Just My Luck

Year 18, Day 75 - 3/16/26 - Movie #5,274

BEFORE: OK, some quick thoughts on the Oscars, which I sped through on DVD yesterday in the early afternoon, which is really the only way I can do it. Got through the whole thing in 90 minutes because I didn't watch any acceptance speeches or commercials. Unfortunately I didn't get the jokes about "Weapons" or "One Battle After Another" because I haven't been able to watch those yet. But I need to figure out my post-romance chain TODAY, so now I've got new goals. Both of those films are on the DVR right now, and maybe I can link to one, but the other one might be a horror movie, I'm not sure. Anyway, congrats to Paul Thomas Anderson for "One Battle After Another", I sort-of met him when he was on tour with "Licorice Pizza" and I had to cue him to go on stage for the Q&A. Give this guy whatever he wants so he can keep making great films. 

I was rooting for "Sinners" because it's the one I'd seen, and it did fine - Best Actor, Best Original Screenplay, Cinematography and Original Score, that's nothing to sneeze at. "Hamnet" and "Frankenstein" also did fine, those are going on my list, too and I'll be playing catch-up, as usual when October comes around, or whatever time the chain deems appropriate. I don't mind Conan O'Brien, he's a bit silly and over-the-top, but sometimes that's what you need in this crazy world. The filler was mostly kept to a minimum, but still, so much over-explaining about what editing and sound design are, didn't they over-explain these things last year, and also the year before? I didn't know anything or anyone from the animation categories, so I guess I'm out of that world now, but I did find out from the "In Memoriam" segment that one of my teachers from NYU passed away - Christine Choy the documentary filmmaker. That segment hit harder than most, what with all the film legends that passed away recently, Redford and Duvall and Keaton and those are just the headliners. The list of deceased stars had a cast better than any movie ever.

Chris Pine carries over from "Z for Zachariah". Tonight's film is another one that was available on Hulu until JUST a couple of weeks ago, yeah that seems about right. This happened with "17 Again" too so it seems like maybe they're doing a bit of house-cleaning over there at HuluDisney. When you pay for 4 or 5 streaming services like we do, you kind of expect that every movie will be available to you at every time, and, well, it just ain't so. Now I can set up a chain with available movies, but if I do that too far in advance, something I need as a link in the chain could be GONE by the time I get to it. C'est la vie, I suppose, but the chain needs to continue - usually I can just follow the film to another format, but tonight that didn't want to happen. I used to fall back on iTunes when this happened, and just pay $1.99 or $2.99 to keep the film alive, but I think iTunes has one foot in the grave and I expect the service to be cancelled any day now, they've pushed everyone but me over to AppleTV or ApplePlus. So I didn't want to pay $4.99 to watch "17 Again", I sure wasn't going to rent THIS one for anything over two bucks - I found it on YouTube posted by a random person who flipped a couple scenes and added a border so the corporate spies wouldn't find it and have it un-posted. I'll just put this on my list and record it the next time it airs on cable, which could be never. Anyway, tonight's film is therefore FREE and yet somehow I probably also paid too much.

THE PLOT: Ashley is known to many as the luckiest woman around, but after a chance encounter with a down-and-out young man, she realizes that she's swapped her fortune for his.

AFTER: Let me get through this one quickly so I can catch up a bit, I'm still behind after working Sunday day and now Monday night, then speed-watching the Oscars, and this is NOT my St. Patrick's Day film, though it is all about being lucky. No, since I've circled back to Lindsay Lohan it's pretty clear what the next film in the chain is going to be. 

What's clear is that nobody knew quite what to do with Lindsay Lohan after the "Freaky Friday" reboot, of course she had kind of developed this reputation for being difficult to work with or handle, but she also got a bad deal because, well, maybe there was nowhere to go but down. Look at her on this film's poster, she looks like she's 12 years old, and what movie do you make with someone in their 20's when they look like they're 12? You can't put them in an adult relationship film because it's going to look like an exploitation film - but really, isn't it? 

After a week's worth of semi-romances featuring deaths, divorces, disabled people and ex-cons doing nothing in a small town, it's very weird to have to go back to a silly, stupid rom-com. But the road OUT of this chain unfortunately leads right through a couple of them. This one hits on the conventions of a rom-com SO damn hard that it nearly becomes a parody of them, like one that obviously was taking those tropes just a bit too far, every single time. We have the mismatched couple, and they end up at odds with each other but they HAVE to work together to solve this very particular problem, so OF COURSE that's a recipe for falling in love with each other. 

But there are things here that didn't age well - Ashley has a list of people who worked at the party, so she has to somehow track them down and kiss them to maybe get her good luck back, but this means kissing a bunch of men without consent, and if that would be wrong for a man to kiss women without consent, the reverse should be equally frowned upon. She manages to disrupt all their lives in the process, like by kissing a groom on his wedding day, not cool. Plus based on the credits, it seems like a lot of the guys who she has to stalk and ambush-kiss were played by crew members, so that means the lead actress of the film was required to have intimate contact with the key grip, the sound guy, and one of the P.A.s - this is not a good look, it's a long series of H.R. violations. 

There are more stereotypes, like a black lesbian in prison who will punch you in the face for no reason. Gypsy fortune-tellers are pretty much off-limits these days, too. Gay guys in steam rooms, modern artists who make art that looks like literal crap, and rich black music moguls who for some reason use $100 bills to pick up their dog's poop. Umm, nobody does this, nobody has ever done this. All the other kids with their pumped-up kicks are struggling musicians who are THISCLOSE to being famous, if they could just get their CD in the hands of a record executive, everything's going to be cake after that. Because you just need to go from loser band to famous band in an instant by saving some record maker from getting run over, sure you can work small gigs for years, build up a fan base, promote yourself on social media but that takes TIME, so really if you can't become superstars in a matter of weeks, like what's the point? 

Everything is super-simplified here, to the point of absurdity - Ashley uses her super-good-luck powers to move up rapidly in the world of event planning, and really, she's like the film version of Marvel's "Black Cat" character, it's not just that she has good luck, but everyone around has to eat up all the bad luck, like all of her co-workers get trapped in an elevator so she has to handle the promo pitch meeting all by herself, and wouldn't you know the music mogul just LOVES her one idea, which is to throw a party. But within the "good idea" are a dozen little "bad ideas", like hiring an escort to date her boss and having little rooms at the party where people can close the curtain and have sex. This is kind of "what could POSSIBLY go wrong" brought to the extreme, because once her good luck powers go away then everything needs to fall apart very quickly. 

Then we have Jake, who has the opposite "bad luck" power, he's the manager of the band and his power to fall down, lose his pants and short out the band's electrical system all at the same time seems to be the only thing holding the band McFly back.  When he kisses Ashley at the party it's another form of "Freaky Friday" body-swapping, only it's the luck power that swaps, now he gets all the good luck and the band becomes a hit, they get a record contract in days and they somehow sell out the Hard Rock even though nobody even knows who they are. Yeah, even in a fantasy movie it feels like they skipped a few steps. Ashley gets arrested for running a prostitution ring at the party, and this leads to her getting punched by the black lesbian in jail - TWICE - and then fired. So she has to get Jake's old job at the bowling alley where the band played forever, changing lightbulbs, fixing bowling machines, unclogging toilets and spraying bowling shoes, which is Hollywood's version of the worst job ever. 

Jake takes pity on the luckless Ashley, gives her his "bad luck" backpack that has a first aid kit, an emergency umbrella and an extra pair of socks (don't ask) but really, giving her some practical advice to not be such a spaz would have also gone a long way. Also maybe stop being such an entitled millennial, just saying. A lot of people work in bowling alleys, movie theaters and sports stadiums doing menial labor and mostly it's good honest work, not career jail. Oh, sorry that we can't all be executives working on the 30th floor who make six-figure salaries hiring dancers and waiters to work at parties.  

Eventually, since Jake and Ashley are still in the same orbit, she puts two and two together and determines that HE is the masked guy who kissed her during the party, and HE is also the guy who her good-luck powers were transferred to, so HE should be the guy she needs to kiss to get the power back, and she does, but then she feels guilty about it. By this time she's in love with him, but now she feels they need to break-up, because if she kisses him again he'll be unlucky again, but she's so stupid she can't think more than five minutes into the future, where maybe if she kisses him several times a day the power's going to go back and forth so many times that it really won't matter any more, and life will become a never-ending series of good things and bad things happening alternately, or, you know, just life. Everything will even out over time if she could just roll with it, but that's apparently not where we find ourselves. 

Directed by Donald Petrie (director of "Little Italy" and "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days")

Also starring Lindsay Lohan (last seen in "Freakier Friday"), Samaire Armstrong (last seen in "Not Another Teen Movie"), Bree Turner (last seen in "The Ugly Truth"), Faizon Love (last seen in "Life as We Know It'), Missi Pyle (last seen in "Just Before I Go"), Makenzie Vega (last seen in "The Family Man"), Carlos Ponce (last heard in "Free Birds"), Tom Fletcher, Danny Jones, Harry Judd, Dougie Poynter, Tovah Feldshuh (last seen in "Armageddon Time"), Jaqueline Fleming (last seen in "The Tale"), Dane Rhodes (last seen in "Where the Crawdads Sing"), Mikki Val, Ira Hawkins (last seen in "Freedomland"), J.C. Sealy, Marcus Hester (last seen in "Runaway Jury"), Loren Kinsella (ditto), Strawn Bovee, Gerry Vichi (last seen in "Coma"), Dennis Wit, Kenny Alfonso (last seen in "Pain Hustlers"), Ray Garvey, Larry Gamell Jr., Rome Kanda (last seen in "The Informant!"), Al Roffe, Dean Cochran, Mary Firestone (last seen in "National Treasure: Book of Secrets"), Matthew Morgan, Dariush Vollenweider, Denis Gawley, Russ Klein, David Jensen (last seen in "The Best of Me"), Loring Murtha, Kevin Scanlon, Frank Ferrara (last seen in "A Shock to the System"), Kasie Head, John Bernard Martin (last seen in "The Irishman"), Chris Carmack (last heard in "Alpha and Omega"), Leanne Cochran (last seen in "Green Lantern"), Kayla Ewell, with a cameo from Craig "Radio Man" Castaldo (last seen in "No Pay, Nudity")

RATING: 3 out of 10 scratch-off tickets (which apparently is the only way to determine if your good-luck powers are back?)

Z for Zachariah

Year 18, Day 74 - 3/15/26 - Movie #5,273

BEFORE: At this point last year, I was done with the romance chain, and I was deep in a Liam Neeson block that was leading up to a St. Patrick's Day film. So this year's chain is a few films longer, and I'm going to hit a romance film on St. Patrick's Day, one that is Irish-themed. And this year I've only seen ONE Liam Neeson film so far, last year I had like nine in a row during March, and only ONE took place in Ireland, so you know, I'll do whatever it takes to make my chains line up with all the big holidays. 

Chris Pine carries over from "Small Town Saturday Night". 

THE PLOT: In the wake of a disaster that wiped out most of civilization, two men and a young woman find themselves in an emotionally charged love triangle as the last known survivors. 

AFTER: I'm posting late, because this is the Sunday film and it's already Monday - I had to work all day so I missed watching the Oscars live, came home exhausted but after an iced coffee I had a bit more energy. Enough to watch "Tournament of Champions" on Food Network with my wife - well, priorities, right? So I didn't have the energy for the Oscars, not even on fast-forward. I'll post my Oscar night thoughts tomorrow - right now everything is a four-way or five-way tie and we'll get there, it's just going to take me some more time.  

Let me deal with "Z for Zachariah" first, it's kind of odd and I don't even understand why the movie is named that because there's no character in the film with that name. For that matter, there are only three actors, so I think this one's going to win a Honky at MY award ceremony in December, for the film with the smallest cast. Yes, that's an award category for me, but there's also one for LARGEST cast, also shortest movie, longest movie, oldest movie, newest movie, best sequel, best prequel, best heist, best murder mystery and best destination wedding. Nowadays we also have best movie that I worked at a screening of, best Thanksgiving movie, best prison movie, best alien invasion movie, best LGBTQ film and best time travel film. It's a lot, I know, but now I'm keeping track of every little subject during the year so it won't take me a week to write that post in December. 

OK, a contender this year for best post-apocalypse film is probably going to be this one, set in a time after some vast but unspecified disaster, based on the radiation suits and the fact that the people who survived were underground, let's assume it's a nuclear disaster of some kind. Iran got their nuclear program running again, or North Korea sent missiles to Seattle, honestly it doesn't much matter, but with the recent news events, come on, anything is possible and this one maybe hits just a bit too close to home. There is, however, still a valley that has been unaffected by the disaster, and a woman lives there with her dog and her family farm and she's getting by. She can't use the tractor because it's out of gas, and she's got no electric power, but she's got a clean well and some chickens so she's getting by. 

Into her world comes a man in a radiation suit, he'd been in an underground bunker for years (?) and finally had to get out of there or else he'd go crazy. He'd apparently traveled hundreds of miles to get there, and he depends on medicine to keep him alive, but relatable, right? Unforunately he's so happy to be out and about in nature, he bathes in a creek, without realizing that the water in it is coming in from the outside world, so he gets radiation poisoning. Fortunately Ann and her dog find him and bring him back to her house, and she nurses him back to health. He repays her by helping out around the farm, helping her get gas from the pumps even though there's no power, and she can get the tractor running again. He also has a plan to build a water-wheel to generate electricity, but to do that he'll need to use the wood from the chapel her father built, and Ann's not crazy about this plan. 

NITPICK POINT: in many scenes you can see a bunch of fences that have been built around the farm, why not use THAT wood for the water wheel? It's not like you need fences to keep all the people who are not coming around out of the farm...

But now comes the reason I've included this film here - even though they are different people and somewhat at odds with each other (he's a man of science, she's a woman of religion) they grow together simply by spending time together and working toward a common goal. So they killed off our cities and they killed off technology, but they couldn't kill the mismatched couple who falls in love despite disagreeing on so many things. They've got wine and they've got music, so naturally one thing leads to another, and one night they cuddle, but the really hot and heavy stuff, well, it's going to take some time. Maybe John's got some issues. 

But one day another person shows up, he's got a back story about mining and watching a group of men go crazy underground, and he's been drifting around for a while, but really all he wants is some clean water and a night's rest, then he'll be heading down to the coast where he thinks there's a settlement, people are broadcasting on the radio calling out for survivors. Maybe it's real, maybe it's a trap, who knows? But Ann says the Christian thing to do would be to take Caleb in, feed him and let him stay for a while, not realizing that even if these are the last three people left alive on earth, there's still the possibility for a complicated love triangle. Sure, love triangles and cockroaches will for sure survive any apocalypse. 

John sees the attraction building between Ann and Caleb, to the point where he's ready to bow out of the situation, I guess it's partially a racial thing, Caleb grew up a few towns away so he and Ann kind of have a shared history, and they can "be white people together", as John says. But John still needs Caleb's help to build that water wheel, plus they hunt wild turkeys together, so it's an uneasy alliance perhaps, but these three people kind of need each other to survive. John clearly has love for Ann, but did he miss his shot? Or did he only have a shot because he was the only man around? Ann still comes to John at night, but one night John is too drunk and fast asleep, so she turns to Caleb instead.  

I won't say a word here about how it ends, because it's a pretty good conundrum, based on that mental game we all play about about thinking about the end times, what would it be like if there were just a few people left and you had to think about maybe repopulating the planet, would you make different choices, would love still even be part of the picture, or would having babies take priority over that? Would the few survivors live like hermits, or would social skills be more vital than ever before?  Would people settle down and work the land or just travel around like nomads?  Would the fall of human society be an excuse to live recklessly and lawlessly, or would people still follow the rules of the past and commit to each other and try to live in harmony together, as hard as that would be?  Would the few people left head out to the country to live a quiet life and work the land because that would produce the best results, or would that be done only because the cities were filled with radiation, destroyed buildings and piles of dead bodies? 

Anyway, we're kind of left with more questions than answers tonight, but they're kind of important questions. This future society might be a lawless one, and life would be just another commodity when resources are tight, people have to fight for supplies and survival, and lying to each other would just be par for the course. More to the point, if you strip down the basic apocalypse story, take away the fancy special effects and the politics and just focus on the survivors and the possible recovery, this is kind of what you get - at least it's interesting. 

Directed by Craig Zobel (director of "The Hunt", "Compliance")

Also starring Chiwetel Ejiofor (last seen in "Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy"), Margot Robbie (last seen in "Barbie").

RATING: 6 out of 10 missing eggs