BEFORE: We're coming up on Labor Day weekend, and I've got two work anniversaries to go along with it. I've been at the theater for just about five years now, I remember the summer of 2021 when I was working at both the animation studio AND an AMC Theater, and I could not wait to get out of the AMC, where I was a combination of usher and porter, meaning I scanned tickets before the show AND swept up the theaters after. But one morning they asked me to mop all the bathrooms, and sorry, that's a deal-breaker for me, I didn't go to film school to mop bathrooms. I mean, I have respect for the people who do mop bathrooms and are good at it, but I'm just not good at it. It took me three months to find a better temp job after the mopping incident, but that's what motivated me to keep looking. Sure enough, the week after I quit, they hired back the regular porters, probably because the ushers that they had, including me, were so terrible at cleaning the place. Anyway, sorry, AMC, smell ya later and thanks for the $100 bucks I got in the class-action suit against you. You declined my unemployment benefits so karma is a bitch. (To be fair, I did quit, and I think you only can get benefits if you're fired.)
And it's also my one-year work anniversary at Barclay's Center in Brooklyn. So they gave me 500 in-house "points" as a reward, but instead of spending those on a NY Liberty t-shirt, I converted them to a $50 gift card for the Cheesecake Factory. Everyone loves that restaurant, right? My wife and I have not been there for a while, and now we can go and it's on me (for once). That will get us a nice couple of apps & entrees, but we usually take home a few slices of cheesecake and I don't think the $50 will cover that also. C'est la vie. A couple of weeks ago a new supervisor there asked me to mop the floor, so I think maybe my days there are numbered, I should just take the $50 gift card and skedaddle, that'll show them. But no, I'll probably stick around there until I can line up something better that isn't so strenuous, I've got two temp jobs now where I'm on my feet for the whole shift, maybe it's time for me to get back to office life. I'm kind of at a crossroads so we'll see.
Tom Skerritt carries over from "At Middleton".
THE PLOT: True Brandywine, a struggling rodeo rider, gets trapped in a blizzard and must confront his life choices while battling the elements for survival.
AFTER: Aha, it turns out this film is right on point, as there is a reference to school. The lead character is at a crossroads in his life, and some people suggest that since he's always drawing and seems to have an affinity for art, that he should go to art school. However, his father wants him to enlist in the Marines, while he wants to keep riding broncos even when that becomes quite difficult for him. So sure, it's a rodeo film, it's a coming-of-age film, it's a romance, but also there's a little bit of being a back-to-school film, and I have to imagine that the chain somehow KNEW that and scheduled the film appropriately in September.
BUT, bear in mind that this is film is in the middle of a Tom Skerritt 3-movie chain. That makes it optional, I have all such films marked on my watchlist with a short note: "OK to drop". So if for some reason I'm not feeling into a film, or it seems like it doesn't belong in this month, or if I need an extra slot for something else that just popped up, I could drop any of those marked films. This is the way, I make a chain but there's also the understanding that things need to be flexible, if I get too busy or if I have to go out of town, there needs to be a way to shorten the list on the fly, and that can happen by dropping the middle films. By the same token, there are sometimes films that COULD be added on the fly, if I so choose, but they might feel a bit out of place if I were to do so - like I could add the new Netflix film "Little Brother" to the September chain, but it would be in the middle of a block of animated features, and maybe I just want to stay on the animation thing for 8 movies in a row, I'll have to see how I feel at the time.
But this also brings up a point of order on "Avengers: Doomsday", which is a film scheduled to be released in December. Wyatt Russell is rumored to be one of the stars, because of his role as John Walker in Thunderbolts (aka "New Avengers") so it might make some sense to save movies with any MCU stars in them, in case I need to link to the new Avengers movie in a rush in December. But I just can't live that way, I have to think about THIS month and putting together the best chain I can, and maybe that means I don't see "Avengers: Doomsday" until January, I'm kind of OK with that. The film looks like a complete cluster-f*ck of bad ideas and loose ends and the internet is filled with rumors over who is and isn't going to be in that movie. I'm trying very hard to ignore all of that. So the upside is that I'm including "Broke" here and that means that both Tom Skerrit and Dennis Quaid make the year-end countdown because this is the third movie this Movie Year for both of them. I'll worry about "Avengers" later.
Anyway, this is a simple movie about a rodeo bronco rider who gets addicted to painkillers, and I know it's a simple movie because they did that thing where they mixed up all the scenes and the past ones are shown in basically random order, as True flashes back on his past a lot while he tries to recover from getting caught in that blizzard on some ranch. Yes, the film starts "in media res" which is Latin for "this is very confusing as we're starting in the middle of the action". We see him dig himself out from under like an inch of snow, which only leads to a lot of questions, like "How did this happen?" and "Who gets buried under an inch of snow?" and also "WTF? Why wasn't he wearing his hat or his boots?" Well, there are answers but you kind of have to wait until the end to see how the thing happened in the first place.
First we have to watch him get in a car, take off all his clothes, try to warm up his frostbitten foot, then drive to a cabin, try in vain to start a fire, and then find a way to stay warm and dry and alive while he flashes back on all of his past mistakes. See, it's a simple story except for all those mistakes, he can't change any of them and somehow they all led him here, to this dreadful time and this horrible storm and then there's that frostbitten foot.
We see his initial success as a bronco rider in rodeo competitions, but with that success came a fair amount of injuries, and over time that causes damages, if painkillers are required then that causes addiction, and all that THAT entails. Also remember that fame and success are also drugs in a fashion, you get a little bit of that and you're only going to want more and more. So despite his working on his father's farm, and his father urging him to join the Marines because they will teach you important skills, not just how to be a soldier but maybe some engineering and other valuable career skills as well. Well, True's dad isn't wrong, that can be a great opportunity for some people, it's just not one that I ever leaned toward or particularly feel like endorsing. Not joining the military is also an option, especially if you want to reduce your chances of getting killed in a war, just saying. But dads are gonna dad.
True's flashbacks also include him meeting a nurse after burning himself on his truck's engine, and starting up a relationship. He brings her home for family dinner and things seem to be going well until she notices how disoriented he is after another accident, and he's diagnosed with brain trauma. She takes him to an exhibition of "cowboy art" and tries to encourage him to join art school, but as stated above, he's addicted to both the fame and the painkillers, so he doesn't really think art school is an option, especially since he's got medical bills now and can't pay for school, and he also won't allow her friends to set up a GoFundMe campaign. Instead he gets a job at Boot Barn and then his family has to deal with the death of his brother, Caleb, who did enlist in the Marines after True did not.
True's method for dealing with all this trauma and grief and anger and dissatisfaction is to load up his horse in a trailer, break up with his girlfriend and go look for work on other ranches. Ah, we're starting to maybe get close to setting up the strange situation we witnessed at the start of the film. True works on a cattle ranch and volunteers to go to distant pastures and provide medical care to sick calves, and one on of these trips he has an accident after passing out from his brain trauma. His horse drags him for a fair distance, and he's unconscious when it starts to snow. Well, there you go. We're all caught up and snap back to the present, where True is going a little stir crazy in that cabin and contemplates suicide - well, all those flashbacks maybe did a number on him.
You'll have to watch the film to see how this all gets resolved, but like "At Middleton" it feels like there's not a lot of story here, and much of it is filler to give the movie a running time of 103 minutes, rather than 10. Then again, I don't think this film would have functioned well as a short film, you really need to experience all the misfortune this guy encountered over a longer period of time if you're going to understand how suicide makes some kind of sense to him near the end. I'm not saying there was for sure a better way to tell this story, but maybe there could have been, somehow?
Directed by Carlyle Eubank
Also starring Wyatt Russell (last seen in "You're Cordially Invited"), Auden Thornton (last seen in "True Story"), Dennis Quaid (last seen in "Marty, Life Is Short"), Mary McDonnell (last seen in "Scream 4"), Johnny Berchtold, Austin Amelio (last seen in "Hit Man"), Alet Taylor, Matt Flanders (last seen in "Definitely, Maybe"), Jackie Vetter, Kate Britton, John Budge, Ray Champ, Bethany Lorang, Aubrie McCall, Aaron Murtagh, Gillian Todd, Keller Paulson, Tami Renner, Rockie Frigerio, Parker Stuart (last seen in "Zeroville"), Charley Crockett
RATING: 5 out of 10 hay bales
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