BEFORE: All right, new month, I should be set to make it through September and then I can think about horror movies and the road to Halloween. My ankle is slowly getting better, I think, and I worked a school orientation shift yesterday at the theater, still with some pain but I was able to make it through the day, with the help of a cane that came from the Lost & Found dept. Today the work on the house is going to be done, just in time for a rainstorm tonight, so we'll see if fixing the roof, repointing the bricks and building a short line of bricks around the backyard basement stairs has the desired effect, which would be to keep all the rain on the outside of the house. I swear, five minutes after the last construction guy left, the rain started coming down, so that was really cutting things a bit close.
Now I've got a lot of September films and maybe just enough time, like 30 films in 30 days, so there's no wiggle room, I shouldn't add anything but if I do, there are a couple films that could be dropped if necessary. But if I just stick with these 30 I could be OK, too. I did watch ONE film already in theaters, and so I'll treat that like a skip day when it comes and just post the review after the fact. Now, here are the links that SHOULD get me through the month, after the Andy Garcia mini-chain is over: Tom Skerritt, Bruce Willis, Terrence Howard, Joe Manganiello, Brett Gelman, Ego Nwodim, Eduardo Franco, Nick Kroll, Rachel Butera, Fred Tatasciore, David Lodge, Keith Ferguson, Tony Hale, Amber Midthunder, Jacob Batalon, Mark Ruffalo, Morgan Freeman, Jennifer Lopez and Steve Zahn. Yes, that's just 19 people linking 30 movies, that's how I roll. There are some 3-film and 4-film chains in there, maybe even a 6-film one.
Andy Garcia carries over again from "72 Hours".
THE PLOT: Prison guard Vince tells Molly from his acting class that one of his inmates is his secret love child. Vince takes him home to stay with his family - a son with a fat girl fetish, a college dropout/stripper daughter and his long-suffering wife.
AFTER: I kind of avoided this film for a long time, because it just looked like a silly or stupid family comedy. And then it was on the DVR that crashed about two years ago, and after that it was unavailable on cable, so it had to be taken off the main list, I don't think it was on streaming either but I could be wrong about that. Anyway, I kept it on the secondary list and then it popped up again on cable (now that Paramount and MGM have their own premium channels, various things from certain libraries come back on a semi-regular basis) and so I took the opportunity to burn it to DVD, along with another Andy Garcia film that I'll watch tomorrow. Because nothing ever really gets removed from the list, unless of course I watch it.
But this is more than just a silly family comedy - I mean, it is that but it's got some heft to it, some heart as well as soul. I possibly could have worked this into a February romance chain, because there's a bunch of relationship issue-based stuff, like how married people communicate (or fail to) after spending twenty years together, and you know, New Yorkers and Italians, I'm familiar with these character types in the real world. Which makes me wonder if this film is based on someone's real-life story, because some of those archetypes are very specific, like the teen who has a sexual fetish for feeding overweight women, or the prison guard who aspires to be an actor. These things can't just come from nowhere, right? However I'm not at all familiar with the writer/director, in that I don't know any of his other movies, but he was born in New York City, and an earlier film of his, "Two Family House" was based on his uncle's story, so anything is possible here.
This seems to be a well-put together story where there's so much misunderstanding that comes from confusion or miscommunication, or people not willing to talk about sensitive subjects with each other. How do you tell your wife that you're taking acting classes? You don't, you just pretend to have a weekly poker game on that night. How do you tell your parents that you got kicked out of college and are working at a strip club to earn next year's tuition? Well, you don't do that either, you just pretend to be visiting home on "spring break", I guess. How do you tell your family that you met your son from a previous relationship and he was IN JAIL and you got him released to come sleep in the boat shed behind the house and help build a bathroom? You guessed it, you don't do that either. Well, you bring him home and you let everyone know he's an ex-felon, but I guess you conveniently leave out the part about him being your son because then you'd have to have even more difficult conversations.
But, as you might imagine, everything goes wrong simply because people are avoiding talking about the truth - this is a family with issues and secrets and all of them are secretly smoking and they all think they're hiding that from the others. Well, they're just not, because there are probably cigarette butts dropped all over the place or there are full ashtrays everywhere, so probably nobody is fooling anybody, so then why even try to hide it by not talking about it? If only everyone could talk about their faults and their secrets, maybe everyone could get some help, like maybe the whole family could commit together to quitting smoking, and agree to not nag each other if someone falls off the wagon? But because of all the time they've spent together and all the arguments that have gone before, it's easier to just not bring anything up, which means everyone is always walking on proverbial eggshells and is also eternally one step away from screaming at each other. You know, like a real family.
There's also a case made for Marlon Brando NOT being the great actor that some people think he was, this acting teacher says that all he brought to the table was pausing for too long while delivering his lines, and it made people THINK that he was deep in thought, but then that doesn't really fit with what we know about Brando, does it? Like he probably wasn't that much of an intellectual, so maybe he wasn't thinking, he was just pausing, as in doing nothing. I'll have to keep that in mind but I really don't watch or rewatch a lot of Marlon Brando films. We also learn that Andy Garcia has a daughter in real life who also played his daughter on screen here. And we also learn a bit about City Island, which is a part of the NYC borough The Bronx, it's a small island that you have to take a bridge to get to, and it's got its own little culture and some traditions, I think it does have a largely Italian population, but as we see happen in this movie, a lot of people who live there commute to work in other places, like Joyce has a receptionist job in Manhattan and Vince is a guard at a prison in Westchester County, which I want to say is north of NYC.
It's the NOT knowing everything and NOT talking about everything that nearly wrecks the family. Because Tony doesn't know he's Vince's son, at one point he's attracted to Joyce, who would technically be his step-mother, and that's, well, making out with her wouldn't be illegal I guess, but it sure could be awkward. And then Tony takes their car and goes to the strip club where he sees Vivian dance, even though he doesn't know it yet, that's his sister and that could be awkward in the future too, knowing that he watched his sister strip. And since Vince is always pretending to be at poker games when he's really at acting class, and pretending to be at work when he called in sick to go an audition, well it's not too far-fetched for Joyce to believe that he's having an affair, which would kind of entitle her to do the same.
But I'm sorry, who installs a bathroom in a shed? At that point, it's not a shed but it kind of becomes a small apartment, and that's probably illegal. Trust me, we just had our construction guy come and do some work on the house, so I kind of know what I'm talking about. Plus, don't they have enough bathrooms in their house already? Just let the shed be a shed, camp out there at night if you really want to, but you can just come inside to use the bathroom. And if you want to be an actor or a singer or a comedian or whatever, you shouldn't be afraid to tell your family about it, also assuming in advance that they're not going to accept you with your new vocation or hobby is really kind of selling them short in advance, it's not fair to them or you.
Directed by Raymond De Felitta
Also starring Julianna Margulies (last seen in "Three Christs"), Steven Strait (last seen in "Stop-Loss"), Emily Mortimer (last seen in "Starring Dick Van Dyke"), Ezra Miller (last seen in "The Flash"), Dominik Garcia-Lorido, Carrie Baker Reynolds, Hope Glendon-Ross, Alan Arkin (last seen in "Being Eddie"), Louis Mustillo (last seen in "The Alto Knights"), Jee Young Han (last seen in "Young Adult"), Sarah Saltzberg, Curtiss Cook (last seen in "Carry-On"), Sharon Angela (last seen in "Empire State"), Marianne Ebert, Paul Romero (last seen in "Begin Again"), Paul Diomede (last seen in "BlacKkKlansman"), Vernon Campbell (last seen in "Night Falls on Manhattan"), Benjamin Mathes, Jennifer Larkin, Lynn Collins (last seen in "10 Years"), Bettina Bresnan (last seen in "The Last Five Years")
RATING: 6 out of 10 hamburger patties made with "80-30" meat (that's mathematically impossible, the meat can't be 80% lean and 30% fat, they need to add up to 100%)
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