BEFORE: I used one of my skip days - and when I explain how busy I was yesterday, I think you'll see that I made the right call. The shifts when we have the Tribeca Film Festival at the theaters are particularly celebrity-packed, therefore some of the busiest, and on a weekend day that means three seatings, six films, and zero downtime. BUT as a bonus I get to rub elbows with high-profile people who appear to speak on Q&A panels - the only days that are more celeb-forward are the red-carpet premieres where they all arrive by limo and I get to see them in the press tent.
But my Sunday was packed, starting with former First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who spoke on a panel after a film about women and politics - this meant extra security, bag check, and an extra task for me, showing the Secret Service around the theater. No problem, I'll gladly do that if it keeps us all safe - and all I wanted was a photo of her on-stage after, WHICH I had to take for the house notes, anyway. Once she was done speaking, and clear of the building, my life could return to a normal level of crazy.
For the second screening, there was a documentary about fashion, co-directed by Sean Lennon and produced by Natasha Lyonne, so they were both there on stage. Then for the third screening we had Artemis astronaut Victor Glover appearing after "Odyssey", a documentary about space travel, duh, and in the big theater we had a film called "In Memoriam", directed by Rob Burnett (of "Late Show with David Letterman" fame) and starring Marc Maron, Michael McKean, Lily Gladstone and Justin Long, who all spoke on stage after. I only spotted one other celeb in the audience, Denis Leary, but that was fine. I was busy during load-out helping a woman with a walker take the ADA elevator out of the other theater.
(Friday night, forgot to mention, I had Emilia Clarke walk right by me, being escorted into the theater. Another one for the "Star Wars" cast life list...)
Anyway, bottom line, no Sunday movie for me, but it's fine - today I wrap up the Keanu Reeves mini-chain as he carries over from "47 Ronin".
THE PLOT: A well-meaning but rather inept angel named Gabriel meddles in the lives of a struggling gig worker and a wealthy venture capitalist.
AFTER: It's pretty easy to see which two classic movies are getting mashed up here - first, "It's a Wonderful Life", because it shows an angel helping out a man who's given up on life, by showing him a different version of reality, how his life could be different. The second movie is "Trading Places", where a rich man and a poor man have their lives swapped as part of a social experiment about nature vs. nurture, to determine how someone who was born rich would act if he lost everything, and how a man picked off the street would act if he were suddenly given everything.
I'll check later - but I'm darn sure that mash-up is the inspiration here. Keanu Reeves plays the angel, which is great casting because he's still kind of playing Ted from Bill & Ted, somebody who's inept and clueless and has great big plans, even if he doesn't quite know how to make them happen. Seth Rogen plays Jeff, the venture capitalist who invested grandpa's money into a telecom company or something, and then just kept investing and hitting big, while Aziz Ansari plays Arj, a guy who's having trouble making ends meet in the gig economy, he's working at a hardware store and also some kind of task-based service, doing household chores for people, even standing in line for entitled people to pick up cinnamon buns. At the same time he's lost his apartment and is sleeping in his car, I think it's safe to say he also doesn't have health insurance or any kind of savings or safety net, he's living check-to-check.
Gabriel the angel is SUPPOSED to be saving people who text while driving, he sits in their back seats and nudges them when they SHOULD be looking at the road - the angel jobs are apparently VERY specific and well-defined and God knows a lot of people still text when they drive for some reason. But Gabriel wants to do so much more, he wants to be like Azrael, who has tales of finding lost souls and reminding them how great it is to be alive, how much life is worth living. Even though Gabriel's boss, Martha, has warned him against doing so, he wants to find a lost soul himself, and he thinks Arj might be the one. After doing some TaskServant jobs for entrepreneur Jeff, Arj applies to be his permanent assistant, and Jeff offers to give him a week's trial.
Jeff even gives Arj a company credit card to use, you know, to buy stuff for the house or make travel arrangements for Jeff - but Arj uses it to pay for a dinner at a steakhouse to impress Elena on a date, and that's enough for Jeff to fire Arj. NITPICK POINT: Jeff seems to have money to burn, and if he was paying Arj as his assistant, he COULD have just docked Arj's pay or made him pay it back, but no, he went straight to firing him. I can kind of see both sides here, I mean, it didn't seem like Arj even had any money to pay Jeff back WITH, so him offering to pay Jeff back was kind of an empty promise. Still, Jeff did not need to be such a damn dick - well, I guess the story required him to be.
Worse off than ever, Arj feels his life is not worth living, and that's when Gabriel makes himself visible and audible. To prove a point, Gabriel intends to show Arj some perspective by changing reality, and now Arj lives in the fancy house, has a ton of money and, one would assume, mo money, mo problems - while Jeff is now penniless and forced to get a delivery job of his own, competing against food delivery robots and getting blamed for forgetting the extra ranch sauce, when he didn't even package the food, he's just the delivery guy. Well, no problem, Gabriel should be able to switch the men back, except Arj doesn't want to switch back, he didn't learn whatever lesson Gabriel wanted him to learn, because he's suddenly living in a great house, he's got a ton of money and he can wine and dine Elena and also take her on vacation to Paris. She doesn't want to go, because she's busy trying to unionize the hardware store, and she and Arj realize that they're two very different people, but STILL Arj is better off than he was before, so he refuses to switch back.
Things get worse when Gabriel gets in trouble for messing with reality to try and prove his point, so he loses his wings and gets demoted to human, which is kind of the angel equivalent of getting fired. Suddenly Gabriel has to EAT and find someplace to SLEEP like a regular guy, so he gets a job washing dishes, starts chain-smoking and he tries to share a hotel room with Jeff, but before long they both end up sleeping in the car, their situation seems very familiar. Then when Arj gets into a car accident (because there was no angel to stop him from texting while driving, probably) and is in a coma, there doesn't seem any way to change reality back again, Jeff may be stuck as a poor person and Gabriel may be stuck as a human, and financially speaking, what hope do they have? We learned from "Nomadland" that you've got to keep moving on down the road and bouncing from gig to gig and get your expenses WAY down if you want to keep the money flowing in.
Jeff comes up with a plan to break into his OWN house and steal some of his prized wristwatches in order to sell them and get some money so he and his former angel friend can afford a place to live. But what could POSSIBLY go wrong here? I won't go into how this all shakes down or how it ends, but this all feels extremely contemporary, like a modern update of those two films I mentioned earlier, or possibly just its own new thing. It probably also calls to mind that film where John Travolta played an angel, too, I'm just not sure how. Would a former angel be obsessed with watching footage of baby elephants on the internet? Sure, why not?
Here's the best news of all - I was at the Tribeca Festival again today and there were three screenings and one interview session at our theater. There were two documentaries, one about gymnasts and one about Daft Punk (who appeared on stage after, without their costumes) and the third screening was a preview episode of an upcoming TV series I'd never heard of - but the interview was Keke Palmer in a conversation with Whoopi Goldberg. Keke Palmer, who was in today's film, "Good Fortune", like what are the odds of THAT? So I'm taking that as a sign from the universe that I'm on the right track here, the movies are lining up with the calendar as well as my external life, that's a win for me. So now there are 13 days until Father's Day, and 12 films to watch, the plan is still solid and very do-able.
Directed by Aziz Ansari
Also starring Seth Rogen (last seen in "The Fabelmans"), Aziz Ansari (last heard in "The Bob's Burgers Movie"), Keke Palmer (last seen in "Nope"), Sandra Oh (last heard in "The Tiger's Apprentice"), Matt Rogers, Felipe Garcia Martinez, Stephen McKinley Henderson (last seen in "Civil War"), Penny Johnson Jerald (last heard in "The Lion King" (2019)), Sherry Cola (last seen in "A Family Affair"), Blanca Araceli (last seen in "Kajillionaire"), Joe Mande (last seen in "The Disaster Artist"), Aditya Geddada (last seen in "Encounter"), Alexander Jo (last seen in "Dumb Money"), Kristen Henley, Shoukath Ansari, Erik Estrada Loaiza (last seen in "Middle Men"), Wil Sylvince (last seen in "Kevin Hart & Chris Rock: Headliners Only"), Michael Arnold, Cam Barr, Addie Weyrich, Cari Shayne, Nena Woolworth, Nate Jackson (last seen in "American Dreamer"), Jesus Garcia, Jay Traynor, Leo Gonzalez, Mason Lawrence, Shing-Hua Pa, Stacy Osei-Kuffour, Randy Focazio, Lakshmi Sundaram, Kiry Shabazz, Sandra Marcela Hernandez, Elena Campbell-Martinez (also last seen in "Kajillionaire"), Chris Kapcia, Joe Anoa'i / Roman Reigns (last heard in "Zootopia 2"), Tanner Cortez, Mitchell Group, Eliza Shin, Jennifer Woods
RATING: 6 out of 10 cold plunges, followed by trips to the sauna
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