Year 8, Day 76 - 3/16/16 - Movie #2,277
BEFORE:
What a difference a day makes - just yesterday we were driving back from 2 days in Connecticut, filled with gambling, buffets, outlet mall shopping and high-class bowling, and today I was getting a root canal. It was scheduled for April 6, but there was a cancellation and they were able to move up my appointment. Gee, thanks, what a nice surprise. I mean, I know it has to be done, might as well get it over with and all that, but what a downer after a nice two-day trip. And this was just the surgery part with the drilling and the filling, I don't even get the crowns until next Friday, so my front tooth is still chipped for another week - because the guy who does the root canal doesn't also do the cosmetic dentistry, so I have to go back AGAIN. I'm sure someone's getting rich off of turning my dental work into a scheduling nightmare.
More troubles trying to record Jerry Lewis films tonight - once again, the TCM channel was off-line for several hours in the late-night/early am time period, so I missed another three films. I got "The Bellboy", but now that will be on the watchlist as a reminder that several other Jerry Lewis films failed to record, and so I'll have the option when I get there of tracking them down some other way. It can't be a coincidence that only THAT channel disappeared from the line-up between 11 pm and 2 am - either TCM is engaged in some bitter dispute with Time Warner over late night viewing rights, or else the ghost of Dean Martin just doesn't want me to watch any Jerry Lewis solo films.
Melissa McCarthy carries over from "Tammy", obviously.
THE PLOT: A desk-bound CIA analyst volunteers to go undercover to infiltrate the world of a deadly arms dealer, and prevent global disaster.
AFTER: There have been many spoof films made in the spy genre - of course the most popular are films like "Austin Powers" and "Johnny English", but back in the day we also had "Top Secret!" and "Spy Hard" and before that there was "Our Man Flint" and the "Get Smart" TV show. Most of them hearken back to James Bond, of course, but it matters whether someone is doing a direct rip-off, or a parody, or in this case, just a general spy-themed comedy. Which unfortunately places it somewhere along the lines of "Spies Like Us", "Zoolander" or "The Man Who Knew Too Little".
What also matters is whether the central character is deadpan serious, or goofy but effective, or just plain clueless. And yes, those are different approaches to the same thing. Lord knows I had my share of clueless characters earlier this week with the "Brady Bunch" films, so I was glad to find out that the characters in this film are not completely in the dark about things. Because then you get a film like "The Man Who Knew Too Little", where Bill Murray thought he was surrounded by actors only pretending to be real spies, and you can only keep that charade going for so long.
Instead we're presented with real spies in this film, who know that they're spies, and they appear to be fairly decent ones. But here's the problem - there's just no consistency throughout the film. You can have competent spies (James Bond) or incompetent ones (Austin Powers), all I ask is that you keep them consistent. The characters in "Spy" seem to all change their abilities and attitudes every five minutes, which leads to many comic situations, but by the end, nobody can even remember which side they're on - and if they're confused, the audience is bound to be confused.
Don't get me wrong, I like reversals - you've got to have reversals, those little minor plot twists, because they often are the best way to show character growth AND surprise the audience here and there with a little shock effect. But just not this MANY - there are enough reversals in this film to make your head spin around, to the point where there's just not enough solid ground to lay down the foundation for a coherent story.
Starting at the beginning - we've got a main character who's competent at being an agent's assistant (their eyes and ears in the field), but then she's not so competent, because that agent gets himself killed. But then it's revealed that she IS competent, she's passed all of her training, she only worked as an assistant for 10 years because she was so attracted to that agent. But this also means that she's NOT competent, because she put her own dreams on hold to have a subservient job, which is an earmark of insecurity and self-doubt. But then she declares once again that she IS competent, and that she deserves to go out into the field to track down the agent's killer. But then as soon as she gets out on her assignment, she's wracked with self-doubt and declares that she's not ready, so once again, she's NOT competent.
I swear, this sort of back-and-forth thing goes on for the ENTIRE film, to the point of annoyance. Can't anything stay defined for more than 5 minutes without any backtracking? Here's a typical conversation between Susan, the competent/incompetent lead character, and Rick Ford, the more experienced (yet somehow also more accident-prone) rogue spy working the same case. Susan: "This is my case, get out of here, you're going to screw it up." Rick: "No, this is MY case, get out of here, you're going to screw it up." Susan: "No, this is MY case, get out of here, you're going to screw it up!" And so on, and so on. Every point gets argued, every little defining moment gets challenged, every fact revealed is dispelled later on - in the end I couldn't put my finger on anything that didn't add up to sheer nonsense.
There's a character who's an Italian agent, and acts in a very stereotypical Italian way, and then at the end he suddenly has an English accent, OK, so he was an English agent under cover, that's honestly a bit clever, I thought. No, wait, he was only kidding, he was just pretending to be an English agent pretending to be an Italian agent. God, this was more confusing than the gender-bending in "Victor/Victoria", with a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman.
Other variations on this abound, with more reversals leading to story problems. First Susan wants to kill the female villain, then she's told to stay away from her, so naturally she goes looking for her. Then when she finds her, her first instinct is to kill her, but she sees someone trying to poison her, so this leads to her alerting her and saving her life. Huh? That doesn't logically follow. Sure, it leads to gaining her trust and this turns out to be a positive move, but she didn't know that at the time. Plus, like everything else in this film, it's a plotline that only lasts for a few minutes before the rules all change again anyway.
Plus, and I wasn't going to go there, but my hand is forced - is she shy or is she bold? Is she smart or is she inexperienced? Is she athletic or is she overweight? She simply can't be all of these things at once, and a story shouldn't require a character to try and cover so many bases.
In the midst of it all, there are also a few jokes that go absolutely nowhere. For some reason, the CIA headquarters is infested with mice, and then bats. To what end? First off, I don't believe that a high-tech organization like the CIA would not have any budget to keep themselves vermin-free, and then assuming that there was some kind of infestation, why wouldn't they deal with this problem quickly and efficiently? Ok, maybe it's funny to someone to see some bats flying around (not to me) but even as a joke, it's a joke without a punchline or a payoff. So there are bats in CIA headquarters, so what?
It seemed like the film was trying to have it both ways, to have genuine action sequences AND also be taken as a comedy. Nope, you can't have your cake and eat it too. You've got to either go full parody, like "Austin Powers", or else play it straight. Oh, and NITPICK POINT, I know you're trying to make fun of a Bond film, but that doesn't make it OK to cast so many British people as CIA agents. Sure, it's possible that the CIA might recruit some Brits, but I'd imagine most U.S. spies would speak like Americans.
Well, I had some REAL spy/action films about a week ago, with the "Olympus Has Fallen" films, and more are on the way this month, after a few more comedies.
Also starring Jude Law (last seen in "Anna Karenina"), Jason Statham (last seen in "The Expendables 3"), Allison Janney (also carrying over from "Tammy"), Rose Byrne (last seen in "28 Weeks Later"), Bobby Cannavale (last seen in "The Night Listener"), Peter Serafinowicz, Michael McDonald, Morena Baccarin, Miranda Hart, Will Yun Lee (last seen in "The Wolverine"), Julian Miller, Nargis Fakhri, with cameos from Ben Falcone (also carrying over from "Tammy"), 50 Cent (last seen in "Escape Plan").
RATING: 5 out of 10 phony passports
Year 8, Day 75 - 3/15/16 - Movie #2,276
BEFORE: I took the Sunday newspaper with me on our trip, so I could go through the TV listings for the week, and that's when I saw that TCM had quite a few Jerry Lewis films (some with Dean Martin, some without) scheduled for tonight and tomorrow night, because Mr. Lewis is turning 90, and they're always one to jump on an occasion like that. I got home in time to schedule no fewer than 8 films, which killed me on some level because I'm trying hard to keep the size of the watchlist under control, but I figured it had to be done. A movie with Dean Martin is the last film in a Burt Reynolds-to-Raquel Welch chain, and if I add some Martin and/or Lewis films, I figured I can keep that chain going a little longer.
BUT, for some reason some of the movies didn't record, because the channel was out for a few hours, so I missed part of "Artists & Models" and "At War With the Army", and all of "You're Never Too Young". So I'm only adding 5 films to the list, not 8, and in a way I've learned to note that these things often happen for a reason. Assuming the recording goes well tonight, I'm adding "The Caddy", "The Stooge", "The Bellboy", "Three on a Couch" and "Which Way to the Front?" and instead of zooming up to 145, my watchlist only rose to 142 - I'll be back down to 140 in just a few days.
Gary Cole carries over from "A Very Brady Sequel" as I kick off a Melissa McCarthy chain.
THE PLOT: After losing her job and learning that her husband has been unfaithful, a woman hits the road with her profane, hard-drinking grandmother.
AFTER: I didn't really seek out this film for the collection, it's one of those I got just to fill a DVD with another film on it. Mostly I find films in pairs, unless they're over three hours, in which case they get their own DVD. But this was a filler to go with the film I'm watching in two days.
And it's not a terrible film, just something of a questionable one - like, why focus on this character, who's not heroic in any way, who doesn't have her life together, someone who's rude and clueless and someone you wouldn't really want to spend time with in the real world? I guess that's the point, it's not a typical film about a perfect, glamorous person in a tough situation, it's someone more like the lead character in a film like "Bad Santa", someone in a tough situation that's probably of their own doing, someone who needs to be motivated to turn things around and get themselves straightened out.
You know, become an adult. But if that character has acted childishly in the past, and still tends to do, growing up isn't going to be easy. Maybe they've been coasting for some time, and they're not used to doing the hard work necessary to improve things. And that could lead someone to think that if they need money quickly, robbing the fast-food restaurant where they used to work is an idea that makes sense, at least in the heat of the moment.
Her grandmother is essentially the same character, only older. She just wants to get drunk and have sex in the parking lot while they're on their way to Niagara Falls. And she's left on the trip without any of her required medications - that can't be good. You'd expect that by the time someone got to be a senior citizen, that they'd have had time to work out little things like taking responsibility for things, or taking care of their health (because those who don't take care of themselves don't always get to BE senior citizens...)
Like, tomorrow I have to get some dental surgery, a root canal and the filling of a huge cavity - I realize it has to happen, and that not seeing a dentist for 12 years probably made the problem much worse, but being an adult means that I have to get this taken care of. And I can say this about "Tammy", given the choice between watching this again and dental surgery, I'd probably take watching this again. Too bad I don't have that choice, I have to get the root canal.
But at least there's a bit of a valuable lesson in the film, if you can stick with it through all the bad behavior.
Also starring Melissa McCarthy (last seen in "The Life of David Gale"), Susan Sarandon (last seen in "The Great Waldo Pepper"), Kathy Bates (last seen in "Dragonfly"), Allison Janney (last seen in "Get on Up"), Dan Aykroyd (last seen in "She's Having a Baby"), Toni Collette (last seen in "Emma"), Mark Duplass (last seen in "Safety Not Guaranteed"), Nat Faxon (last seen in "Sex Tape"), Sandra Oh (last seen in "The Night Listener"), Ben Falcone (last seen in "Bad Words"), Sarah Baker, Mia Rose Frampton.
RATING: 4 out of 10 hamburger buns
Year 8, Day 74 - 3/14/16 - Movie #2,275
BEFORE: I'm watching the 2nd Brady reboot movie under less-than-ideal conditions, on my wife's laptop from a hotel room in a casino in Connecticut (I did enough free advertising for the casino by tweeting about our activities, so no more...). We drove up on Sunday, hit the outlet stores, and then treated ourselves to dinner at one of the on-site steakhouses. Monday after breakfast we drove down to Mystic, CT, where we vacationed about 8 years ago for almost a week, but this was just a quick visit to the old-timey village of shops, plus a modern bookstore and a couple slices at Mystic Pizza. Then back up to the casino for a nap, followed by an evening of playing the slots, dinner at the buffet and then a few frames of bowling in possibly the most elegant bowling alley I've ever seen.
A technical glitch on the laptop prevented me from watching two movies, and I'm now not a day ahead, meaning I had to watch Monday's movie on Monday night, and I'll have to watch Tuesday's movie on Tuesday night, where I'd much prefer to watch films after midnight, and use Tuesday to get a jump on Wednesday's movie. Oh well, I was running a movie ahead of schedule anyway, so after St. Patrick's Day if I want to take a day off, I'll still be on track.
Most of the cast of last night's film carries over for the sequel, and considering I didn't really care for the first Brady film, I'm guessing that the method of watching the film won't matter very much, I just want to get this off the list and move on to the next part of the chain.
THE PLOT: A man claiming to be Carol Brady's long-lost first husband, Roy Martin, shows up at the suburban Brady residence one evening. An impostor, the man is actually determined to steal the Bradys' familiar horse statue, a $20-million ancient Asian artifact.
AFTER: Ugh, I don't know where to start in picking this one apart, it's bad on so many levels. More of that same (intentionally?) bad acting from last night, particularly in the characters of Marcia and Jan. Marcia's more cruel than ever to her sisters, plus she scrunched up her face way too much, and she had a weird affect to her voice, pronouncing the word "school" like "skue-well" - what the heck was that? Jan's character stopped listening to the voices in her head, but her lines were still delivered like she was in a state of constant shock, like with no emotion at all, and she somehow believed that creating a fake boyfriend would make her more popular. After sending herself flowers and setting up fake phone calls from her mystery man, this led to her making out with a mannequin in a coffee shop, as if that would fool anyone - it just led the customers to think she was some kind of insane performance artist.
Here's the think about humor, to be effective, it has to come from someplace real - it has to start with a scenario that could genuinely happen ("A priest, a minister and a rabbi walk into a bar") and then it needs to go in an unusual angle and defy your expectations ("and the bartender says, 'What is this, some kind of joke?'"). If the set-up is impossible, the joke can not and should not proceed from there. A family that still acts like it's the 1970's just isn't possible, so all of the humor that develops from there is suspect. When Mike Brady doesn't know what cable TV is, or Carol Brady gets duped by a man pretending to be her first husband, despite the fact that he's too tall and looks and sounds nothing like that man, it defies all rational logic, and it negates all of the humor that develops from there.
I get that once again, they want to revisit some of the greater plotlines from the original series, so we're shown Greg and Marcia fighting over who gets to live in the attic (which must be in another dimension, since again, it's a two-story house at best), the kids having a contest to build a house of cards, Bobby playing amateur detective and the whole family going on a trip to Hawaii. But the new elements that link those things together are so far-fetched and out of step with the original show, that it amounts to virtual nonsense. Like the kids doing a musical number on the plane, with no background band in sight, or Alice tripping out on magic mushrooms (even though that was a sneaky way to get an animated psychedelic 70's sequence in there).
Hey, wait, maybe drugs are the answer. Maybe Mike and Carol Brady did so many drugs in the 1970's (when they were married to other people, not to each other) that their kids were born with strange birth defects, which make them stop aging after a certain point, and makes them just as clueless as their parents about what year it is, or what gay people are, or what current fashions look like. Because otherwise, wouldn't Marcia eventually see that she's got a stack of yearbooks from attending high school as a junior 15 times, and she never gets to be a senior? Wouldn't Bobby and Cindy get sick of constantly being 10 years old, like that vampire Kirsten Dunst played in "Interview With a Vampire"?
The only two saving graces here are: Gary Cole's pitch-perfect impression of Robert Reed as Mike Brady (right down to the seemingly endless moral lessons that seem to go around in circles) and acknowledging that Greg and Marcia were totally hot for each other, and that allowing teens to share a bathroom is a really bad idea, especially if they're step-children of no blood relation. (Legally, they could have sex and get married, right?)
NITPICK POINT: The man pretending to be Carol's first husband is really after an ancient relic that's been in the Brady's living room for years, and there's an implication that years ago, he sabotaged a boat to get rid of the real Roy Martin, and that boat was the S.S. Minnow, which would make Roy Martin the "Professor" who was stuck on an island with Gilligan and the Skipper. Nice try, but any trivia buff knows that the Professor's real name was Roy Hinkley, not Roy Martin. This is an obvious nod to the fact that Sherwood Schwartz created both TV shows, "The Brady Bunch" and "Gilligan's Island", but you can't just change facts like this when it suits your spoof plot.
There apparently was another sequel, "The Brady Bunch in the White House", where Mike Brady became U.S. President with his wife as his V.P., but I just don't feel the need to track that one down.
Starring Shelley Long, Gary Cole, Christine Taylor, Christopher Daniel Barnes, Paul Sutera, Jennifer Elise Cox, Jesse Lee Soffer, Olivia Hack, Henriette Mantel, Steven Gilborn, RuPaul (all carrying over from "The Brady Bunch Movie"), Tim Matheson (last seen in "The Story of Us"), John Hillerman, with cameos from Richard Belzer (last seen in "The Big Picture"), David Spade (last seen in "Grown Ups 2"), Zsa Zsa Gabor (last seen in "Touch of Evil"), Rosie O'Donnell (last seen in "Another Stakeout"), Barbara Eden.
RATING: 2 out of 10 Hawaiian leis
Year 8, Day 73 - 3/13/16 - Movie #2,274
BEFORE: After 7 years and 2 months, I'm sort of at the point where there are just two types of movies left on the watchlist - the first type is recent films, like from 2013-2015, which make up over a third of the list, and the second is films that I just haven't gotten around to, which is often intentional, like with tonight's film. I'm not a fan of the old TV show, though I did watch it when I was a kid, and based on what I know about the film, it's probably going to drive me buggy. So I held off as long as I could, but it turns out that I can really use the film as a link to get me to the next set of films from the last couple of years. So here goes, with Michael McKean carrying over from "The Big Picture".
After this, I'm taking off for a few days on a road trip, but I still want to stay up on films, so I'll try to watch one film while away, and another as soon as I get back. I'd stay up late and watch both "Brady" films before leaving, but wouldn't you know it, it's the weekend we start Daylight Savings Time, so I'm going to lose an hour's sleep - if I watch both films, I'll never wake up tomorrow in time to leave for Connecticut.
THE PLOT: The original '70s T.V. family is now placed in the 1990s, where they're even more square and out of place than ever.
AFTER: While my BFF Andy was in town, we took some time to record a podcast, and we talked about a lot of geek stuff - the new "Star Wars" film, for example, but also the Marvel Comics Universe in its post-"Secret Wars" state, and I think some of that conversation is relevant to understanding this "Brady Bunch" movie. If you're in charge of a franchise, whether that's in movie or TV or comic-book form, there's an interest in keeping that franchise going, sometimes re-tooling or tweaking it for a new generation of fans. They've done it for "Star Trek", "Battlestar: Galactica", and Disney does it every few years by thinking of a new spin to put on various fairy tales. Everything seems to come around again eventually, even the stuff we don't really want to see, like Smurfs and those damn Chipmunks, because somebody who owns the franchise wants to squeeze some more cash out of it while entertaining America, ideally.
So how can I fault the makers of "The Brady Bunch Movie" for doing in 1995, essentially, the same thing as J.J. Abrams did with "Star Wars" last year? Namely, putting together a bunch of elements from the stories that had gone before, putting a new spin on them, and repackaging them in a way designed to please the old fans, and interest some new ones as well. Hell, Marvel just shook up their whole universe, scrambled the superhero teams around a bit, destroyed the whole universe and put it back together, just like DC Comics had done three or four years before. Which leads to a lot of questions about the comics I'm now reading - like, do these characters remember the universe being destroyed? The adventures that were depicted before, did those still happen, or is it a new universe with new rules, and the past stories are not to be remembered or mentioned?
The Bradys here seem to be stuck in the 1970's, but the world around them is clearly the 1990's - there's grunge music and high-school lesbians, shady real-estate deals and property tax liens, not to mention a transvestite school counselor and horny teachers, neighbors and teens. But the family members (and Alice) are all oblivious to the present, their speech, clothing and attitudes all scream the floral, pastel 70's - so what am I supposed to make of that? It's done for comedy's sake, of course, but is there supposed to be some kind of time-suspension bubble around their house? Are they just out of step, or have they all been living in the same house for two decades without getting older or realizing that they're out of sync with the world? The neighbors and other kids at school all think the Bradys are weird, but doesn't anyone notice that they're not aging, and the kids aren't moving forward and are repeating the same grades, year after year?
OK, maybe the family is a bunch of genetic mutants that doesn't age, but that doesn't explain Alice, she's not related! Or is this some kind of bizarre family cult, based on the meaningless platitudes and life lessons of Mike Brady? Or, since we see key events from the TV show repeated - like Marcia being hit with the football, or Peter's voice changing, they must be in some kind of time-loop, doomed to repeat the same events over and over, with no memory of what has gone before, just those little life-lesson mantras to guide them through life, like the tattoos seen in the film "Memento". Damn, I don't know which theory is correct, maybe I'm overthinking the whole thing, but these are the problems and situations that concern me. I can't just turn off my brain and not worry about the Bradys, who are apparently stuck in this time-warp - wait, Mike Brady built the house, maybe it's some kind of TARDIS.
(Don't laugh, I could be on to something. If you remember the exterior shot they used to show of the Brady house on the old series, it doesn't match up with the interior, not at all. I tried to build it once in a Sims game, and realized there's just no correlation between the inside and outside. Plus the living room is, like, two stories high, and the upstairs bedrooms are over nothing, unless Alice had a 5-room suite. Plus, in the later years, Greg had the attic bedroom in a two-story house, how is that even possible? Try to figure out where the Bradys' front door is in relation to the kitchen, and you could go insane - the floor plan ends up looking like the architect was M.C. Escher, not Mike Brady...)
They even make a joke in the movie about how there are 9 people living there, and just one bathroom. With no toilet, so now I'm back to the genetic mutants theory. These are not real people with real human bodily functions, so maybe they're robots or clones or synthetic humans, that would also explain why they all have such a tough time understanding basic human relationships, especially sex (except for Mike and Carol, that is). Oh, wait, there are jokes here about Alice and Sam, who comes over for a weekly "meat delivery". Right.
Like "The Big Picture", this film is nothing but self-referential. There's no point where the audience is unaware that they're watching a movie, and this effect is compounded by the (let's say intentionally) bad acting. I mean, really bad. But if you push the bad acting far enough it can be over-the-top funny, like it was in "Airplane". I get the drift, but it's just not my thing. Of course the world changed a lot in two decades, and sometimes the 1970's and the 1990's feel like there's a century's worth of difference between them. But still, I'm left wondering - are these Bradys aware at all that they're characters stuck in a time-warp? And if not, then what the heck is wrong with them? It feels like some kind of "Pleasantville" scenario, filtered through "The Twilight Zone".
Also starring Shelley Long (last seen in "Hello Again"), Gary Cole (last seen in "One Hour Photo"), Christine Taylor (last seen in "The Craft"), Christopher Daniel Barnes (last heard in "The Little Mermaid"), Jennifer Elise Cox, Paul Sutera, Olivia Hack, Jesse Lee Soffer, Henriette Mantel, David Graf, Jean Smart (last seen in "The Odd Couple II"), Shane Conrad, Alanna Ubach, Marissa Ribisi (last seen in "True Crime"), Steven Gilborn (last seen in "He Said, She Said"), with cameos from Florence Henderson, Barry Williams, Ann B. Davis, Christopher Knight, David Leisure (last seen in "10 Things I Hate About You"), James Avery, David Proval (last seen in "Four Rooms"), RuPaul (last seen in "EdTV"), Davy Jones.
RATING: 3 out of 10 pounds of ground round
