BEFORE: Well, the chain ends tonight unless I stay up late and do a bit of linking - this is really as far as I've linked, this is where I wanted to go right after the Doc Block, I figured it would give me a few possible places to go and also it seemed thematically seasonal to get in a summer film before the end of August.
I really will have to hustle, though - first I need to pick out part of the horror chain, thankfully I keep working on this all year round, moving films here and there so as to make the longest possible chain. There's one chain that's 29 films long and there's another one that's 16, and a third that's 14 films long. The easiest thing to do would be to go with the 29-film chain, because there are 31 days in October, but I'm going to be away for a week, so that may not work, unless I want to extend the chain into November. And the 16-film chain just isn't enough, so if I go that way I'll have to see if I can extend it on both ends or maybe in the middle. If that's not an option, I can take the 14-film chain and tack on 10 films from the end of the 29-film chain, just do one chain and then link right to the last third of the other, that would give me 24, that sounds pretty do-able. But then I have to see if I can get from HERE to the start of THAT, in a number of steps that's roughly equal to the number of days in September plus the end of August. Well, sure, I'll be up late tonight trying to figure all that out, but I can't lose a day, I've got to keep inching forward without knowing if I'm making the hook-up to horror movies possible or impossible.
Eugene Levy carries over from "Marty, Life Is Short".
THE PLOT: After years apart, three childhood best friends who used to spend every summer together at a sleep-away camp have an opportunity to get back together for a summer camp reunion.
AFTER: Ugh, this film was a struggle to get through, and it was only 95 minutes long! Compared to, say, the Billy Joel two-part documentary, this should have been a walk in the park, but it was just SO inconsistent and all-over-the-place that it ended up being very close to nonsense. This is just not a thing that people do, go to camp reunions when they're senior citizens, for very good reasons. Seniors don't go white-water rafting, they don't go zip-lining and they don't ride horses, especially if it's been 50 years since they last rode one. Look, I'm all for the senior set being active, like I'm glad that Dick Van Dyke works out even though he's wasting part of his platinum years in the gym. But then again, without regular work-outs maybe he never would have made it to 100 years old, so I guess there's a trade-off there. You can live longer, however a large portion of your extra time gets sucked up by exercise - I don't think it's worth it. I may not be here for a long time, but I'll be here for a good time. A shorter good time.
You know what seniors like, what they'd probably do if they went back to camp? Movie night. Watching CBS shows together. Having a nice meal that they didn't have to cook which is NOT like camp food or prison food in any way. Paint and sip events, book clubs, the only thing that rings true here is that one of the three friends grew up to be a motivational speaker, and the camp has hired her to give a motivational speech about aging - sure, throw in wine and cheese and that's a big night out for seniors, just make sure their hearing aids have fresh batteries. They do NOT, I repeat, do NOT want to go white-water rafting. Anyway, the camp probably couldn't get insurance coverage if they were dumping 70-year olds into rafts with life-jackets and oars and saying, "Go nuts, have fun, see you on the other side, maybe."
Of course, there's some romance here, because everyone's at the age where their spouse has passed away and their kids have moved out, so they have their work and their e-mails and their Facebooks and that's their life. Getting a hook-up at senior camp seems a bit logical, until you realize they're not insured for any activities except pottery class (and even that's got a big spinning potter's wheel, I don't think we should let the seniors have access to that...) and things like horse riding where they're sure to break a hip or archery where they'll probably shoot someone with an arrow, in fact, it happened before on this very spot to this very same group of girls. They should NOT be allowed back on the archery range.
So yeah, there's not a lot here that makes sense - there are plenty of bad ideas, though, that seem like they might be trendy and would naturally occur, but if you think about them, you realize it just couldn't go down this way. At check-in the camp personnel require all the seniors to hand in their phones, however this would make sense to do with teenagers, who spend all their time on their phone and their parents probably sent them to camp to get fresh air and physical activity and so taking away their smartphones and iPads makes sense. But these are seniors, they probably still have flip-phones and they need to check in with their children every 10 minutes, so they're just not going to survive without that. Anyway, I think two of the three characters sneak their phones in anyway, so narratively, what was the point then of trying to take them away?
The WHOLE FILM is like that, one person says something and then the next person says the opposite is true, and then the plot reveals they're both wrong or it's a meaningless argument that ends up going nowhere. Well, to be fair that does kind of replicate the way seniors tend to talk, they'll say something incorrect (or racist) and then get corrected by their friend, who is also wrong, and then the argument goes nowhere or they both forget what they were talking about and they go have lunch. Or in this case, a food-fight in the camp mess hall. But seniors just wouldn't DO THAT, these are the people who were born during the Depression who then went on to tell their children to eat their food and not waste it, because people are starving in China or Africa or something. To have a food fight and throw dinner all over the place would be incredibly hypocritical, also these older people probably couldn't even pick up their plate of food, let alone throw it and expect to hit something.
Furthermore, in a film like this where there are three main characters, consistency is key - it would be most helpful if each character could have just ONE personal flaw, for each of them to have three or four is confusing and also unlikely. THIS one should be the workaholic, THAT one should be the busybody and the THIRD one can be the doormat. That's it, stick with that and stop trying to make them each have another two or three personal problems that they can't quite solve. We've only got 90 minutes for them to have some kind of change of heart or growth from insight that results in a course correction, the credits are coming up soon (hopefully) and we really need to wrap some of this up. If one wants to leave her deadpan, boring husband for the more exciting, debonair guy she knew as a hot teenager, I'm there for it, but PLEASE be quick about it, what's going to kill us all here is the endless indecision process.
Sure, we can hook up the workaholic one with the guy she was attracted to years ago, who is retired now and has a new, less stressed outlook on life. I love that for her, again, just please hurry the process along because I can't take all the back-and-forth. Too many reversals! And then there's the "Mean Girls" trio, who of course are now seniors themselves, but again they can't really decide if these Plastics (because they had plastic surgery, get it?) are truly evil or just slightly obnoxious or decent people who are just a bit screwed up and misguided themselves. Screenwriters, you have to pick one! Any of them, I don't care, just be consistent.
Oh, and of course these three older women don't have to sleep in a rundown cabin, somehow they have a luxury suite with giant beds and full bathroom and I think room service too - so you might ask, what is the freakin' point of going back to camp, then? I mean, there's an in-universe answer but in reality it's all just somebody's fantasy, so it's camp without any of the inconveniences of camp, which I'm pretty sure isn't a thing. Oh, wait, there's glamping but this isn't really that either. It's more like ma'am-ping.
If this had been the first fiction film after watching like 50 documentaries, maybe I would have appreciated it more - but I guess that was "Spinal Tap II", so this one really didn't hit as hard.
Directed by Castille Landon
Also starring Diane Keaton (also carrying over from "Marty, Life Is Short"), Kathy Bates (last seen in "A Family Affair"), Alfre Woodard (last seen in "Space Oddity"), Dennis Haysbert (last seen in "Men, Women & Children"), Beverly D'Angelo (last seen in "John Candy: I Like Me"), Nicole Richie, Josh Peck (last seen in "Havoc" (2005)), Betsy Sodaro (last seen in "The Out-Laws"), Tom Wright (last seen in "Creepshow 2"), Victoria Rowell (last seen in "Starring Dick Van Dyke"), Maria Howell (last seen in "Daddy's Little Girls"), Raymond Santiago (last seen in "In Time"), Castille Landon, Eugenie Bondurant (last seen in "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2"), Tyler Weaks (last seen in "A Rainy Day in New York"), Ashley Padilla, Lindsay Lamb (last seen in "Haunted Mansion" (2023)), Stephanie Hong (last seen in "Hit Man"), Arielle Kebbel (last seen in "Think Like a Man"), Taylor Madeline Hand, Kensington Tallman (last heard in "Inside Out 2"), Audrianna Lico, Gabe Sklar, Zachary Connor, Lindsey Blanchard, Artemis Vibria Davis, Gabrielle Days, Jerry O'Donnell, Billy Jack Harlow, Ashley Abrams, Jacob Berger, Ray Lewis Jr.,
RATING: 4 out of 10 camp activity coordinators - no, wait, it's just the same guy over and over again.
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