to 144 seen out of 341, or 42.2%. That's more or less the final tally because I should break even on the last day.
THE PLOT: A girl navigates life with two intellectually-disabled parents and an extended family that can't quite agree on the best way to help.
AFTER: Well, you either believe in coincidences or you don't, all I'm saying is this week there were THREE films where divorce papers were delivered by process servers ("Serving Sara", "Fools Rush In" and "Sweet Home Alabama") and now there are TWO films in a row where Child Protective Services workers are characters/plot points - "Life as We Know It" and this one. So either it's 100% and we should appreciate that or there's some larger organizational thing going on that I can't understand, and we should at least acknowledge that. I just say the chain knows what it's doing. To increase the workings of coincidence, I like to have my iTunes on shuffle play while I write the blog entries, but today I'm turning off the shuffle and I'm just playing Tom Petty's "Wildflowers" album from start to finish. That's enough synchronicity right there, with songs like "Time to Move On", "You Wreck Me", "Hard On Me" and "To Find a Friend", thematically I can tell you those definitely all work with the themes in the film. The sounds of regret, forgiveness, insecurity and all forms of self-reflection.
I think this year's romance films, particularly the ones in March, have sort of outdone those from previous years on the "It's complicated" scale. I mean, could a relationship BE any more complicated than the one Matthew Perry's character had in "Fools Rush In"? Or what about "Sweet Home Alabama", where a woman falls back in love with the man she's trying to get a divorce from, so she can get married again? The all-time champion might be "Life as We Know It", though, where two people who once dated but failed to connect are forced to live together to raise a baby and then START having feelings for each other, like a few months in? We don't have a word in the English language to describe people who are ex-dates but current roommates and potential future life partners. I mean, I bet someone who speaks German could build a word for that, like maybe LebensPartnerMitbewohner. But in English, forget about it.
Which brings me to "Wildflower", another contender for most complicated relationships - technically this is a film about a whole fairly screwed-up extended family, but since there's a bit of romance in it, I'm going to allow it to remain here as part of the chain, again, under the "it's complicated" proviso, which neatly sidesteps the rule forbidding any film without the IMDB "romance" tag from taking up a slot in February or early March. Look, it's a timing thing, I need tomorrow's film to be in tomorrow's slot, and I need the very Irish film to be on 3/17. I wasn't SURE if this one had relationship stuff in it, but it does, so it's staying.
Bea, a teenage girl, gets in an accident, and as she lies in a coma for a few days, her family gathers around her and she flashes back through her whole life so far, by necessity this is all done to keep some kind of mystery about the HOW of the accident, but also it's an excuse to give us her whole family history, even the parts that happened before she was born, which obviously she wasn't witness to, but we're going to go through it all anyway.
Before I begin, let me point out that it might be National Developmental Disability Awareness month, according to Google, anyway, but I'm getting conflicting information here - Disability Pride Month is July and Disability Employment Awareness Month is October - to be blunt, it kind of feels like there used to be a Disability Awareness month and then probably conservatives did away with it or said it was too "woke" or maybe the liberals thought it didn't go far enough so they threw two more months into the mix with slightly different names, and now nobody knows when to celebrate disabled people. Screw it, I'm going to say I'm doing my part here, because it's also National Women's month, unless they've done away with that one too. Anyway, the story kind of starts with Bea's mother, Sharon, who has a developmental disability, which would have been called "handicapped" just a few years ago and something much worse and more demeaning a few years before that. But when Sharon has romantic feelings for Derek, who had a head injury years before and never fully recovered, Sharon's family argues over whether to allow the relationship to continue, and some family members argue that maybe one or both of them should be sterilized so that their relationship doesn't produce children. Meanwhile, while the families are arguing over this, Sharon and Derek run off to Las Vegas and get married. Then Sharon gets pregnant shortly after that.
They name their daughter Bambi, and move to Las Vegas so they can work in the service industry, Derek runs a slot-car arcade and Sharon plays the slot machines. They live with their baby in a van in a trailer park for a while, until they can save enough money for a house. It's implied that perhaps their families financially supported them in part, especially after Bambi (now going by the name of "Bea") was old enough to go to private school. This is based on a true story, so it's not a case where a screenwriter was coming up with things that went wrong during Bea's childhood, but still it kind of feels that way. Bea's father taught her to drive his truck when she was only ten, just in case there was some kind of medical emergency where she needed to drive one of her parents to the hospital, as her mother was not eligible or capable of getting a driver's license.
In exchange, her father got her a dog, but when her mother left the front door open, the dog ran away, and Bea drove the truck to find the dog, only to get in an accident - of course - which caused a CPS worker to come and investigate. Bea would not admit she was driving, because that would get her father in trouble for teaching her, so she gave up the dog because she could not care for both the dog and her parents. Young Bea also learned hard lessons about being more responsible with her money after the money she earned at a summer job was lost by her mother's gambling on slots. In many ways Bea had to grow up quickly and become the most responsible family member.
Her story skips ahead a bit to high school, where she tricks her mother into buying a few cases of beer so she can gain entrance to a popular student's party, which is where she starts a relationship with a boy who just moved into town, whose family is well-off because they run a successful portable toilet business. All of this feels very real because who the heck would write this this way? None of this is laugh-out-loud funny, really, but it's all comically tragic or tragically comic. Ethan could go out with any girl at school, but he's had trouble making friends because he's a testicular cancer survivor, but Bea manages to break through his facade and before long, they're dating and then she does her best for a while to keep him from meeting her parents.
Eventually it happens, though, and they all get along fine, because Ethan brings over pizza and that breaks the ice. But there are still more complications because Bea doesn't feel that she'll be able to move away for college because she needs to stay local and care for her parents. This limits her choices for higher education, and her guidance counselor doesn't quite understand why she's putting limits on herself, her grades are great but she doesn't seem willing to apply herself and dream of a better future. Then there are issues over the upcoming prom, she'd promised her best friend, Nia, that they'd boycott prom together, but you know, that was before she started dating Ethan. Now she can have that prom night fantasy that she never allowed herself to have before, only it hurts her friendship with Nia, and also she can't afford it because she had to bail both of her parents out of jail. It seems her mother kept buying alcohol for other teens because that got her more money to play slots with, and she couldn't understand that doing this was illegal.
While the flashback timeline of Bea's past moves on, we also see that CPS caseworker from years ago meet with the various members of Bea's extended family, like her grandmothers on both sides, her aunt and uncle that she lived with for a while, and eventually Ethan himself. The audience gets some insight in this way regarding what it's like to have a family member with a disability, and to deal with the stigma of that and the guilt that can come with being non-disabled and frustration and lack of patience and other issues.
Finally, eventually, we learn exactly how Bea got her head injury, it's all too complicated to even get into here, also it's a long and very twisty road to get there, and by the time we get there, she's conscious again so it barely matters. After a talk with her father, who wants what's best for his daughter, she's convinced that she needs to start thinking about herself and trusting that her parents are going to somehow manage their lives without her, even if they continue to make mistakes. I guess how you feel about the resolution here might say a lot about where you stand on the rights of people with disabilities, and how much help they should be given by other people, which I guess is a somewhat complicated issue? Look, I'm getting older now and my legs hurt a lot and my balance is off, but other than being hard of hearing on one side and very nearsighted, I don't really consider myself "disabled". Still there's a chance that my current employers have put me in that category because I tick some boxes somewhere and they can claim that X percent of their employees have disabilities, and then they qualify for a rebate or something. I don't really care, I just want to do my job(s) until I can't any more, and then I'll file a claim or something, I don't have it all worked out just yet.
I really can't stand the lead actress here, I hated her in the show "Mad Men" and I don't think her acting's improved by much since, she's still pretty terrible. Really, every other character in her family is three times more interesting just because she has zero expression or emotion and is therefore completely unbelievable in every scene. Experts on disability issues were consulted for this film, but it's unfortunate that they couldn't also hire an acting coach. According to Wiki the director based the Bea character on his niece, so that means the uncle character here is the stand-in for the director, it makes sense because he's portrayed really well, he's kind and understanding and it's hard to say anything bad about his character, plus he's played by the current lead on "Law & Order", who seems like a righteous dude, plus he came to the theater where I work for a screening not too long ago.
Directed by Matt Smukler
Also starring Kiernan Shipka (last seen in "The Last Showgirl"), Ryan Kiera Armstrong (last seen in "The Tomorrow War"), Dash Mihok (last seen in "Basic"), Charlie Plummer (last seen in "Moonfall"), Brad Garrett (last seen in "Saturday Night"), Alexandra Daddario (last seen in "When We First Met"), Samantha Hyde, Jacki Weaver (last seen in "Father Stu"), Erika Alexander (last seen in "American Fiction"), Reid Scott (last seen in "Venom: The Last Dance"), Victor Rasuk (last seen in "Stop-Loss"), Kannon Omachi (last seen in "A Family Affair"), Chris Mulkey (last seen in "Gotti"), Clayton Royal Johnson, Josh Plasse, Kue Lawrence (last seen in "Unfrosted"), Chloe Rose Robertson, Amanda Jones, Bill Kottkamp (last seen in "Please Stand By"), Kimleigh Smith (last seen in "The Discovery"), Jana Savage, Christian Vunipola (last seen in "Queenpins"), Sanjay Nambiar, Django Ferri, Masashi Ishizuka, Hayley Jordyn Seat
RATING: 5 out of 10 raffle tickets
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