If I Had Legs I'd Kick You

Year 18, Day 90 - 3/31/26 - Movie #5,289

BEFORE: Rose Byrne carries over from "Wicker Park" and I'm finally able to get to something else that was Oscar-nominated for last year. Another one is on the way this week, then I really have to find a path to Mothers Day and maybe try to work in "One Battle After Another" ASAP.

Here are the format stats for March, since we've come to the end of another month:

22 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Save the Last Dance, The Prince & Me, Enchanted April, Love Is Strange, Untamed Heart, Drop Dead Gorgeous, Fools Rush In, The Best of Me, Sweet Home Alabama, Life as We Know It, Small Town Saturday Night, Z for Zachariah, Austenland, Southside with You, Fight or Flight, A Working Man, Death Race, The Upside of Anger, Let Him Go, Draft Day, Wicker Park, If I Had Legs I'd Kick You

3 watched on Netflix: Irish Wish, Wrath of Man, Homefront

1 watched on Amazon Prime: Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre
1 watched on Hulu: Wildflower

1 watched on YouTube: Just My Luck

2 watched on Tubi: Serving Sara, Killer Elite

30 TOTAL

I'll post the April links tomorrow, as much as I can anyway.

THE PLOT: While trying to manage her own life and career, a woman on the verge of a breakdown must cope with her daughter's illness, an absent husband, a missing person and an unusual relationship with her therapist. 

AFTER: It's another film that I just don't know what to do with, because in some ways it defies any kind of categorization or classification. Is this a drama, a dark comedy, a weird sci-fi thing? It almost feels like the kind of film somebody puts into production once "Everything Everywhere All at Once" wins Best Picture, only they don't take things quite as far with this one. And I really was SO looking forward to this one, but unfortunately it's too tragic to be a comedy, and too weird to be taken seriously, but then somehow at the same time it feels like it didn't go far ENOUGH into absurdism to be the weird, wonderful film that it could have been. It's firing in too many directions at once without having a very clear purpose. 

I love Conan O'Brien, though, I'll support any film that casts him, and I usually like Rose Byrne, but I somehow couldn't stand her yesterday in "Wicker Park". That was VERY early in her career, though, it might even have been her first film. Nah, it came out after "Star Wars: Episode II", plus a few others so really, she should have known better. But what is today's film all about, or perhaps a better question is really WHY is today's film? Also, WTF?

This is a film about Linda, a therapist who has a lot of personal problems in her life - this is probably not uncommon, and I've heard that most therapists also see therapists, because they have to listen to people unpacking their problems all day long and that takes a toll on therapists, so they more than perhaps anyone else need someone to talk to. And the therapists that she unpacks her own problems to is a very sarcastic, dismissive one, also she has some weird attraction to him, and I've also heard that people having romantic fantasies about their therapists is quite common, too - that is at least one person in your life who has to listen to you, after all.

Linda has a daughter who has a feeding disorder, she has to be fed through a tube and is hooked up to a machine at night, Linda has to monitor the machine all night long, and as a result her sleep cycle is probably quite unusual, also her daughter needs to participate in a daily program at the hospital, where the doctors don't want to remove the tube unless her daughter reaches certain weight gain goals, and Linda suspects these goals are impossible, therefore she's being set up to fail. Linda's husband, by the way, works as a ship's captain, so he is away from home for weeks at a time, it's unclear what kind of ship he is on, but maybe it's a cruise ship, he talks about activities on an island at one point, and Linda is very jealous because he gets to travel and she doesn't, meanwhile her husband is envious of her because he thinks that therapists just "sit around all day". Well, clearly this isn't true because Linda has to drive her daughter around and also monitor her at night. 

Their life gets further imbalanced when the ceiling collapses in their apartment, supposedly from a burst pipe, and the place gets flooded. So Linda and her unnamed daughter have to relocate to a nearby hotel because the landlord claims to have found black mold or asbestos or something. Linda has even more trouble sleeping at the hotel, she tries wine and cannabis gummies, listening to music and eating junk food and sometimes she even leaves her daughter alone for hours, which leads her to conclude she's a bad mother and then she feels even more guilty. 

Another thing that goes wrong, and the movie is kind of full of them (par for the course, I know) is that one of Linda's clients also has trouble with boundaries and she brings her infant son to her therapy sessions. One day she says she needs to use the bathroom and just plain disappears, leaving her infant son behind. Caroline is another mother who for some reason doesn't feel up to the task, because raising kids is HARD, sure, and also we see frequent clips in the news in the background about another mother who just plain stabbed her kids to death. Look, I don't have any kids but I sure can maybe how some parents are driven to insanity, but perhaps for those people it's just not a long trip? Anyway Linda calls up Caroline's husband, who had no idea his wife was seeing a therapist, also he won't come and pick up the baby, so Linda is forced to call the police about the abandoned infant. 

One night Linda visits the apartment, after the construction workers take like a week off, and she gazes up into the hole in the ceiling, and she sees something bizarre, like a bunch of floating lights and the voices of people, I don't know if they're dead souls or Linda's tapped into the hive mind of the world like through a Cerebro, or if she's just going plain old insane in the membrane. It's too bad the film couldn't have explained this a bit more, or if not explained then at least just given us more, because I couldn't understand what they were shooting for here, not at all. Then there's some cross-symbolism between the hole in the ceiling and the feeding tube hole in Linda's child, something akin to what Darren Aronofsky showed us in "Requiem for a Dream", maybe, but the connection here was rather weak, and I still couldn't figure out what it all meant, so again, they just didn't lean in enough to the weirdness here.

Linda's husband, Charles, eventually comes home and he sets right to hiring more contractors to fix the hole in the ceiling, while Linda has taken it upon herself to remove the feeding tube from her daughter, theorizing that maybe she's never going to be motivated to get better as long as the tube is in place. This is probably backwards thinking, but, hey, you never know. I have a nephew who had digestive issues early in childhood, and the "solution" was to only feed him crackers and grapes, but then there never was any real motivation to even TRY any other foods, he just kind of fell into the pattern of "this is all that I eat" and I think the only other food added to his diet since then is McDonald's French Fries, once a day. Well, they are delicious, sure, but there's a whole wide world of food out there that he could probably try now, only he doesn't. 

Anyway, it's pretty obvious to everyone at this point that Linda has gone quite insane, also that she's been leaving her daughter unsupervised at night while she drinks or does drugs, so her "solution" to being revealed is a bad mother is to run down to the beach and throw herself into the ocean, but it's not only a cop-out, it's bad to treat suicide as a viable solution to one's problems. The movie doesn't go completely THERE, but she did try repeatedly, and that's no bueno. Surely there could have been a better resolution, somehow. I feel pretty let down by the ending here, and also no explanation about the surreal cosmic lights that she saw or maybe hallucinated. Even the title of the film is left quite open to interpretation, which means either that somebody was either being very "arty" or couldn't be bothered to tell us what it means. 

NITPICK POINT: Linda keeps referring to the hole in the ceiling in the family's "apartment", but when she approaches the residence before finding the workmen fixing the place, it looks from the outside like a private house. Can you have an apartment in a house? That was also pretty confusing to me. If it's a house, who lived upstairs, even in general, why don't we ever learn who lived upstairs? 

NITPICK POINT #2: I also didn't quite understand why the parking lot attendant was always mad at her. Was she doing something wrong, like not paying for parking? Or she was staying inside her car so she didn't have to pay for parking? Again, very confusing, please dumb it down for me if you want me to understand if that guy had a valid reason to be mad at her. 

Directed by Mary Bronstein

Also starring Conan O'Brien (last seen in "Please Don't Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain"), Delaney Quinn, Mary Bronstein, A$AP Rocky (last seen in "Dope"), Ivy Wolk (last seen in "The Bubble"), Christian Slater (last seen in "Untamed Heart"), Mark Stolzenberg, Manu Narayan (last heard in "The Assistant"), Danielle Macdonald (last seen in "Dumplin'"), Eva Kornet, Ella Beatty, Helen Hong (last seen in "Family Switch"), Daniel Zolghadri (last seen in "Eighth Grade"), Josh Pais (last seen in "The Friend"), Ronald Bronstein, Laurence Blum (last seen in "Good Time"), Lark White, Amy Judd Lieberman, Char Sidney, Jodi Pynn Gabree

RATING: 5 out of 10 screams into a pillow

Wicker Park

Year 18, Day 89 - 3/30/26 - Movie #5,288

BEFORE: Christopher Cousins carries over from "Draft Day". And Josh Hartnett is back in the countdown, after three action films earlier this month. Sometimes it just makes sense to split one film off from a mini-chain of films with the same actor, because I need to spread things out - look, if I'd come here right after "Fight or Flight" or "Wrath of Man" I would have missed out on a bunch of films, and I'd be too close to Easter way too soon. Easter is coming up this weekend, I better load up on some Reese's eggs or something. 

THE PLOT: A young advertising executive searches obsessively for his ex-lover Lisa who disappeared two years earlier. 

AFTER: Well, this film is a complete mess, I don't know how else to describe it. It looked like it was going to fit in with last week's theme about people being kidnapped or otherwise disappearing, only this one doesn't really go with that because here the missing woman just sort of moved unexpectedly. She got a job offer in London and just left, which is a thing that somebody might do, and it's not her fault if she just forgot to inform the man who was running around town trying to randomly bump into her. 

Let me back up a bit, because the movie does that frequently, it's way too flashback-y and it presents us with something of a split timeline, some events are in the present and others are in the past, and the film skips between the two without much warning. I had to re-watch the first half hour just so I could determine which scenes were the flashbacks, and I'm on a tight timeline, I can't be watching a movie one and a half times just because it's hard to understand. But we meet Matthew when he's moved back to Chicago, he's dating his co-worker and things seem to be going OK, and his boss has gifted him a new account, but the next meeting is in China because these people have never heard of Zoom meetings. Maybe in 2004 that wasn't a thing, but still, to fly to China for one meeting, when the clients are right THERE in Chicago seems pretty stupid. But, you know, business. 

Matthew seems like he has it all, great job, beautiful girlfriend, he even bumps into his old friend Luke on the street, and they look forward to getting into some trouble together. Yep, everything's coming together, so it's time for Matthew to shoot himself in the foot and tear it all down. The problem comes after the meeting in the restaurant when he overhears a phone call in the back and he goes into the apartment-sized phone booth (it must be a fancy restaurant, if the phone call room is bigger than the restroom, but you know, it was a different time, before everyone had cell phones) and he swears he can smell his ex-girlfriend's perfume. He rushes out only to see her from the back as she breaks a heel and almost falls down. But he can't catch up with her, it's maddeningly going to take the rest of the movie for that to happen. 

He then misses his plane to China on purpose (the first of many times) so that he can search Chicago for Lisa, who he has determined is back in town, only, how to find her? It's not like there's a thing called directory assistance or the internet, so instead he has to follow clues like a detective would, back at the restaurant she somehow left a folder with her hotel key, so OK, that might be a good place to start. He goes to her room at the Drake and searches her room, he even falls asleep there, which triggers another round of flashbacks or dreams. So this is a good chance for us to learn how he first met Lisa, which has something to do with a camcorder that won't record audio, him seeing her on video and then in person across the street while he's watching that video, then following her to a dance studio so he can watch her rehearse. This leads to her coming into Luke's shoe store so Matthew can pretend to work there and tell her that those red heels she wants aren't available in her size, but they can be ordered. But she knows he's been following her, and somehow that's not creepy at all to her, so they agree to meet the next day and kind of fall into a relationship.  

But you know, life happens and one day she disappeared, later we learn that Matthew had asked her to move in with him (after knowing her for what, three days?) and that's too fast, man. Who can blame her for running away from the guy who basically stalked her and then jumped the gun on living together? You know, sometimes we make choices and we have to live with them, but I guess maybe that erratic woman you slept with two years ago is always going to evoke that powerful fantasy even though you've got a beautiful girlfriend right next to you who will even drive you to the airport, and isn't that what love is all about? No, by all means, ditch the flight and go roam around Chicago's underworld trying to get lucky. 

When Matthew finally finds Lisa, she looks completely different - probably because she's not Lisa, she's a different Lisa who was also at the restaurant and seems a little sketchy, but what the hell, Matthew will sleep with her anyway. Wait, WHAT? Is she pretending to be Lisa, or was Lisa pretending to be her, what exactly is going on here? We see a lot of the same events again from a different P.O.V., but still nothing is starting to make sense. Meanwhile things seem to be going great for Luke, who's been dating this actress named Alex, she even forgives him when he doesn't show up for their date because Matthew borrowed Luke's car and didn't bring it back on time. Matthew also books another flight to China but fails to go to the airport again. 

The third time we jump back in time and go through this crazy exercise again, we learn that Alex and second Lisa look a lot alike, Luke and Matthew go to her play performance (she's terrible, at acting, BTW, and I'm not sure if this actress that I think is a good actress was a bad actress back then, or if she was acting like a bad actress would - I suppose it doesn't matter) and she's wearing a lot of make-up, so the two guys don't put it together that they've slept with the same woman. Matthew has to leave the play to NOT take the next flight to China, and you would think there would be some repercussions at his job that he's missed the meeting completely, but the explanation is somehow that an Italian businessman's wife died in a car crash. No, I don't understand that either. 

The "explanation" for all this is that Lisa and Alex were friends, except the "guy from the newspaper" (who I think was the Italian businessman) was stalking Alex, so she switched apartments with Lisa for a while. And Alex fell in love with Matthew, but he only had eyes for Lisa, the mystery woman he saw across the street. Or maybe Alex was in love with Lisa, that's all a bit unclear. Anyway, Alex was masquerading as Lisa so she could get Matthew's attention or something like that, but that seems very unhealthy, too, like why didn't she just keep dating Luke? It feels like everyone here wants what they can't have and nobody wants to be in the job or relationship that they do have. Alex was also deliberately keeping Matthew and Lisa from getting together, by not delivering hand-written notes and deleting voicemail messages. 

This feels a bit like bargain-basement David Lynch, like I'm thinking about "Lost Highway" where one character became a completely different person somehow and "Mulholland Drive" where two characters got so close to each other that they switched places, and the audience is just supposed to accept these things as if they could really happen. Like if you're going to go for it, really go for it, but "Wicker Park" has nothing but terrible reasons to explain why one person would impersonate another, and then there are also no repercussions for that. I've tried my best to make heads or tails out of "Wicker Park", but I think I've failed - or perhaps there's nothing there that does make any sense, in which case I'm exonerated. 

I think there are also maybe some translation errors, since this is based on a French film titled "L'Appartement", which in turn is loosely based on Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and all of that play's star-crossed lovers. I think maybe Billy Shakes invented "reductio ad absurdum" with regards to love stories, when you have fairies pouring love potions (ruffies) into people's eyes and giving people donkey heads, you're really exploring all the things that could POSSIBLY go wrong in relationships. But here in "Wicker Park" they changed the play-within-a-play to "Twelfth Night", which makes a bit of sense, because that play also has someone falling in love with someone in disguise. Still I stand by my initial ruling, that this is all one giant mess. 

Directed by Paul McGuigan (director of "Lucky Number Slevin" and "The Reckoning")

Also starring Josh Hartnett (last seen in "Wrath of Man"), Rose Byrne (last seen in "Ezra"), Matthew Lillard (last seen in "Five Nights at Freddy's"), Diane Kruger (last seen in "Marlowe"), Jessica Paré (last seen in "Another Kind of Wedding"), Vlasta Vrana (last seen in "French Exit"), Amy Sobol, Ted Whittall (last seen in "The Calling"), Joanna Noyes, Mark Camacho (last seen in "Shattered Glass"), Marcel Jeannin (last seen in "The Greatest Game Ever Played"), Stefanie Buxton, Stanley Hilaire, Zhenhu Han, Lu Ye, Christian Paul (last seen in "Death Race"), Gillian Ferrabee (last seen in "Secret Window"), Miranda Handford, Benjamin Hatcher, Richard Jutras (last seen in "Dream Scenario"), Mary Morter, Erika Rosenbaum (last seen in "The Hummingbird Project"), Jessica Schulte (last heard in "Megamind"), Paul Doucet, Jamieson Boulanger, Carrie Colak, Gordon Masten (last seen in "Stanley & Iris")

RATING: 3 out of 10 sleeping pills (maybe the whole film is just one long fever dream...)

Draft Day

Year 18, Day 88 - 3/29/26 - Movie #5,287

BEFORE: It's another film today that I just don't know what to do with - I mean, it's somehow an entire film about the NFL draft, which apparently is a big deal every year, it's televised and everything. Again, I'm not a sports guy, and I think big league sports might be a bit out of control, a film about the drafting process which is tangential to the sport itself only kind of proves my point. I get that there are movies about football, sure - "Any Given Sunday", "The Longest Yard", "Rudy" and so on. But did we need a movie about the NFL draft? Probably not, which is the main reason I've avoided it for so long. But the chain is the chain and I kept a little spot on the watchlist where I piled up three Kevin Costner movies, so while the clearance sale is still going on, I want to get rid of them all, they're just taking up space in the warehouse. 

This year's NFL Draft is longer than a day, it will take place April 23-25 in Pittsburgh - sorry that I couldn't arrange to watch this film any closer to this year's event. For someone who runs a calendar-based movie blog this might be the equivalent of watching a Christmas movie in August, I don't know. But I did what I could - the whole process is still a bit of a mystery to me, and by that I mean my own scheduling process, not the NFL draft process. But we live in a world now where everyone the ability to record videos and a place to post them, since joining Instagram I can't tell you how many people are making video lists of the best pastrami sandwiches sold in NYC or where to find the greasiest cheesesteaks or the most secret speakeasies, judging restaurants on the weirdest scales you can imagine. Like there's a guy who's a cab driver who reviews restaurants on his lunch breaks, popping in to get a table for one at some of the most exclusive restaurants you can imagine, and everyone can't wait to serve him because they know he overtips.  

But I'm sure there's someone out there who, for example, judges restaurants only on their decor, or their names or reputations. We've got Michelin-star ratings, celebrity chefs, and then there's being internet famous as opposed to being known for making good food. I have to wonder what's being lost in the process, because sometimes you just want to have a decent meal in a place that isn't too crowded. But judging a restaurant on anything other than the food seems a bit like making a movie about the NFL draft and not the sport itself. But let's find out. 

Kevin Costner carries over from "Let Him Go". 

THE PLOT: Cleveland Browns GM Sonny Weaver has the opportunity to rebuild his team when he trades for the number one draft pick. He must decide what he's willing to sacrifice on a life-changing day for a few hundred young men with NFL dreams. 

AFTER: Well, I was kind of right, this is a film that started at 8 on the ridiculous scale and then took it up to 11. Partly society is to blame, because we can't really do anything "small" here in America, everything that starts out small eventually gets overhyped to the point of madness, the Super Bowl is just one example, if you feel like spending six or eight hours watching a tribute to excess, to the point where there's so many food traditions or tailgating "rules" that there's a whole subculture just for THAT, then you've got the exorbitant amount of TV commercials and just the money spent on making and booking ONE of those ads is larger than the GDP of most countries, I'd say that things have gotten pretty far out of hand and they're not going back. There's a sponsor just for the COIN FLIP, and people are also betting on the coin flip (one of hundreds of things you can bet on). 

Another example is the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, like I imagine 100 years ago somebody just thought it might be a nice idea to inflate a couple balloons, book a marching band and entertain a few dozen people in the streets, and now look where it all is. It's a three hour mythic mash-up of product placements, musical numbers from Broadway shows, marching bands from all over the country, dance troupes and celebrities who drop by and comment for five minutes because they've also got something to promote. Whatever entertainment value a parade might have once had is now buried under a giant merchandising pile, but God help your Broadway show if you DON'T do a performance on 34th St. during the parade, you might as well just close down the theater because everyone will be going to the other show down the block that did perform. They have plenty of marching bands in the NYC area, I'm just saying, and they all pretty much look and sound the same, why do they have to fly an entire band plus parents and support staff in from Flagstaff, Arizona - it all seems very wasteful to me, but I guess then those teens get to say they were on TV and also they got to visit the big city. At the end of the day, does NBC get to air three hours of programming that means something, that they're proud of? Or is it just a tradition now, muscle memory and we keep doing what we're doing without thinking about why we're doing it? 

To be fair, sports movies only took things so far, because at one point somebody wrote the book "Moneyball" and regular people started to realize that there might be more to the game than what you see on the field, and every team has staffers who are even more obsessed with stats than the fans are, and they've also got researchers who dig into each player's personal history to try to determine not just what kind of player they're going to be, but what kind of person, what kind of teammate they're going to be, and for the team owners who are spending millions on THIS guy over THAT guy, maybe that all adds up to something, or maybe it doesn't, because nobody has a crystal ball that works 100% of the time. The best you can do maybe is spend your money wisely, make the best picks you can, cross your fingers and hope for the best - and STILL 100% of the people are going to get fired over time based on the decisions they made or didn't make. 

But still, I went in to this knowing almost NOTHING about the NFL Draft, and after I really don't know much more. I know that the team with the worst record each year gets the best (first) pick the next, so it's a bit like my father's family's old Christmas gift distribution. (We did the white elephant thing, where everybody got a number and then picked wrapped gifts in order, but you couldn't pick the gift you brought, and you had options to trade what you just opened for anything that had been unwrapped before. Other trades were negotiated afterwards, privately.) But then every team gets a pick in every round, unless they've traded away that pick to another team for something else in return. Is that about it? I have a feeling this system was designed to make things equitable among all of the NFL teams, but then the teams with the smaller budgets are free to negotiate with the teams with the bigger budgets, and that's not equitable at all. The teams in the larger markets might have more power and assets to negotiate with, so again, something about this very fair system doesn't seem very fair. 

We follow Sonny Weaver Jr., the GM of the Cleveland Browns, who receives directions from the team's owner to at least TRY to get the most coveted player in the draft, a QB named Bo Callahan, because he's going to put asses in the seats. After speaking with the also-struggling Seattle Seahawks, Sonny is able to trade for their #1 pick in the first round, but only by giving up the Browns' 1st-round pick for the next THREE years. This puts the Browns in the best position to secure Callahan, only it raises questions, why were the Seahawks so eager to give up their pick? I mean, they got something in return, but perhaps that was just a cover-up tactic, do they know something about Bo Callahan that the other teams don't? Sonny would rather draft a running back named Vontae Mack, or even a legacy player like Ray Jennings - but the owner wants the flashy new quarterback to replace Brian Drew, their sophomore QB who might have a bad knee, and who also seems to be demanding a trade IF the Browns take Callahan, because that town ain't big enough for the both of them. 

Meanwhile, everyone assumes that the Browns will take Callahan with their new first pick, so the head coach starts to revolt because he didn't plan for this, he likes Drew, the old QB just fine and he's got all his plays for the season centered around what Drew can do. Ali, the team's accountant, is called in to see if the team can even afford to draft Callahan, because of the salary cap (another thing that I believe is supposed to level the playing field, but I bet there are plenty of ways around it). Sonny starts re-reviewing all the footage of Callahan, too, to see if he's got a weakness they haven't discovered yet, and he has the team's security officer do another deep dive into Callahan's background to find any hint of scandal, other than the fact that there was an incident at his birthday party in college, and it seems none of his teammates were involved, but that also means they weren't THERE, and why weren't they? Did Callahan not have any friends on the team, or did he have bad B.O., or were the local cops inclined to hide the fact that team members were there? Anyway you try to explain it, it doesn't make much sense. 

Also meanwhile, the film needs to pile on all this other personal drama, to hide the fact that this is a football movie where nobody plays any football - sure, it's the off-season and Draft Day, but maybe you came here for a football movie and not a negotiation movie. So for some reason that accountant, Ali, is in a situationship with Sonny, and they have to keep it quiet because that's probably an H.R. violation. But, Ali is pregnant so they're going to have to disclose sometime soon. And on top of THAT, Sonny's father died like a week ago and he was the GM before Sonny was, and in his will he had a request that his ashes be scattered on the team's practice field, and Sonny's mother wants to do this TODAY, right now, while she's there, and Sonny for some other reason doesn't have the stones to say, "Mom, today's just not a good day for this, I'm very busy, how about tomorrow?"

I mean, it's really like "What could POSSIBLY go wrong on Draft Day", only heightened beyond the absurd. There are 365 days in a year, but every problem in Sonny's life seems to have come to a head on Draft Day, of course. How is a man supposed to conduct trading business, research a player again at the last minute, keep the coach from quitting, keep the team owner from firing him, and try to figure out who the other teams are going to pick while also trying to figure out who HE is going to pick? It's a lot. Also it's worth considering that you may draft a player you really want, or you may draft a player to keep him from another team that needs him, or you may just draft a player for the hell of it so you can trade him later to another team. This is worse than 3-D chess, this is like doing a jigsaw puzzle in the dark when you can't even feel the shapes of the pieces. 

It's also possible that all of the team's research isn't worth a damn.  People always point out that Tom Brady, one of the greatest if not THE greatest, was picked like 140th in his year. Some stats will tell you a player is really great, and then you still have to cross your fingers and hope he lives up to the hype, while other players you may draft just to round out the team, and one of those guys can really surprise you one day. Or so I've heard. Anyway, I don't know what all the fuss is about, because at the end of the day, this is still drafting for the Cleveland Browns, one of the worst teams in the NFL on a perennial basis. I've spent time in Cleveland, and I can tell you their fans are some of the most loyal there could be to a team that has just never delivered for them, not even a bit. Yet we're supposed to believe here that there are players somewhere who are ECSTATIC to be drafted by the Browns. I refuse to believe it, except that playing for Cleveland might be slightly better than digging ditches in Kuala Lumpur. 

It's just my feeling here, but I speak as someone who's gotten a behind-the-scenes look at hypefests like San Diego Comic-Con, and now I've peeked behind the curtains of NBA games, while I'm selling beer at Nets games. My strong suspicion is that simply everyone is just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. Certainly nobody knows for sure what movies are going to be successful, what children's TV shows are going to catch on, and which players are going to coalesce into a successful team of contenders in any sport. Everyone's running around trying to get maximum eyeballs on their product, whether that's at live events, on TV screens or on social media. But I think mostly the thing to remember is that nobody has a clue, not at all, not from what I've seen. Creative people just keep putting stuff out there and hope that other people find it and enjoy it, but sports is really its own thing, teams just have to keep practicing and playing the games and trying to win, but then there's this whole ridiculous culture (or cult) built up around each team and each sport. 

Directed by Ivan Reitman (producer of "Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire" and producer of "Space Jam: A New Legacy")

Also starring Jennifer Garner (last seen in "Family Switch"), Denis Leary (last seen in "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work"), Frank Langella (last seen in "Sweet November"), Sam Elliott (last seen in "The Company You Keep"), Sean "Diddy" Combs (last seen in "Girls Trip"), Terry Crews (last seen in "Serving Sara"), Ellen Burstyn (last seen in "The Tale"), Chadwick Boseman (last seen in "Stan Lee"), Rosanna Arquette (last seen in "Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary"), W. Earl Brown (last seen in "The Unforgivable"), Kevin Dunn (last seen in "King Richard"), Arian Foster (last seen in "Baywatch"), Brad William Henke (last seen in "The Frozen Ground"), Chi McBride (last heard in "Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe"), Griffin Newman (last heard in "Disenchanted"), Josh Pence (last seen in "La La Land"), David Ramsey (last seen in "A Very Brady Sequel"), Patrick St. Esprit (last seen in "Acts of Violence"), Timothy Simons (last seen in "Don't Worry Darling"), Tom Welling (last seen in "The Fog"), Wade Williams (last seen in "Message from the King"), 

Dave Donaldson, Jordan Harris, Zachary Littlejohn, Enre Laney, Laura Steinel (last seen in "Babylon"), Wallace Langham (last seen in "Daddy Day Care"), Christopher Cousins (last seen in "Untraceable"), Erin Darke (last seen in "The Drop"), Quincy Dunn-Baker (last seen in "A House of Dynamite"), Gregory D. Rush, Tom Headlee, Patrick Breen (last seen in "The Assistant"), David Dunn, Stephen Hill (last seen in "Widows"), Jim Brewer, Margot Danis, Leanora Haselrig, Jennifer McMahan, Brenda Adrine, Edwina Hadley, Pat Healy (last seen in "Killers of the Flower Moon"), Andre Bello, Jacob Bertrand, John Dannug, Shannon Edwards, Mike Karban, Annette Lawless, Gil O'Brien, Nathan Andrew Read,

with cameos from Chris Berman (last seen in "Happy Gilmore 2"), Russ Brandon, Jim Brown (last seen in "Ali & Cavett: The Tale of the Tapes"), Monique Brown, Joel Bussert, Sammy Choi, Jeff Darlington, Rich Eisen (last seen in "That's My Boy"), Ken Fiore, Mike Florio, Aaron Goldhammer, Roger Goodell, Jon Gruden, Rebecca Haarlow, John Heffernan, Marc Honan, D'Qwell Jackson, Mel Kiper, Bernie Kosar, Ray Lewis, Alex Mack, Alex Marvez, Mike Mayock, Tony Rizzo, Deion Sanders, Frank Supovitz, Phil Taylor, TJ Ward, Seth Wickersham, 

and archive footage of John Candy (last seen in "Once Upon a Crime...")

RATING: 5 out of 10 retired jersey numbers