Thirteen

Year 12, Day 252 - 9/8/20 - Movie #3,648

BEFORE: Happy belated birthday to Evan Rachel Wood, born on September 7, 1987.  That was Labor Day this year, and yesterday's film fit in more with that theme, but since I started watching this one before midnight on 9/7, I'm counting that as a birthday salute.

This is also BACK TO SCHOOL film #2, following "The New Guy", which was a film about a teen boy acting tough to survive high school - for the sake of balance, this one's about a teen girl acting out to make friends in high school.  One's a comedy and one's a drama, but still, things are still sort of happening in twos like they did in August.  I've had "Thirteen" on my list for quite some time, for a while I was going to link to it via "Swing Shift", but that film then got moved into the romance chain in February last year.  Then I tried to link to it via the animated film "Ferdinand", via Jeremy Sisto, but then that film got dropped last year and re-scheduled into 2020.  All of this didn't help me get to "Thirteen", so this is at least the third attempt to schedule it, as it didn't fit into last September's schedule either.  Finally, FINALLY I'm crossing off this film today, no matter what.

Holly Hunter carries over from "Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her".

THE PLOT: A thirteen-year-old girl's relationship with her mother is put to the test as she discovers drugs, sex and petty crime in the company of her cool but troubled new best friend.

AFTER: I think the first time I saw Evan Rachel Wood in a movie, she was just nine or ten, the film was "Digging to China", which I think I saw at the Sundance Festival in January 1998.  Then I don't think I saw her in anything else until I watched "Across the Universe" in 2007, that movie that made actors sing a bunch of Beatles songs, forcing a very convoluted plot.  Sometime after that I watched "The Missing", which she filmed at the age of 15 or 16, and then "The Wrestler", which came five years after that - and I didn't really make the connection back to that 10-year old girl from "Digging to China".  So by the time she became super-famous for starring in the reboot series "Westworld" in 2016, I was still saying, "Who the hell is that?" even though I'd seen her in a respectable number of films, but somehow she was always under my radar.

Clearly I missed something somewhere, maybe it was those awkward teen years - but after watching "Thirteen", maybe I got the better part of that deal.  I should have quit while I was ahead, because there are parts of this film that were just painful for me to watch, and I'm not just talking about the tongue-piercing scene.  Sure, everybody goes through some kind of rebellious phase when they're a teenager, who doesn't want to misbehave for fun every now and again.  It's become practically a rite of passage for teens to drink a little, smoke a little, try all sorts of little chemical experiments and also sexual ones, part of becoming an adult is to figure out where one's own limits are.  But this film really piles them on to demonstrate an extreme example of a teen girl acting up - or is it acting out?

Which really interferes with me being able to label this as a "back to school" film - OK, sure, there are some scenes set in a high school classroom, but there's very little attention paid here to doing homework, taking exams, or even taking notes.  Last week I pointed out after watching "The Wilde Wedding" that if that film had depicted a wedding in which everyone showed up, behaved and everything went smoothly, that would have been very boring indeed.  By the same token, I'll admit that if Tracy just went to class, completed all of her assignments, followed all the rules and generally tried her best to fit in but also not draw too much attention to herself, yeah, that's also a very boring film.  Some things HAVE to go wrong in her life, or she's got to get into some kind of trouble along the way, or her teenage experience would be, well, just as boring as mine was - and you don't see anybody making any films about my so-called high school life.

Instead she's an extreme example of bad behavior, in order to become friends with Evie, the popular girl, she starts shoplifting and also stealing a purse or two, then once they're besties there are drugs smoked, snorted and inhaled, from there it's on to kissing guys, making out with guys (separately and then together) and then making out with each other.  In a few weeks Evie's been spending so much time at Tracy's house that they're practically roommates, and Evie keeps selling sob stories about how her mother's not really her mother but just her legal guardian, and her mom's boyfriend likes to beat her, so can't she just stay over a little longer?  For extra messed-up points Tracy is also seen cutting herself, and that's a whole different ball of wax from what little I know about it, but hey, at least it prepares her for all the piercings that are in her future.

Tracy's a child of divorce, and her father is constantly too busy to visit, let alone be a guiding influence.  Meanwhile her mother works as a freelance hairdresser just to make ends meet, and also has a live-in boyfriend, who seems OK but is probably another bad influence in some way.  I don't think any of this explains or excuses Tracy's bad behavior, but I think somehow we're supposed to draw the conclusion that it's all connected somehow.  Is Tracy acting up to get noticed, or just taking advantage of the lack of discipline coming from her parents?  Those are kind of two different things, and sometimes it's hard to tell if the parental neglect causes the child's bad behavior, or if it's the other way around - or maybe it's a cycle once the ball gets rolling, who can say?

For that matter, did Evie completely drag Tracy into the world of bad behavior, or did Tracy jump into it herself?  Which one influenced the other, or are they both co-conspirators?  And how far will each girl go to misbehave and then try to cover it up when their mothers start to notice?  Evie's mother is a model and actress who's never around, so we're left to conclude that her method of "hands off" parenting is the worse of the two options, but still she can't believe that her daughter is the "bad one", she's convinced it must have been Tracy corrupting Evie, not the other way around.  Another cycle of bad behavior reinforcing itself, I suspect.

In all of this, it's the school work that gets neglected the most - which I think screenwriters are eager to abandon, even in films about good students.  Classes are boring, in life and in movies, so it's often the first thing thrown out the window in school-based films like "Booksmart", "Good Boys" and "Superbad".  You know what's more fun than seeing kids going to class?  Watching kids go to parties, or trying to get to parties.  Maybe if some screenwriter had allowed Tracy to pay more attention in class, or give her some time to focus on her homework, then she wouldn't have to repeat seventh grade.  Just saying.

Also, there's no real solution offered here to the problem of Tracy's juvenile delinquency.  The film ends after Tracy's mom blames Evie and Evie's mom blames Tracy for the situation, the relationship between the two girls is shattered, and Tracy and her mother are seen motionless together on a bed for a long period of time.  Umm, that's not a resolution of any kind - you can't just raise a bunch of  questions and not answer them - what's in the cards for Tracy?  Can she straighten up and fly right, or has she been forever tainted by her experiences with sex and drugs?  Will she learn anything in her second try at seventh grade, or ever do any homework at all?  How much therapy is there in her future?  A dream sequence of her on a playground isn't really an answer.

The director, Catherine Hardwicke, based Tracy on the real-life experiences of the actress who played Evie, as she was in a long-term relationship with Nikki Reed's father.  And the two actresses playing 13-year-olds were really 15 or 16, because otherwise some scenes might have been illegal.  Then that same director went on to direct "Twilight" (which I'm going to watch in early October) with two of the actresses from this film in it.  But none of that affects my score for the film, which is based mostly on how much I enjoyed it - but it's not really a film meant to be enjoyed, is it?  It's more of a cautionary tale, or for someone like me, a confirmation of my life choices to not have children who would only grow up to become problematic teenagers.

Also starring Evan Rachel Wood (last heard in "Frozen II"), Jeremy Sisto (ditto), Nikki Reed, Brady Corbet (last seen in "While We're Young"), Deborah Kara Unger (last seen in "White Noise"), Kip Pardue (last seen in "Remember the Titans"), Sarah Clarke (last seen in "Happy Endings"), D.W. Moffett (last seen in "Pacific Heights"), Vanessa Hudgens (last seen in "Spring Breakers"), Jenicka Carey, Ulysses Estrada, Sarah Blakly-Cartwright, Jasmine Di Angelo, Tessa Ludwick, Cynthia Ettinger (last seen in "Frailty"), Charles Duckworth, Jamison Yang (last seen in "The Ugly Truth"), Yasmine Delawari (last seen in "Mr. Brooks").

RATING: 3 out of 10 trips to the mall

Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her

Year 12, Day 251 - 9/7/20 - Movie #3,647

BEFORE: I saved this one for Labor Day, because it seems to be some kind of anthology of women's stories, and the characters have a variety of professions - doctor, bank manager, police detective - I don't want to read too much of the plot before watching the film, obviously.  This may be a tenuous link to the spirit of the holiday, but I can't be certain until I watch it.  Anyway, it was enough for me to insert two skip days into last week, which ultimately is going to make it easier for me to spread my films out across the month, as I'd prefer to not have a full week at the end of the month where I'm not watching any movies, and thus feel like I'm not making progress.  I also can't block out October yet, even though New York Comic Con got cancelled, I still don't know if we'll be able to go on any kind of vacation, like we have in October for the last several years.  The immediate goal is to just stay focused, spread out my movies and try to get through September as best as I can.

Either way, good or bad, this film's been taking up space on my DVR since June of last year, so it will be a relief to watch it and clear a little bit of room.  Glenn Close carries over from "The Wilde Wedding" for the last time in this chain, and I think for the year.

THE PLOT: Five California women struggle with personal problems as their own paths unwind in unexpected ways.

AFTER: As an anthology of sorts, this could be viewed as five short films that are linked together, they're set in the same storytelling universe, and I believe there are five or so characters that appear in two segments each, so in theory I should be all over this, in a way it's reminiscent of my movie chains, where every day one actor or actress carries over from the last film, and then a different one may carry over to the next.  Something like five days of movie-viewing for me, compressed into under two hours!  So I should support this storytelling style - but then since the five shorts are being presented together, the question then becomes - do the five stories flow together well, is there a point to telling these five stories in a row, does the total equal something greater than the sum of its parts?

There must be other movies that follow this format, but I haven't encountered very many - the only one that leaps to mind is "Pulp Fiction", which is kind of in its own league, and is one of the few films that I'll allow to bend time and space for the purposes of crafting a tale.  Somehow that film circles back on itself, it ends in a place and time shortly after where it started, and the real final scene is somewhere in the middle, if you're really interested enough to parse out the correct chronology through the actions of, and the things that happen to, John Travolta's character.  A pretzel-shaped timeline that managed to present the information in the most satisfying way, it seems, and somewhere around your 7th or 8th viewing of the film I found I could see the way it all is supposed to come together.

I suspect that it might also take 7 or 8 viewings of "Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her" in order to fully unlock all of its secrets and put every little thing properly in its place.  The clues are all there, it seems, and I managed to miss quite a few of them.  The film opens with the discovery of a suicide victim, and the detective later discusses some aspects of the case with her blind sister, and the sister's insights send her back to look for more clues at the crime scene, and then those clues spark more theories about this woman, whose name is Carmen.  Normally I'm against spoilers, but if you haven't seen this film, what I'm about to tell you will be helpful the first time you watch this.  Carmen appears in each of the five segments, somewhere in the background.  If you know to look for her, this might make things easier - and this tells us something about the timeline, if you're interested in putting the segments into chronological order.  The first part of the film, when Carmen's body is discovered, is therefore next-to-last, and a later segment where her autopsy is performed would then be the last one to occur.  It's possible that her appearances in the film, viewed as a whole, could confirm the theories put forth over why came to L.A. and why she killed herself - but since I wasn't looking for this evidence, I didn't notice it.  But maybe it's something of an "Easter Egg Hunt" that you could look for during your 4th or 5th viewing of the film - I don't have that kind of time, and honestly I'd rather watch "Pulp Fiction" again.

SPOILER ALERT for the rest of this post, because it's impossible to discuss the film further without giving away key elements of the plot.  If you haven't seen this film, but intend to in the future, please turn back now.

The first main segment concerns a female doctor who is caring for her elderly mother, while also dealing with her own relationship problems resulting from dating other doctors.  She passes the time in various ways, which include getting a tarot card reading from a psychic that makes house calls, and from what we're told (which, honestly, isn't much) the reading appears to be spot-on.  Well, I guess it is, since we're not given much information to contradict it.  The second segment concerns a bank manager, who is dating a married man and then learns she has become pregnant, after scheduling abortion for the next day, she happens upon a co-worker from the bank in a bar and has a one-night stand with him.  She also interacts with a homeless woman in the bank parking lot while on her smoke breaks, and the homeless woman sort of fulfills the same function as the psychic did in the first segment, namely accidentally giving insight into her character and mental state.  The doctor from the first segment re-appears as the bank manager's abortionist, the first crossover between the stories, but certainly not the last.

In the third segment, a divorced mother writes children's books and is focused on her 15-year old son, when a little person (they say "dwarf" in the film, but this was made in 2000 and I'm not sure the term is still acceptable) moves in across the street.  She sees him at the grocery store and offers him a ride home, and after learning his back-story, she seems to be considering him as a potential love interest.  The fourth segment brings back the psychic from the first segment, and details her home life, caring for her terminally ill girlfriend.  The final segment sort of wraps things up, picking up the thread of the detective with the blind sister investigating Carmen's suicide.  In doing her case-work, she interviews someone at a hospital, who turns out to be the L.P. from the third segment - and the blind sister goes on some dates with the bank employee who had a fling with the bank manager in the second segment.  Finally a theory is proposed over the timeline of the deceased woman, and a short montage gives us a little update on all of the central characters, like a little capper or a coda for each one.

In the wrong hands, this anthology could have been even more confusing.  If somebody like Paul Thomas Anderson or Robert Altman had turned this into a "Magnolia" or "Short Cuts"-like film, the temptation was probably there to cross-cut between all five segments, and that would have been a mistake.  The Tarantino approach of bending time to give each segment room to breathe was, I believe, the correct choice.  But it's an interesting topic for debate - were different editing techniques tried for this and rejected, or was this the only framing method that was considered?  What, if anything, was the common theme across all the segments - loneliness?  A desire to connect with others?  Sacrifice?  The fact that women are complex, complicated creatures that resist all efforts to figure them out?  (OK, maybe I'm projecting on that last one.)  Or are female lives so complicated that we shouldn't even try to quantify these stories in such basic, commonplace terms?

There was a time, not that long ago, when there were no female doctors, no female police detectives, no female bank managers.  I know that we still haven't reached a point of equality in the workplace, not even with how much women are paid when compared to men, but progress has been made.  Once upon a time women could become nurses, but not doctors, it's hard to believe.  I rewatched that "RBG" documentary while taping it last week and editing out the ads, and Justice Bader-Ginsburg made a whole career out of striking down the laws that were keeping women from applying for the same jobs as men, the same college courses, and receiving the same benefits along the way.   Even when I was working at a movie theater in the early 1990's, the managers would only hire males as ushers and females to work at the concession stand.  I personally didn't feel like suing the theater over this point, but I could have.

Perhaps I'm overthinking things.  The film's title comes from something that's said about the suicide victim - what the detective and the coroner have to do is tell something about the woman just by looking at her (and, umm, maybe also there's the toxicology report) and it's also what we in the audience have to do, we have to determine some things just by looking at these characters.  Maybe that's all that's required here, and maybe in the end that should be enough.  But is it?  I'm not sure.

Oddly, this was made as a theatrical film that was eligible for the Emmys - Holly Hunter was nominated for an Emmy for this back in 2000.  Did it not have a theatrical release in the U.S.?  After playing at the Sundance Festival in 1999, it appears to have gone straight to Showtime, thus qualifying it for the Emmys, and not the Oscars.  I'm thinking there's a story there, perhaps it's just as simple as some male film executives not thinking there was an audience for a female-centric film.  It made some money in theatrical release overseas, but there's zero U.S. box office.  Well, if you don't put a film in the theaters, then the audiences can't go out and see it, and this then becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, doesn't it?

Also starring Cameron Diaz (last seen in "The Box"), Calista Flockhart (last seen in "A Midsummer Night's Dream"), Kathy Baker (last seen in "The Ballad of Lefty Brown"), Amy Brenneman (last seen in "City of Angels"), Valeria Golino (last seen in "Frida"), Holly Hunter (last seen in "Trespassing Bergman"), Matt Craven (last seen in "Dragonfly"), Gregory Hines (last seen in "The Muppets Take Manhattan"), Miguel Sandoval (last seen in "Sid and Nancy"), Noah Fleiss (last seen in "Brick"), Danny Woodburn (last seen in "The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas"), Penelope Allen (last seen in "The Thin Red Line"), Roma Maffia (last seen in "Holes"), Mika Boorem (last seen in "Riding in Cars with Boys"), Irma St. Paule, Juanita Jennings, Jacob Avnet, Elpidia Carrillo.

RATING: 5 out of 10 parking meters

The Wilde Wedding

Year 12, Day 250 - 9/6/20 - Movie #3,646

BEFORE: Well, if I moved yesterday's film (and tomorrow's) out of next year's romance chain into September, then I might as well take this one with it, too - if I leave it in the romance category it doesn't connect to much there, just one film, and two connections are the minimum required.  This one feels like the most romance-heavy film of the three, so I'm not totally sold on the idea of moving it, because there's always the chance that another film will turn up to make the connection on the other side, so what to do?

I did a quick pass through the (very rough) plan for next February, after removing these three films and three others that I excised in order to make my September connections - thankfully I'd already highlighted any actors and actresses that appear more than once in bright green, so I'd know all the other possible options for connections, other than the ones I was already using.  I can't be sure just yet, because it's still so super early, but it seems like I still have plenty of options - removing these six films from the mix could actually make next February's chain tighter and more focused - and maybe less reliant on finding new films to bridge the gaps.  It's an odd concept, like if you knocked out a couple of bricks from a wall and somehow made the wall stronger in the process - but I've seen this happen before with my horror chains.  Just a week or so ago I moved "Replicas" to October and used it (along with "Birds of Prey" and "Doctor Sleep") to bridge a gap that otherwise would have required renting 3 films from iTunes that I wasn't crazy about, I think moving these three Glenn Close films from February to September is along those same lines.

Now, next question, because I don't HAVE to move this one with the other two, I could drop this one and the gap would close up around it, and that would free up one more slot for 2020 - so is there any film that's begging to be added, with an actor that I'm already using as a link, so it could be added in right between them?  Again, a quick search through my cast lists of the actors I'm going to use as links - and nope, nothing seems like an obvious omission, so I'm going to stick with the plan and proceed.  Just for fun, here are my links for the rest of September - after Glenn Close comes Holly Hunter, Vanessa Hudgens, Will Smith, Karen Gillan, Jimmy Tatro, Allison Janney, Tammy Blanchard AND Maddie Corman, Tom Hanks, Karen Gillan (again), Dan Stevens, Will Ferrell, Joe Manganiello, and Chris Hemsworth.  If you're ambitious enough to search the IMDB, you might even figure out my September schedule - but why would you want to?

Glenn Close carries over, for the next-to-last time this year, from "The Wife".

THE PLOT: A retired film star's wedding to her fourth husband brings chaos when their families (and her ex-husband) show up for the festivities.

AFTER: I think I made the right call by moving this one out of February - it's not really about romance, well it is and it isn't, I'll get more into that in a bit.  It's really about a crazy family, or two crazy families, and a bunch of shenanigans before a wedding.  There's relationship-y stuff, but mostly between exes, which would sort of grandfather it in under "relationship" issues, but I think the focus here is on comedy, not some kind of intent to examine the nature of relationships, or instructions on how to maintain proper co-parenting relationships with ex-partners.  Plus, as a bonus, this is the third film appearance this year for John Malkovich, Patrick Stewart and Minnie Driver, so they'll all make my year-end countdown now.  Another little indicator that maybe I'm on the right track, if there even is such a thing.

But there seems to be a huge divide here between those top stars and, well, the rest of the actors.  I feel like I can tell you EXACTLY how many of these actors got their own trailer, and, well, it's four.  The other actors feel like they're straight out of central casting, maybe one or two exhibit that "Hey, it's THAT guy" effect, but mostly I've never heard of these actors, and for me, that's saying something.  I think there's one actress that I've seen 3 or 4 times, but I mainly know her because my boss follows her mother on Facebook, and she posts something every time her daughter is in a new film, even if it's a tiny role.  She means well, but it's also a bit much.

The other problem, and this is sort of tangential to the last one, is that there are WAY too many characters here.  Sometimes more is not more, more is just too much - somebody wanted to show how crazy these two families are, and logically more characters means more craziness, only comedy is not always logical.  If there are two many characters it can be hard to keep them all straight - if they were all actors I was familiar with it might be a bit easier, but that's not the case.  So we have the lead character, her ex-husband and her prospective husband.  She's got three sons with the first husband, and two of those sons have daughters, one of those daughters brings a friend (girlfriend?) and then there's another kid on that side, but I can't even tell who his father is, it's unclear.  Then one son's ex-wife shows up (the mother of one of those daughters) and she's also got a son, but from a different father.  Geez, I'm exhausted already trying to keep this straight, and that's only the bride's side of the guest list.

The groom arrives with two daughters (neither family has met before, so the introduction of everybody to everybody else takes like ten minutes, or maybe it just feels that way) and his daughter's friend who he says is "like his third daughter".  Mmm-hmm, that could be important later - it's a bit unclear at first if she's the girlfriend of one of his daughters, or what.  This film wanted so badly to be progressive, to act like gay relationships are no big deal, but it just couldn't quite make that leap - was some studio afraid of alienating the conservatives in the audience?  Or was this the point, that the twenty-somethings today are more gender-fluid, and don't make a big deal about being bisexual or having casual sexual relationships with their friends?  It's unclear, unclear, unclear to the point of being maddening.  Or perhaps this is a by-product of having so many characters that there's really no time to delve into the relationships of the minor characters, because we need to focus on the more prominent characters.  Or maybe I'm seeing things that aren't really there, these extra guests are just "family friends" and that's all, they're not important to the plot.  But if they're not important, then why are they even there?  Start trimming away the extra characters, and narrow the focus here.

I'll give two specific examples, to prove my point, and then I'll move on.  The groom's best man shows up last, and he's Italian for some reason, and naturally he's also got two daughters with him.  There's some weirdness in the car, like he's hesitant to complete the last quarter-mile of the car trip, but finally the journey is complete, he arrives at the big house, is greeted by the groom, and...well, that's it.  He seems like he might be an interesting character, like why does the groom have an Italian best friend?  What's up with his daughters?  Why did he stop the car and seem reluctant to arrive?  I've got no idea, because the movie then forgot about him and his daughters (umm, I think, again, too many characters to keep track of...) and in fact they could have cut this whole best man character out of the film, and it wouldn't have made a difference.  It might even have made things a bit less confusing.  Don't introduce characters late in the game unless you're going to DO something with them, that's a good rule to follow.

Second example - Mackenzie, the granddaughter of the bride, is the one talking directly to the audience, and she's also making a film (using a video-camera, not her phone for some reason, very 1990's) by interviewing the guests on their thoughts about love.  Though I'd say the film is very erratic, it's got no focus, and comes to no conclusion, and about halfway through the film, it feels like the director forgot that this is something Mackenzie does.  Mackenzie is attracted to her cousin, which she acknowledges is wrong, but he's not really her cousin, or is he?  This is the grandson that I couldn't track, I wasn't sure whose son he was, and it seems maybe Mackenzie's not sure either.  Here's the problem - what's his appeal?  There's no time to even give him any distinguishing characteristic, so I don't even understand why she's attracted to him.  Is it just because he walks around without a shirt on?  He barely even talks - OK, maybe she likes the silent type, but this is another casualty of the "too many characters" issue.  How did he rise above the crowd in this house to even catch her eye in the first place?

The one thing that the big crowd in the big house does create is plenty of opportunity.  There's one son on the bride's side who will screw anything in a dress, and there's so many girls to choose from that he barely even needs his box of chocolates with drugs in them.  If he gets turned down, he just moves on to the next random girl.  Another one of the bride's sons is more focused, he apparently did a lot of research on the groom's daughters, and showed up knowing about her book award nomination, and she did the same with him, because he's a former rock star and she's a fan of his music.  This relationship I could keep track of, but for the most part, there's almost too many romantic pairings that are possible, especially when they lose track of that box of chocolates and it starts getting passed around.  So much drugs and so many bottles of wine and those inhibitions start coming down - for a while I thought that things were going to get so crazy that Husband #1 was going to sleep with Husband #4.  That didn't happen - but I suppose it could have.

(There's definitely a sort of "bedroom farce" to this whole thing.  I'd like to see one of these comedies with a lot of partner-swapping where somebody sleeps with their own spouse, and it's a total accident.  That would feel sort of Shakesperean in a weird way.  Maybe it's the presence of Patrick Stewart here, but with elements like drugged chocolates and free-flowing wine, I was reminded of plays like "A Midsummer Night's Dream", where there are magical love potions and such.)

Something does happen, and I don't really want to give it away here, because I always try to be spoiler-free, but I don't think it's a spoiler to say that "something goes wrong".  If there was a film about a big family wedding and you tuned in and everything just went according to plan, that could be a very boring movie, right?  So something goes wrong, and it has to be addressed.  Unfortunately, the solution is one that appears all too commonly in movies that simply can not happen in real life - it's a problem in fact that people who write movies think that this is the way that weddings work, and, well, they're wrong.  I've said too much, but if you're a fan of a certain classic Hollywood movie from 1940 that got re-made as another classic Hollywood movie in 1956, maybe you know what I'm talking about.

I think the larger point here is that famous people are more screwed up than regular people - the bride is a famous but retired actress, her ex-husband is a famous actor, and her intended groom is a well-known author.  One of the bride's sons is a former rock star, and his ex-wife is a currently famous pop star.  They operate by different rules than regular people, so for this reason it's somehow acceptable for them all to be on their second, third or fourth marriages.  But all their kids are divorced or otherwise relationship-challenged, too, so is the point that nobody these days is able to sustain a relationship?  And the younger generation is the most confused of all, they're crossing gender lines and even hot for their own cousins - so let's face it, nobody really knows anything about love and marriage, everybody's just making it up as they go along, and that means making a ton of mistakes.  I guess each generation is trying to avoid the mistakes that the last one made, but I fear that means they're just going to make all new mistakes of their own.  Oh, well.

Reading between the lines here, the film's box office is conspicuously absent from the IMDB - so that means it bombed, right?  I can see why - too many characters and too many plot points that don't connect with the others and are just left hanging there.  One last example - in one notable romantic coupling, perhaps under the influence of those drugged chocolates, one of the young women decides to make a plaster-cast mask of that son who sleeps around a lot.  Um, OK, except this process is not a romantic thing that horny people do, in fact it's pointless unless you're a make-up artist and you're going to create a monster-mask for that actor.  The gag is that he falls asleep with the plaster on (umm, where did SHE go?) and he stands up and walks straight into a wall, knocking himself out.  Well, I guess that's one thing to do with a character, but it's a prime example of a bit that comes from nowhere, goes nowhere, and serves no practical purpose at all.  It's sort of a metaphor for the entire film.

Also starring John Malkovich (last seen in "Supercon"), Patrick Stewart (last seen in "Charlie's Angels"), Minnie Driver (last seen in "Hard Rain"), Jack Davenport (last seen in "Kingsman: The Secret Service"), Grace Van Patten (last seen in "The Meyerowitz Stories"), Noah Emmerich (last seen in "Fair Game"), Peter Facinelli (last seen in "Riding in Cars with Boys"), Yael Stone, Lilly Englert (last seen in "Little Women"), Brigette Lundy-Paine (last seen in "Bombshell"), Tim Boardman, Kara Jackson, Rob Langeder, Paulina Singer (last seen in "The Intern"), Joe Urla (last seen in "Hands of Stone"), Jake Katzman, Victoria Guerra, Juan Castano, Camila Perez, Marsha Stephanie Blake (last seen in "The Laundromat"), Elizabeth Wood, Cher Cosenza, with a cameo from Edward Hibbert (last seen in "Father Figures")

RATING: 4 out of 10 oversized bedrooms in this house, apparently

The Wife

Year 12, Day 248 - 9/4/20 - Movie #3,645

BEFORE: These days I've got so much time on my hands that watching a movie each day is very easy, and writing about it isn't that much of a struggle, either - since I'm still not back to work full time.  It's harder for me when I have to skip a day - I've got 22 films to spread out among the 30 days of September, for example.  So, no more than 5 or 6 a week, unless I want to have a big gap at the end of the month.

I took a look ahead at the schedule, and there's one film coming up that seems like it wants to be on Labor Day - but that meant watching only two movies in four days, just to get that one to land on Monday - so no movie yesterday, and no movie tomorrow.  Guess I can always watch 4 episodes of "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee" instead, and come closer to getting one more TV series off my list.

Glenn Close carries over from "Cookie's Fortune".  I forgot that she appeared a few times earlier this year, like in "Tarzan 2" as the voice of a gorilla.  She's a pretty late entry vying for the top spot this year, but I don't think she can win it.  She still might make the top ten, though, when I add up her earlier appearances with this chain of four of her films in September.

THE PLOT: A wife questions her life choices as she travels to Stockholm to see her husband receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.

AFTER: I took this film (and the two other Glenn Close films coming after it) out of the February line-up, because the linking demanded it - I needed material to help connect the back-to-school films, since they weren't connecting to each other.  Relationship-driven films like this one could have a place during February's romance chain, because even a film that depicts two people on the verge of a break-up is still a valid topic to explore - "romance" is just code for "relationships" in some ways, so this could have counted as a February film, but you know what?  I've got a ton of romance/relationship films, in September I'm focused more on preserving the chain with solid links.  I didn't link 8 months of films together this year just to allow the chain to be broken in early September, not with this year's horror chain coming up in just a few weeks.

I suppose I could have saved "Cookie's Fortune" to be the outro from the romance chain, but everything here in this month, right now, is serving a purpose, even if the movies are terrible - the chain is telling me what to watch, and every day I get closer to the end of regulation play 2020.  I'll have plenty of time in November and December to review the damage done to February 2021's romance chain, plus the hole I created by removing three films, and see if there's still a good plan to make a connected chain with whatever's left.  But that's a concern for another day, and I've got to get there first.

The title character here is Joan Castleman, whose husband, Joe, has just been chosen for a Nobel - and if the film had just concerned itself with an insider's look at that process, that might have been enough.  You have to travel to Sweden, you have to participate in a ceremony where you have to bow several times, and then you have to give an acceptance speech in a separate ceremony - unless you're Bob Dylan, in which case you can decline to participate but still get the honors anyway.  The Castlemans bring along their son, David, who's just starting his own writing career, and like many people, the son doesn't always see eye to eye with his parents, because they just can't help being that specific mix of supportive and critical over his life choices.  David can't get a straight review of his own work from his father, not without a few overly honest criticisms, and several "When I was starting out as a writer..." anecdotes.  That right there would be enough to make me choose a different profession as my parents - David's at that difficult age where he finds his parents super-annoying, which is really any age.

At some point, the film starts the flashback sequences (ah, I should have known there would be a catch) that go back to show us how Joe and Joan met, and it turns out that he was her college professor, at a time when he was married to the first Mrs. Castleman, and Joan baby-sat for the couple.  But slowly she worked her way into Joe's life, and by the time we get to the second set of flashbacks, Joe's lost his teaching gig (probably for having an affair with a student) as well as his marriage (umm, same reason) and so it's "publish or perish", as they say.  Joan has a secretarial job at a publishing house, and overhears one executive saying that they need a good Jewish writer, like the other publishers do, so she steps forward to suggest Joe.  But Joe's novel needs a lot of polish, so she steps in as a sort of "ghost editor".

Meanwhile, back in the present (which isn't the right use of "meanwhile", I know...) a younger writer has traveled to Stockholm to convince the Castlemans to let him write the definitive biography on Joe, and when Joe turns him down flat, he targets Joan instead.  He reveals that he knows about Joe's many affairs, then puts forth the theory that maybe Joe isn't the great writer that everyone believes him to be, and perhaps the real writer of all those novels is someone hiding in plain sight.  Gradually through toggling between the two advancing timelines (sort of a similar structure to "Wonderstruck" here) we're brought to the conclusion that the young writer could be right - this could explain why Joan has specifically asked to not be thanked or even referenced in Joe's Nobel acceptance speech.

The problem here, I think, is that assuming the theory is true, that Joe's nothing more than a figurehead, while Joan's the true creative genius, there's not a real explanation given here for the decades-long deception.  Why, exactly, was this necessary?  Was the patriarchy so powerful in the 1950's that a book by a male author would get published and one by a female author wouldn't?  That can't be true, because Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, and Agatha Christie all managed somehow.  Or was there specifically a bull market at the time for a particular type of novel being written by male Jewish writers?  This is all left just a little uncertain, I could have used some edification here that would justify this couple presenting an image to the world that wasn't truthful.  Why couldn't they have shared co-writing credit on these novels, for example?  Was there not enough room on the covers of their books for two names?

Sure, there's one female character in the flashbacks who decries the lack of opportunities for female authors, but is that enough of a justification?  I'm not sure.  And while Joan was writing eight hours a day, Joe was cooking dinner for the family, cleaning house and raising their son - is that really such an embarrassing job for a man, that he preferred the fantasy life of an author over his reality?  They had such a great opportunity here to be a progressive couple and flip the traditional gender roles around, why didn't they take it?  Then again, why do Stephen King and J.K. Rowling write some of their novels under pen names?  It's a strange process when you can read a book and not be entirely sure who the author is, because the vagaries of publishing are sometimes shrouded in mystery.  So who's really getting shafted here if Joe's not really the author of the books?  Is it the public, or Joan herself?  The couple seems to have enjoyed a pretty darn good life for a pair of frauds.

And it's odd that it takes the trip to Sweden to finally cause some tension between the married couple.  If Joan knew about Joe's many affairs, why hasn't she expressed her dissatisfaction with them before this?  And Joe had a pretty sweet deal, too - what with his wife writing the novels and him taking all the credit.  Why would he want to ruin all that by sleeping around?  Driving his wife away would therefore not only take a personal toll on him,  but it would also mean the end of the writing career, right?  So why take that chance?  Obviously it just seems like a set of circumstances designed to create the greatest amount of drama within the confines of this film.  I'm not saying it doesn't work, because mostly it does, but there's a fair amount of bending the story over backwards to bring it all to this place where it apparently needs to be.

Also starring Jonathan Pryce (last seen in "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote"), Christian Slater (last heard in "Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay"), Max Irons (last seen in "The Host"), Annie Starke (last seen in "Father Figures"), Harry Lloyd (last seen in "The Theory of Everything"), Elizabeth McGovern (last seen in "Once Upon a Time in America"), Alix Wilton Regan, Karin Franz Körlof, Johan Widerberg (last seen in "Ocean's Twelve"), Richard Cordery (last seen in "Mr. Turner"), Jan Mybrand, Anna Azcarate, Peter Forbes, Jane Garda, Fredric Gildea, Nick Fletcher, Mattias Nordkvist, Suzanne Bertish (last seen in "W.E."), Grainne Keenan, John Moraitis (last seen in "Woman in Gold"), Michael Benz (last seen in "Joker").

RATING: 6 out of 10 autographed walnuts

Cookie's Fortune

Year 12, Day 246 - 9/2/20 - Movie #3,644

BEFORE: Lyle Lovett carries over from "The New Guy" - he really hasn't been in that many movies, and it seems like a good portion of the films he has acted in were directed by Robert Altman - like "Short Cuts", "The Player" and "Ready to Wear".  Today's film was also directed by Altman, which could be good, or could be bad.  I've tried to see as many of Altman's film as I could, but while I'm a fan of "Short Cuts" and "The Player", he also had some films that were just OK, like "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" and "Nashville", and also stinkers like "Dr. T & the Women", so you just never know.

THE PLOT: Conflict arises in the small  town of Holly Springs when an old woman's death causes a variety of reactions among family and friends.

AFTER: Yeah, I was afraid of this - there's something of a good idea behind "Cookie's Fortune", but parts of it are really dumb, and other parts just drag on and on, over-explaining everything that doesn't need to be explained.  Maybe this is an accurate portrayal of life in a small town in Mississippi - I wouldn't know, I've never been there - and maybe if I visited there or lived there I'd get this same feeling, that life moves at a snail's pace, everything takes too damn long and all the residents are clueless as hell about life.  Could be true.

One character in particular is intentionally slow, I don't know if she's learning disabled or mentally challenged or whatever the proper PC term is these days, but she somehow manages to remember all her lines for the church's Easter-themed play, so I'm not sure.  The storyline on IMDB just calls Cora "incredibly shy", which I suppose is a thing, but then that doesn't seem to match up with Cora playing Salomé, a Biblical character noted for performing "The Dance of the Seven Veils", which is essentially an ancient striptease, right?  This could have really livened up the film, since Julianne Moore plays this "incredibly shy" character, but the director chose not to go that way - his loss.

Cora's sister, Camille, on the other hand, is the pushy director of the play, who's taken it upon herself to rewrite some of Oscar Wilde's scenes, so that sort of tells you what you need to know about Camille.  She's always sure that she's right, and she takes advantage of her shy (or is it dumb?) sister whenever she can.  The two women go over to their Aunt Cookie's house to "borrow back" (aka steal) their mother's fruit bowl, only to find that Aunt Cookie has committed suicide with a gun.  But since it wouldn't be "proper" for a member of their family to have committed suicide, plus since only crazy people commit suicide this would imply that there is madness in their family (quite clearly there is, so I don't see what the big deal here is) so Camille stages the suicide to look like a break-in and impromptu murder, removes the gun from Cookie's hands and ditches it in the yard, before calling the police.

Based on the evidence, the police determine that the prime suspect is Willis Richland, Cookie's friend and handyman, who had cleaned all the guns for her the night before, so therefore his fingerprints were on the gun in question.  Even though Willis is known by everyone in the town as a sweet man who would never kill another person, he's put in jail anyway (well, sort of) while they straighten everything out.  The sheriff is convinced Willis is innocent just because they fish together regularly, that's the kind of town it is.

The ensemble cast is the sort you'd expect to see in an Altman film - nearly everyone's in that church play, including the dead woman's family attorney, and also the rookie cop who can't seem to keep any information about the case to himself.  He's sleeping with Emma Duvall (everybody in this film seems to use everyone else's first and last names at every opportunity, and that's just not how most people talk) and Emma just happens to be the daughter of Cora (the shy one), the niece of Camille (the pushy one) and close friends with Willis (the accused one).  So yeah, it's a small town, everybody's connected, we get it - still the film keeps over-explaining to us how everybody is related to each other, ad nauseam.  

Or maybe it's just the fact that there's not much of a mystery here - since we saw Camille stage the crime scene, we know Willis didn't kill Cookie.  So much for suspense.  Wouldn't it have worked better if we hadn't seen everything up front, so we the audience would still have some doubt over whether Willis was guilty, also if he didn't kill Cookie, then we could still wonder who did?  I guess Robert Altman wasn't much for crime dramas, which employ the usual technique of having a detective figure out the crime scene, and then we all get to see the crime being committed in flashback sequences.  I know, I'm usually the one complaining about flashbacks and non-linear narratives, but here's a case where they could have been useful and served a purpose, and they weren't even used at all.  What a shame.

Instead we get to meet all of Willis's friends as they're interviewed by the police and a special investigator brought in from a bigger city, as they confirm (THREE TIMES!) that Willis was doing errands on the day of Cookie's death, just like he said he was.  It's overkill - and like the fish supplier character (played by Lyle Lovett) who seems to have a thing for Emma and is building an apartment for her out of a train caboose, largely unnecessary.  You could take Manny the fishmonger's character right out of the film and it would hardly make any difference.  By the same token, there are a few too many police characters for such a small town.

It's also quite obvious that "Salomé", the play within the film, is largely symbolic of the larger crime, especially when the soldier character (played by Jason, that rookie cop) commits suicide, mirroring Cookie's own choice to take her life.  Plus the whole thing is set on Easter weekend, so there's a tie-in with Jesus' sacrifice, too - in the deaths of Cookie and Jesus, there's a similar confusion over what really happened, I'll wager.

It's just a very clunky mystery story here, and it didn't need to be.  Camille didn't HAVE to re-stage the suicide scene, but she did, so the story then has to deal with the repercussions of that.  Every little detail is super-important, like the fact that the neighbor kid saw what happened, and that the lawyer just happened to know exactly where Cookie hid her will.  I'll maintain there were much more elegant ways to move this story along, ones that didn't rely on coincidences and last-minute revelations, but the film just didn't seem interested in those methods.  Nah, let's just keep making things more and more confusing before starting to resolve anything.

And of course, the fact that Camille could so easily steamroll her sister Cora into believing a different version of the facts is going to come back and haunt her.  (Hmm, that feels a little bit familiar.  Who's also known for presenting sets of "alternative facts" to the American citizens, without worrying about any of the possible repercussions?  Karma's a bitch, man, just saying.).

If I had known this was set over Easter weekend I would have preferred to watch this then, but since I needed the linking this film provided now, maybe it's better that I didn't know.  And this way the theme of characters going to jail also carries over from "The New Guy".

Also starring Glenn Close (last seen in "Father Figures"), Julianne Moore (last seen in "Wonderstruck"), Liv Tyler (last seen in "Ad Astra"), Chris O'Donnell (last seen in "The Bachelor"), Ned Beatty (last seen in "Nashville"), Courtney B. Vance (last seen in "Office Christmas Party"), Charles S. Dutton (last seen in "Against the Ropes"), Patricia Neal (last seen in "Ghost Story"), Donald Moffat (last seen in "The Bonfire of the Vanities"), Danny Darst (last seen in "Swing Shift"), Matt Malloy (last seen in "Phil Spector"), Randle Mell, Niecy Nash (last seen in "Selma"), Rufus Thomas (last seen in "Elvis Presley: The Searcher"), Red West (ditto), Ruby Wilson, Preston Strobel, Ann Whitfield, Hank Worsham, Christopher Coulson.

RATING: 4 out of 10 rolls of yellow crime-scene tape.

The New Guy

Year 12, Day 245 - 9/1/20 - Movie #3,643

BEFORE: September is here, and I still can't go to the movies.  It's OK, I planned for this.  There are enough movies available on streaming platforms for me to hold out until November, what a relief.  I'm giving the industry two more months to get its act together - I'm secretly hoping theaters in NYC will open soon, because I'm figuring that they're going to need an influx of ushers and concession stan workers, and I really need to get a second job, and get off partial unemployment.  I've worked in theaters before, and since the shifts are mostly nights and weekends, I could still work days at my old job and still have time for more job-hunting.  That's the plan, anyway.

For some people, September means "back to school", and look what happened here, all my debating and fretting over my chain, and breaking it apart and putting it back together again, and turning pieces of it around, and a high-school based film is right here on September 1.  Honestly, I didn't plan this, I thought this was a prison movie, which it is, but it's also a high school movie.  Divine providence manifests itself once again.  I had three other school-based films planned for later in the month, this will make four, and it's a nice surprise.  Here's another one - David Hasselhoff carries over from "Killing Hasselhoff".  Yep, it's a Hoff two-fer.  Who saw that one coming?

Before we proceed, here are the platform stats from August, the first month this year that I didn't overbook or double-up:

AUGUST -
9 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Standing in the Shadows of Motown, Hitsville: The Making of Motown, 13 Going on 30, The Equalizer 2, Captive State, The Gambler, Matinee, The Kid, Death Wish
0 Movies watched on cable (not saved):
4 watched on Netflix: Fyre, A Single Man, The Ballad of Lefty Brown, Killing Hasselhoff
1 watched on iTunes: Greed
1 watched on Amazon Prime: Wonderstruck
4 watched on Hulu: Whitney, Fyre Fraud, Where'd You Go Bernadette, Once Upon a Time in Venice
2 watched on Tubi: Muscle Shoals, Lay the Favorite
2 watched on other random sites: Shine a Light, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
23 TOTAL

I was all over the place in August, cable films didn't even make up 50% of my viewing, or even 40%. But that's just the kind of month I had, a weird mix of weird films that was slammed together for one purpose only, just to connect the end of the documentary chain with the start of the back-to-school chain.  It still represents some solid work on my part, but with vigilante action films, westerns, sci-fi and alien invasion films, off-beat comedies, and also docs on Motown, the Rolling Stones AND the Fyre Festival, what else is there to say about August?  Hey, at least it was unique - and at least I avoided watching "Trolls World Tour", which also could have connected to "Killing Hasselhoff" via Ron Funches and to tonight's film via Zooey Deschanel.  Whoops, sorry, I don't seem to have a slot for that one - come see me in 2021.  Maybe.

THE PLOT: A high school senior branded uncool in the ninth grade gets himself expelled to change his image to a cool kid at another high school.

AFTER: While people in America are concerned with "cancel culture", I've spent my year enduring "reschedule culture" - that doesn't really sound as catchy, but in its own way, it's a bit more positive.  For me it's a constant process of rescheduling the films that don't seem to fit - plus it might be helpful to view the Covid-19 pandemic as a constant rescheduling of everything.  Like in May when I first ventured out of the house, I noticed that drug stores in NYC were still selling Easter candy, though Easter was on April 12.  I guess after Easter there are no good candy holidays until Halloween, plus there might not have been enough people working at the drugstore to pack it all up (ah, so THAT'S why marshmallow Peeps always taste stale...) so I took advantage of the situation and loaded up on peanut butter eggs, maple creme eggs, marshmallow eggs - basically any flavor of egg-shaped chocolate went into my basket, and that kept me snacking through June, because I stored it all on the fridge.  But that's what you have to do in 2020, it seems - we went out for our Easter dinner in July, and then in July there were too many amateur fireworks for us to venture out, so Fourth of July celebrations for us might happen in mid-September, you never know.  Then I visited my parents the weekend after Father's Day for a re-scheduled Mother's Day/Father's Day weekend, and so on.

By extension, New York Comic-Con wasn't cancelled, it's rescheduled for a bigger event next year - hopefully it doesn't conflict with the 2020/2021 Olympics, right?  Indoor dining in NYC is still rescheduled for either the vaccine proving effective, or a class-action lawsuit once the weather gets too cold to sit outside - and that's coming.  The start of indoor school is now rescheduled for Sept. 21 in NYC, to triple-check safety measures and also prevent a teachers' strike.  The tax deadline was rescheduled this year, plus baseball games, basketball games, college football and so on.  Life keeps moving forward, but everything's also on hold, and significant events just keep getting moved into the future, again and again.  The fact that the "New Mutants" movie is screening anywhere, for anybody, is a minor miracle, turns out that the fifth try at a release date was the charm.  I might be cut out for this lifestyle, because I've spent the last 12 years living it - every time I watch one movie, I'm saying "Let's hold off on those other 379 movies on my list..."  Meanwhile while I'm still sticking to this actor-linking format, there are classic films like "Grand Illusion" or "The Prisoner of Zenda" that have been waiting patiently for their turn, and it seems they may be waiting in vain.  And this will probably be yet another October where classic horror films like "Salem's Lot" and "The Mummy's Tomb" go unwatched again.

But, they say that every dog has his day.  Every film, hopefully, will get its chance to be seen.  Yes, even "Trolls World Tour", god help me.  (Someday, just not today.  Look, I've agreed to watch the "Twilight" films this October, I can only handle so much.).  And that brings me to "The New Guy", a film that I passed on when it was on cable - it just seemed too below the radar.  Then it was on Hulu, so I figured, what the heck, and added it to my playlist.  You've probably guessed by now that by the time I was ready to watch it, and found a way to link to it, it was gone from Hulu - that's par for the course, I think I have about a 50% success rate with Hulu on this front.  Who the hell's in charge of this streaming thing, anyway, who decided that two years is the preferred amount of time for a film to be available?  Who does this help, or is this all an extension of that horrible "Disney Vault" mentality, namely the theory that if a film is kept from the public, somehow it regains its value and people will suddenly want it again?  This doesn't help the people who want to see it NOW, does it?  I'm finally ready for this film, it serves a linking purpose for me as well as being entertaining (ideally...), but now I have to pay $3.99 to see it?  Well, that's going to color my opinion of it, isn't it?  I might rate this film higher if it's FREE, or included with one of our monthly subscriptions.  We need to get to a place where every film is available, all the time, and nothing is unavailable, why doesn't that fit with anyone's corporate strategies?  Don't make me cancel - er, reschedule - you yet again.

OK, rant over, I paid the $3.99, but now the pressure is on "The New Guy" to be worth the cost.  Eh, I'm not sure if it is.  I've seen so many films about navigating high school, from "Never Been Kissed" and "Can't Hardly Wait" back in the day, to more modern films like "Superbad" and "Booksmart".  They're all using the same playbook, really - and it's very outdated.  That's what tends to happen when you have movies about 17-year-olds, played by 22-year-olds, that have been written by 40-year-olds.  If you really want to know what's going on in high-school NOW, why not produce films written by current high-school students?  I suppose "Love, Simon" was notably progressive, at least on the sexual orientation front, but the classroom stuff keeps taking a back seat to the social interactions.  All of these high-school films spend more time in the bathrooms than in the classrooms, while my high school experience was about learning.  Sure, I had extra-curriculars, but also I had a job on nights and weekends, so I sure didn't have any time for dating.  (I had no idea how to talk to girls anyway, so it all sort of worked out.).

For Dizzy (Gillespie) Harrison, it's all about rising above his current social status, where he's nothing more than a "blip" on everyone's radar.  His friends are "blips" too, which calls to mind other films where the losers get together and commiserate like "The Goonies" (which we re-watched this past weekend) or "Good Boys", or "Superbad", etc.  Here Dizzy and his "blip" friends have formed a funk band and are constantly rehearsing, but I guess that path takes too long to be cool, so Dizzy's got to speed up the process.  Here the movie has to go through a bunch of contortionist acts to get Dizzy into jail - he gets a public erection while talking to a girl, an older librarian then thinks he has a concealed weapon in his pants, so she grabs it, causing him to have a broken penis, and this somehow convinces the school counselor that he has Tourette's Syndrome, so she puts him on medication, and the medication somehow makes him jump on stage with a gospel choir at the mall, and for this he gets arrested.  Wow - that's a lot to take in, so many contrivances in the first 10 minutes of the film, that it's almost painful.

And then once he's in prison, the contrivances continue - he shares the weirdest possible bullying experience with his cell-mate, Luther, so of course they instantly bond.  Luther's also been moved from prison to prison, and found that if you're on the bottom of the social ladder in one place, the easiest thing to do is to act up and get yourself moved to another prison, where you can start from scratch, act even crazier, and maybe end up on top.  And thanks to pop culture and movie tropes, we all know by now what to do on your first day in prison, right?  You're supposed to find the biggest, baddest mofo in the prison, and beat him up, just to show everybody how tough you are, that you're not messing around.  I wonder, has this advice ever worked out for anybody?  Or has it just gotten a lot of prison newbies killed?  I'd like to see some stats on this.  Anyway, Dizzy goes back to high school - which is just another form of prison, if you choose to think about it like that, and he sets out to get himself expelled.  He cheats on an exam, then tries to bribe the teacher, even records video of the principal straining in a bathroom stall (he uses a security camera with an unbelievably long cord, because this film was made a couple years before everybody had video cameras on their phones) but nothing seems to work.  Finally he breaks a mop handle in two (intending to smack the principal with it) and gets expelled for destroying school property.

Dizzy then goes back to prison - though it's a bit unclear if he was jailed for breaking the mop handle, or if he was just visiting his old cell-mates for more advice.  Either way, he gets a prison make-over, learns to walk tough and act tough and make "crazy eyes", even gets a jailhouse tattoo, which is all going to help him make that all-important first impression at his new school.  He somehow changes his name to Gil Harris, dyes his hair blond, and gets his new prison friends to drop him off at the new school in restraints, as if he's Hannibal Lecter or something. (Actually, this was a riff on Steve Buscemi's character in "Con Air").  Right, because they frequently allow violent serial-killing teens to attend classes with regular kids.  It's a bit much, but it works.

"Gil" then quickly identifies the 25-year-old tough teen who's at the top of the social pyramid (it helps that East Highland High) was built on a big metaphorical hill, and only the most popular kids get to sit at the top of the hill, so they can more easily bully the loser kids who can't or aren't allowed to climb up the hill.  At the top of the hill is Conner, a classic leather-jacket wearing bully of the "greaser" variety, who takes Gil down with one punch.  Gil gets up and retaliates, but as luck would have it, the bell rang and nobody got to see it.  So Gil has to drag the unconscious Conner around through the halls and then pull the fire alarm, just so everybody can see that the new guy means business.  Like most of this film, this comedy bit ends up working, but it's a long, arduous struggle to get there.  (I see your "hill as social status" metaphor, and raise you a "finding comedy is like dragging a bully's unconscious body around" one.)

What's the moral here?  That with a little bit of planning, some hard work, and maybe a couple of lucky breaks, it's possible to completely re-invent yourself, and improve your social situation?  OK, I guess that works, but then also there's a danger that if you completely burn down your life plan and start a new one, you may lose what made you special and unique in the first place.  "Fake it till you make it" can produce results, but it can also make you a fake version of yourself, because Gil finds himself turning his back on his friends when he's got a shot at getting close to the hot girl at the new school.  Meanwhile there was Nora, one of his "blip" friends, there all the time, right there in his band, and he just never thought of her in that way?  People might totally want to ship Dizzy and Nora here ("Dora"?) but it all works out - Nora had her eye on somebody else, anyway, which is awfully convenient.  Hey, let's note that Zooey Deschanel was in teen comedies like "The New Guy" before she became famous for starring in "The New Girl" on TV.

There are a few clever bits here, like when Dizzy/Gil decides to invigorate the East Highland football team by re-enacting the classic motivational scene from "Patton" to get them their first win in years, then he gets the whole school to participate in a parody of "Braveheart" later in the film when they've somehow reached the state championship.  Umm, NITPICK POINT here, Texas is a pretty big state with a lot of high schools, so I think to win the state championship you can't just be a good football team, you've got to be like the best football team ever, and I think you have to win like 87 games in a row - but I'll admit I'm not quite sure how high school sports works.  Like most everything else in this film, this seems just a little bit beyond believable, that one guy on a horse could turn a team full of zeroes into champions.

Ultimately I think this one lands somewhere between "Napoleon Dynamite" and "Drillbit Taylor", if that makes any sense.  I actually had to check the dates, this film came out two years BEFORE "Napoleon Dynamite" did - while watching it I was willing to bet that it was one of those films that came out a few years after, trying to capitalize on the unexpected success of that quirky little indie film.  Nope, this one came first.  But all three films sort of have the same DNA, the same message about how being quirky or a misfit is OK, despite whatever the bullies at your school do to bring you down.  They all just take different roads to end up in the same place (umm, more or less).  And like "Killing Hasselhoff", the extensive blooper reel during the closing credits implies that much of this film, perhaps most of the film, was improvised.  So, umm, what did the screenwriter DO, then?

It's nice to know, though probably wishful thinking, that if all the so-called losers in a high school can band together, they can change the social status rules for everyone - all the nerds, geeks, freaks, weirdos, disabled kids and troubled teens working together is a nice thought, but possibly also a pipe dream.  (Plus, getting all the losers working together could produce another Columbine, instead of a high-school paradise.).  But perhaps there's a metaphor somewhere in there about voting - the largest voting block in the 2016 election was the people who didn't vote at all, and they certainly had an impact with their absence.  Maybe it wouldn't have changed anything, maybe if the non-voters voted they also would have been split among the candidates in similar proportion, but we'll never know, will we?  But if the non-voters could come together and somehow agree, which is unlikely, I'll admit, they do have the potential power to change the course of history.  But as we all know, they probably won't - an entire generation of disaffected Americans isn't suddenly going to get motivated overnight.

NITPICK POINT: Remember what I was saying about 40-year old writers not portraying high school accurately?   This film really screws up the school football season, even worse than a pandemic could.  Dizzy's band is scheduled to play at the homecoming dance, which somehow takes place after the championship football game.  That's simply not how any high-school calendar works.  Homecoming is traditionally in the fall, representing when a football team that's been playing on the road at other schools finally comes back to their home field (though admittedly, the team hasn't really "gone" anywhere, the students still need to show up for classes in-between games played on the road, right?) for a big game, maybe against a traditional rival school.  The state championship would logically be at the END of the sports season, right?  (again, not an expert on the high-school sports, but come on.). So in what universe could the championship game come BEFORE homecoming?  I went through something similar with a director who insisted that proms took place in the fall, and I tried in vain to convince him that proms always take place in the spring, like May or June.  He was clearly confusing prom with homecoming, because that film also had a prominent football game sequence, right before the big dance in the fall.  Some screenwriters and directors get into their 40's or 50's and forget details about how high school functions - I just couldn't convince him that a fall dance should be called homecoming, since proms take place in the spring, so the resulting movie's calendar makes no sense as a result.  (I begged him, call anybody on the phone, any friend you trust, and ask that person when prom is - he refused to do that.). Who knows, maybe the school calendar will get so screwed up this year because of the coronavirus that maybe the football championship game will happen right before homecoming.

Also starring DJ Qualls (last seen in "The Core"), Eliza Dushku (last heard in "Batman: Year One"), Eddie Griffin (last seen in "A Star Is Born"), Zooey Deschanel (last heard in "Trolls"), Lyle Lovett (last seen in "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story"), Jerod Mixon (last seen in "Me, Myself & Irene"), Parry Shen, Rachael E. Stevens, Ameer Baraka, Kina Cosper, Ross Patterson, Geoffrey Lewis (last seen in "The Great Waldo Pepper"), Kurt Fuller (last seen in "Ghostheads"), Sunny Mabrey (last seen in "xXx: State of the Union"), Illeana Douglas (last seen in "She's Funny That Way"), Justine Johnston, Matt Gogin, Jerry O'Connell (last seen in "Can't Hardly Wait"), Charlie O'Connell, Henry Rollins (last heard in "Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker"), M.C. Gainey (last seen in "Wonderland"), Horatio Sanz (last heard in "Ralph Breaks the Internet"), Josh Todd (last seen in "The Banger Sisters"), Julius Carry, Avery Waddell, Mike Erwin, Bryan Shy, Laura Clifton, with cameos from Vanilla Ice (last seen in "Sandy Wexler"), Tony Hawk (last seen in "xXx"), Tommy Lee (last seen in "God Bless Ozzy Osbourne"), Kool Moe Dee (last seen in "Quincy"), Jermaine Dupri, Kyle Gass (last seen in "Saving Silverman"), Gene Simmons (last seen in "Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story"), Jai Rodriguez, with archive footage of James Brown (last seen in "Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown").

RATING: 5 out of 10 swimsuits worn by Danielle in a gratuitous impromptu fashion show at the mall.

Killing Hasselhoff

Year 12, Day 243 - 8/30/20 - Movie #3,642

BEFORE: How does this happen?  How do I find myself watching something that's probably a throwaway film, at best guess, and potentially a big piece of nonsense, especially when this film just appeared on Netflix at the start of August, and there are probably MUCH more important films to watch, ones that have been on the list much longer?  I'll attempt to explain.

The original plan was to link from "Once Upon a Time in Venice" to a film called "Replicas", which also has Thomas Middleditch in it.  And then "Replicas" also has Keanu Reeves in it, and it would have served as the link to "Bill & Ted Face the Music".  (It's not really the original plan, it's the revised original plan, which is the original original plan backwards, because "Bill & Ted" got delayed or something, it's a little tough to remember.  No, I think that's correct, because Ron Funches was the original link out of the documentary chain, since he appeared in archive footage in "Fyre".)

OK, so I held a spot for "Bill & Ted", only then it got released in theaters, but not in New York City, which is keeping its theaters closed for now.  I mean, it's not like there's a lot of people who live in NYC who want to go to the movies, right?  (I don't know, is this true?  Between marching in Black Lives Matter protests, building seating enclosures for outdoor dining and just generally trying not to catch Covid while we ride the subways, we're all pretty busy...). Sure, I could watch "Bill & Ted" on Demand, but it's priced at like $20!  That's too much to pay for a first-run movie, so I've removed "Bill & Ted" from the schedule.  So much for Plan "B" (which, if I'm being honest, was more like Plan "F" or "G") and I did have a back-up plan for my back-up plan.  Removing both "Replicas" and "Bill & Ted Face the Music" is possible because "Once Upon a Time in Venice" shares an actor with the next film in the chain.  (In the original plan, Kid Cudi would carry over from "Bill & Ted" to today's film...).

Surprise, it's Ron Funches!  He's here again tonight, carrying over from "Once Upon a Time in Venice" as I wrap up August - I've spaced out my days so I wouldn't have too many days off in a row - so 23 films in August, and I've got another 22 films planned for September (bringing the year's count up to 3,664), and then I'll be in to horror films for October.  Another 24 films in October gets me to 3,688, and then, assuming "Black Widow" gets released in November, 12 more films gets me to the end of the year.  (And if I still can't see "Black Widow" in a theater in November, or don't want to pay $20 to see it On Demand, which I could do, then it's on to Plan "J" or "K", damn it.)

Now, removing "Replicas" from this part of the list raised another issue, where should it go?  Should I just put it at the bottom of the list, or think of it as a "Maybe" for 2021?  Well, I left myself a note that this (sort of?) horror film connects to a number of other horror films planned for this October, so on a whim I checked out placing it somewhere in October, and here's the best news of all - I can use "Replicas", along with two other films recently acquired, to replace a three-film section in October that I really wasn't crazy about.  The linking was solid, but watching "Black Christmas", "Beautiful Creatures" and the reboot of "Nightmare on Elm Street" didn't really thrill me, plus I would have had to rent all three films on iTunes for $2.99 or $3.99 apiece.  Now I don't have to do that, and I can replace those three films with ones I really want to see, and also already have in my possession - I'll save some money and the October movie count stays exactly the same!  It's a win-win.  Umm, except for the "Bill & Ted" movie that's off the schedule now, that one I will have to catch up with in 2021. This would also have been a fine place to drop in "Trolls World Tour" (actually, there may not be a good place to drop in that film, it looks horrible) but it's still $5.99 on iTunes, so I'm going to pass on that one too.  It's a lot easier to pass when I know I have a solid path to the end of the year.

Anyway, all that explains why today's film is "Killing Hasselhoff", at least I hope it does. I'll total up the stats on August's movies and report back in two days, when it's September.

THE PLOT: A struggling nightclub owner resorts to desperate measures in order to pay off a loan shark.

AFTER: It's been a pretty big week for loansharks, they figured prominently in the plots of "The Gambler" and "Once Upon a Time in Venice".  It's interesting what Hollywood thinks about loan sharks, look at the actors they cast to play them - John Goodman, Ken Davitian and Will Sasso.  So, all loan sharks are fat guys?  Seems like an interesting stereotype - I guess a fat guy is shorthand for a rich guy, but then they also have to be ruthless, mean characters who will hurt or even kill people if they don't pay up, and that's just not what most fat guys are about.  Fat guys are jolly, happy guys in real life, right?  I can believe Michael Kenneth Williams as a loan shark, but I'm not sure about Will Sasso.  John Goodman's a good enough actor to pull it off, I think - when he threatened Mark Wahlberg's character, I believed it.

Ken Jeong's character here, Chris Kim is the clueless lead, unfortunately he's not smart enough to handle a loan shark who wants to collect on the money he borrowed to open up a nightclub - especially when the club gets some bad publicity due to a false sexual harassment claim (umm, yeah, that's a really questionable plot point, see NITPICK POINT below) so when the loan shark comes to collect, it seems that Chris' only option is to collect the money from the celebrity death pool that he's been a part of for six years, and the pot keeps growing every year because all of the 18 celebrities chosen have decided to keep on living, so I guess the participants re-invest every year, which makes the pot worth about half a million.

NITPICK POINT #1 - 18 guys betting $500 each adds up to only $9,000 - can $9,000 in a bank account grow to over $500,000 in just 6 years?  That seems like an impossibly high interest rate. Even if each participant anted up another $500 each year, I'm not sure that the math here justifies the total.  Six times $9,000 is just $54,000, and I still don't think that money could grow tenfold in just six years in the bank. So there goes the premise, right out of the gate.

But the lead character picked David Hasselhoff to die - factoring in that "The Hoff" is sort of getting up there in years, plus may be likely to engage in high-risk activities like sky-diving or driving his own version of the KITT car.  Hell, even shaking hands with fans is a high-risk activity these days, you never know what you could catch.  And who are the other celebrities that were picked in the pool?  I just paused the film to find out - they include high-risk celebs like Charlie Sheen, Dennis Rodman, Gary Busey, Courtney Love, Mel Gibson, Tommy Lee, Britney Spears and Tara Reid.  But I may have to call a NITPICK POINT on some of the other choices.  Somebody picked Howie Mandel?  Being a total germophobe will keep you alive longer, I believe. Hulk Hogan?  He may be a big jerk, but he seems pretty healthy, except for the steroid damage.  Tony Danza, Nicolas Cage and Joe Piscopo?  They all seem like they're aging well - but I guess they had to round out the field somehow.  Technically, you're not supposed to use even the NAME of a person in a movie without permission - so perhaps these are just the 18 celebrities who said "yes" when the producers called and were willing to sign a release.  (One loophole method around this is to find a regular, non-celebrity person also named "Tommy Lee", for example, and have them sign a contract for $1 to use their name in the film.  But good luck finding another person named "Britney Spears" or "Hulk Hogan".

The Hulk Hogan thing is a bit interesting - it seems he was a big part of this film at one time, but then had a dispute with WWE Studios (which produced this film) and then the whole film had to be re-cut to remove every scene he was in.  It seems he made some racial remarks that resulted in the termination of his contract.  I suppose it's possible that this film was once called "Killing Hulk Hogan", then they had to find Hasselhoff as a replacement - I'm not sure.  It's a bit like "Being John Malkovich", which managed to cast John Malkovich to play himself - and if he hadn't been available and willing, what would they have done?  Would they have cast another actor to play Malkovich, or changed the title of the film to accommodate whoever replaced him?  "Being Terrence Stamp" just wouldn't have been the same film, admit it. But today's film could have easily been transformed into "Killing Shatner" or "Killing Stallone" or even "Killing Grammer", any larger-than-life celebrity willing to poke fun at his own image would have sufficed.

Still, it's great that Hasselhoff said yes and agreed to come along for the ride.  He at least seems like he's in on the joke - another celebrity might have taken umbrage or not been able to laugh at himself in the same way.  As long as everybody understands that reality is not being depicted here, we're viewing everything through the comedy lens and taking everything with many grains of salt.

That being said, any legitimate Celebrity Death Pool worth playing would probably have some kind of rule, or at least a guideline, that it's NOT O.K. for one of the players to try and kill their celebrity in order to collect.  It's just not sporting.  Chris makes three attempts at "offing the Hoff", once by playing upon his shellfish allergy, and once by spiking his juice at a party, before resorting to a handgun, the "old faithful" approach.  It's a shame, when the film's storyline went to all the trouble of creating Fish, another celebrity death pool participant who had a mental breakdown after learning that his girlfriend was sexting another guy, and then crafted a long list of ways to kill that guy while institutionalized.  Fish gives Chris his journal with over 100 ways to murder Hasselhoff, but only three get tried before Chris realizes that he's not the murdering type.  (Yet he still tried twice before realizing this, so that's something of a contradiction.  N.P. #3.

While I'm at it, NITPICK POINT #4 - if a celebrity was only 16 years old, and booked the "party room" at the nightclub, whose responsibility would it be to keep that female celebrity away from alcohol and drugs?  Would that be the job of the nightclub manager, or the celebrity's mom-ager?  It seems to me that this situation itself would create something of a scandal - namely, what is a 16-year old girl doing in a 21-and-over club?  Wasn't she herself breaking the law by just being there?  I guess this sort of thing might happen all the time - dating back to the Drew Barrymore days and probably before - but come on, there's a lot of blame to go around here.  Turning the situation into a false "me too" charge against the club owner is not just bad form, it's missing the point - what was she doing there in the first place?  Booking that space for her party was, in itself, a violation.  And again, depicting a false sexual harassment claim in a film helps nobody IRL.  Agreed, the club owner should have had a better system in place to check IDs, even those of the celebrities.

While I'm at it, a gay hit-man (sent to kill the Hoff by the loan shark, who realizes that he can't collect the money owed to him unless Chris wins the pot) seems like a progressive idea, but if that character just gets reduced to a series of stereotypes, than it's a bit questionable whether any new ground was broken here.  The guy can't decide whether to kill Hasselhoff or make love to him, and like the Hoff himself, I'm wondering why those were the only two choices.  Is he that unprofessional that he can't separate his job from his desires?  A real hit-man wouldn't have this problem, a straight hit-man probably wouldn't have a problem with killing a woman, so what is it about a gay man that his sexual orientation is so easily going to get in the way of completing his assignment?  He's so weak when under the spell of Hasselhoff that his judgment is clouded?  It's a strange plot point at best, and homophobic in some way at worst. (I'm just not sure exactly how.)

I hesitate to compare this film to "Amadeus", but it's a similar plot-line.  Once Salieri decides that Mozart doesn't deserve to live, how does a man just kill another man?  How do you get close enough to someone to accomplish that?  But since this is a comedy, you know everything's not going to have a tragic result, the Hoff is going to be fine, even if we can't see for a long time how that's going to happen.  At least Hasselhoff understands that we've all got to go sometime, so we might as well have a party while we're here.  Just don't hassle the Hoff's fans, and everything's going to be OK.  I"m very curious as to what this film COULD have been, because the filmmakers have said that it would have been much funnier before all the re-editing, but then, filmmakers can say that about any film that failed to find an audience.  The film is just 80 minutes long, so at least it won't take up too much of your time - that gave me a lot of extra time today to wonder where Jim Jefferies' Australian accent went.  Because if Aussies don't HAVE to talk that way, then why the heck do they?

Also starring Ken Jeong (last seen in "Lady and the Tramp"), Jim Jefferies, Colton Dunn (last seen in "Other People"), David Hasselhoff (last seen in "Baywatch"), Dan Bakkedahl (last seen in "Battle of the Sexes"), Jennifer Ikeda, Rhys Darby (last heard in "Trolls"), Victor Turpin (last seen in "Murder Mystery"), Jon Lovitz (last seen in "The Stepford Wives"), Master P, Will Sasso (last seen in "Movie 43"), Flula Borg (last heard in "Ferdinand"), Carlos PenaVega, Michael Winslow (last seen in "Cheech and Chong's Next Movie"), Sarah Colonna, Taylor Collee, Harry S. Murphy (last seen in "Race to Witch Mountain"), Alfred Adderly, Joseph S. Griffo, with cameos from Justin Bieber (last seen in "Zoolander 2"), Rick Fox (last seen in "Holes"), Kid Cudi, Tony Rock, Mel B, Howie Mandel (last seen in "Gilbert"), Gena Lee Nolin, Pat Monahan.

RATING: 4 out of 10 fans in red swimsuits