Extraction

Year 12, Day 273 - 9/29/20 - Movie #3,664

BEFORE: It's the last film for September, with Chris Hemsworth carrying over from "Jay and Silent Bob Reboot".  On one level, I know I should be happy, because this perfectly sets me up for the October horror chain to start in two days time, and I've got a clear path to the end of the year, even though Disney moved "Black Widow" from November to next May.

But it's still going to eat at me, isn't it?  The fact that "Hellboy" is sitting there on my DVR, and if I follow my rules, that I made up, I can't watch it.  "Hellboy" was programmed right after "Black Widow", with David Harbour carrying over.  And what stinks is that David Harbour is in today's movie, which makes me feel like there should have been a way.  Months ago I came up with some alternate plan that moved "Hellboy" up to today's slot, or someplace close to it - only when I reviewed that plan a second time, I couldn't find the connection on the other end.  Did I ever have one, or was it just wishful thinking that one would present itself?  Did I mistakenly believe that some actor or actress, like Rosario Dawson, had a role in "Hellboy"?  It's annoying that I can't remember what I was thinking at the time that led me to rely on a path that didn't exist.

I worked on it a bit today, one last futile hope - and sure, I found a couple of paths that would allow me to move "Hellboy" here, but none of them fully work.  Frankie Shaw from "Jay and Silent Bob Reboot" was in a film called "Knife Fight" with David Harbour, which would link to "Hellboy" and then "Extraction" and allow me to continue - but should I let the linking force me to watch a film I don't have a copy of, and possibly have no interest in?  Then there's Sasha Lane from "Hearts Beat Loud", who does have a role in "Hellboy" - but of course I can't erase the fact that I've watched four films since then.

So maybe I just need to suck it up - "Hellboy", like so many other things, is re-scheduled for next year, and I have to deal with that.  It was always an outlier, anyway - a sort-of horror film that didn't fit into October, it was hanging out in November as a back-up plan after "Black Widow" moved to November.  It's connected to that Marvel film on my schedule, so I should just be happy that the collateral damage of the "Black Widow" delay is only taking one other film along with it.

THE PLOT: Tyler Rake, a fearless black market mercenary, embarks on the most deadly extraction of his career when he's enlisted to rescue the kidnapped son of an imprisoned international crime lord.

AFTER: Again, I'm trying my best to be happy, but these days, that's just not easy.  I've got election anxiety on top of pandemic anxiety on top of partial-unemployment anxiety, so really, I feel like my nerves are getting stretched very thin.  I'm just a big ball of worry these days, and spending 4 out of 7 days at home still isn't calming me down at all, it just feels like it's making things worse.  Every day I don't go out and get some new part-time job is painful, but any job I take, like if I go work at a store or something, just increases my risk, and Covid rates are starting to creep up again in New York City, at least in some neighborhoods.  We're supposed to enter a new phase tomorrow, with limited indoor dining made available, but I bet if the citywide positive rates go up over 2% or 3%, they're going to reconsider that move if they make the connection.  (I thinking, bring on the horror movies for 2020, because at this point, what could be scarier than real life?)

"Extraction" didn't do much to alleviate my stress levels - I guess maybe it was an OK distraction, because it did allow me to focus less on my personal stress by showing me somebody else's.  This film happens to be the most popular Netflix original film at the moment - or is it of all time? - but it's also the second film I've seen this year about someone who's an expert at rescuing people being held for ransom, the first was "Proof of Life".  There's also some stuff in here about teens being trained as soldiers, so I guess it's also got similar themes to "Beasts of No Nation", though it's not set in Africa but Bangladesh instead.  So it's those two films mixed in with a dash of "Slumdog Millionaire" - just kidding, it's got nothing to do with that one.

Tyler Rake is a mercenary soldier, in desperate need of money - or perhaps in desperate need of being able to handle a job that nobody else can handle, it's maybe even a little bit of both.  There's some suggestion that he's secretly looking for the job that will take him down, but I'm not sure I buy that motivation, because there are probably easier ways to kill yourself, like, say, not wearing a mask to a political rally these days, but that's a separate issue.  When the teen son of a Bangladeshi drug lord is held for ransom by another gangster, Tyler and his team are called in - because they'll cost money, too, but can you really trust the other gangster to let the kid go, once the ransom has been paid?

Tyler does the job, he locates where the teen is being held, infiltrates the site and takes them all down, the first of many thrilling action sequences where it's basically him against everyone, and he tends to come out on top.  But after transmitting evidence that the mission has succeeded, something goes wrong, and his team is attacked by other forces hired by the kid's father.  I was very confused at this point, but reading the plot summary on Wikipedia suggests that after Tyler got Ovi free from the kidnappers, it made sense for his father's forces to take his team down, because then they don't have to pay him.  OK, now it's clear, things were just a bit foggy during the movie, there was a lot going on in the action sequences, and not much time spent on exposition.

Tyler's support team tells him repeatedly to abandon the job, leave the kid behind and walk away, but he can't - this is not who he is, plus he's haunted by the memory of his own son, who got sick after Tyler left his family.  So instead he's challenged with somehow getting Ovi across Dhaka when simply everyone is looking for them - the kid's father's forces, the rival drug lord's forces, the police who are probably on the payroll of one of the gangsters, and then there's the army of street kids who've been pressed into similar service.  Tyler's forced to call on an old teammate who lives in the city, and is out of the extraction business, plus they may not have parted on good terms, making an already tough situation even tougher, and there goes my stress level again.

More elaborate fight sequences and one unlikely team-up later, and Tyler has to decide what's more important, getting paid or making sure that the kid is brought to safety, because it seems at this point it's impossible to accomplish both things.  It all leads to a big showdown on one of the blocked-off vehicle-filled bridges leading out of the city, which isn't really any kind of spoiler because the film actually STARTS with a flash-forward of this battle, then spends the next two hours jumping back to explain how Tyler got there. This is a valid storytelling format, commonly seen on the "splash page" of comic books, but it's been gaining more exposure in movies over the last few years.  The theory is that you give the viewers a little taste of what's to come, even if that taste is very confusing, so they'll be eager to know how we're all going to get to that extreme set of circumstances.

The exciting car chases and indoor shoot-outs seem extremely complicated - it's very possible a ton of special effects were used to transition between exterior shots to the interior shot within a vehicle, and then back out again.  This technique can very impressive unless you should happen to think a bit too much about, "Hey, how did they DO that?" at which point you're kind of aware that an effects shot is in play, and that can take you out of the film's internal reality for just a bit.  So I recommend trying to not think about that too much, however my recommendation itself might make that impossible.  Umm, sorry.

Seeing Hemsworth in action, and David Harbour as another actor who was JUST ABOUT poised to become part of the MCU in "Black Widow" before the quarantine restrictions got extended, has really driven home to me that this will, unfortunately, be the first year in ages that I haven't seen a movie based on Marvel comics.  Again, this is very distressing for me, but some sacrifices have to be made. I wasn't even able to see "New Mutants" this year, so I'm eager for 2021 and/or a Covid vaccine to be available, so we can get movie theaters in NYC open again.  In the ongoing battle between Marvel and DC, it looks like DC's going to win 2020 hands-down, even if I don't get to see "Wonder Woman 1984" until next year.  I did a whole week of DC-based films in January, including "Joker", "Shazam!" and 6 animated films with Batman or Superman.  Then I followed up in May with "Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay", and I've still got "Birds of Prey" scheduled for October.  Oh, it's painful for me as a Marvel fan (in the comic-book world, I probably read about 80% to 90% Marvel) but here's hoping that Marvel can come back strong on my 2021 schedule.

Also starring Rudhraksh Jaiswal, Randeep Hooda, Golshifteh Farahani (last seen in "The Upside"), Pankaj Tripathi, David Harbour (last seen in "State of Play"), Priyanshu Painyuli, Sudipto Balav, Adam Bessa, Shataf Figar, Suraj Rikame, Neha Mahajan, Sam Hargrave (last seen in "Avengers: Endgame"), Abhinav Srivastava, Rob Collins, Wayne Blair, Chris Jai Alex, Vonzell Carter.

RATING: 6 out of 10 Oxycontin tablets

Jay and Silent Bob Reboot

Year 12, Day 271 - 9/27/20 - Movie #3,663

BEFORE: I've been hearing about these "flights to nowhere", which are a desperate play by the airlines to make some money at a time when hardly anybody is traveling - I think the main one is in Australia, it takes off from Sydney, flies around the country for seven hours and then lands back in Sydney, thus not spreading any COVID-19 to another city or country.  Really, it's all the things that many people hate about flying - cramped space, shared air, a non-zero chance of being in a plane crash - without any of the benefits, like going somewhere and accomplishing something by visiting another city.  I'll put up with the downsides of traveling on a plane if there's something waiting for me at the other end, like a cruise or a week in Vegas, but I'm just not seeing the upside of getting on a plane and enduring turbulence and leg cramps for seven hours just to fly over a couple tourist attractions and not really visit them.  Yet these flights are selling out, which I think is an indication of just how desperate people are to get out of the house and just pretend that things are back to normal for a few hours, when they clearly are not.

But I wish I'd thought about these flights to nowhere a couple days ago, because they would have been a great metaphor for "Drunk Parents" - that storyline similarly circled around for a few hours and never really got anywhere.  I'm hoping for better results today, with a new (OK, from last year, but new to me) film from Kevin Smith, and man, it's been a while.  I endured both "Tusk" and "Yoga Hosers" back-to-back a couple years ago, and they did not score well according to my very non-scientific system.  Again, maybe better results today, hope springs eternal.

This is one of those films with a HUGE cast, dozens of cameos, it looks like - which is part of the reason it's been scheduled several times already this year, but since it's the Year of the Re-Schedule, I didn't really mind moving it if I thought it could fulfill a better linking need a little further down the road.  With so many actors in it, it could fit in many different places, and I think by putting it HERE it's helping me out of something of a linking jam, so it makes sense to put it where it has the most value.  Without it I simply can't connect the September chain I wanted to the start of my horror chain, I think that will be evident in just a couple of days, when you see how I get from here to there. Putting this between two other films with, say, Ben Affleck or Molly Shannon in them would have felt like a waste, or at least a mis-step.

Plus, my wife and I watched "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back" together, years ago, so I gave her a couple of chances to watch the sequel with me, once I realized it was on AmazonPrime.  And she passed, again and again - but she's funny that way, I'll watch every film in a franchise long after they've started to go downhill, and she would rather just keep the memory of the first film in a series, if it was good, and not risk ruining that with an inferior sequel.  She's probaby right to do so - but if this Reboot film is any good, I can at least bring that to her attention tomorrow.

Joe Manganiello carries over from "Drunk Parents".

THE PLOT: Jay and Silent Bob return to Hollywood to stop a reboot of the "Bluntman and Chronic" movie from getting made.

AFTER: Jeez, how long has it been since "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back"?  That film precedes my blog's existence by eight full years - that was close to Will Ferrell's first movie role, wasn't it?  (OK, it was more like his tenth, but his star was still on the rise.). That film came out in 2001, and Kevin Smith's directed like 7 other films since then, including "Clerks II", and he's directed episodes of "Flash" and "Supergirl" and produced a bunch of other TV shows that I don't watch.  But he keeps coming back to this shared universe of his films, the only problem being that it has to include films like "Dogma" and "Chasing Amy" that diverged from the central storyline quite a bit, so as a result there are actors he's used again and again that now have to play multiple roles, and the fans are then asked to just ignore this, which isn't possible.  (Remember when Jason Lee had to play both Brodie AND Banky in "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back"?  And nobody noticed that those two characters looked alike?  Just wait, it gets worse...)

Here, Jay and Silent Bob find out that the "Bluntman and Chronic" franchise is going to be re-booted, so they go see Brodie so they can find out just what a re-boot is.  They learn that's when Hollywood makes the same movie over again, only with just enough changed so that you have to pay for the same shit again.  Then they're off to Hollywood on a quest to stop the movie from being made, which is basically the same exact plotline from "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back", only just enough has been changed here so that we all have to pay for the same shit again.  Hmm, I can't tell if this movie is aware of its own irony or not - either Kevin Smith is clueless, or guilty of the same sins as the other franchise directors, and I'm not sure which is worse.  He's got to be in on the joke, right?  But then he's just repeating himself, or the whole franchise is coasting on fumes, and neither of those is good.  It's like "Star Wars" telling us we have to watch the heroes blow up yet ANOTHER Death Star, even if it's not called that.

The guilty party here, the man who's poised to destroy the "Bluntman" franchise, is Kevin Smith - so now HE has to play two roles in this reboot - which is only a reboot by HIS own rules, really.  For most reboots, that means some kind of total re-invention or re-casting, so this isn't a re-boot, it's just a rehash, or standard sequel.  Because at least they change everything around for a re-boot, this is just the same story, only without Will Ferrell.  And they check in on how all the secondary characters from all the other View Askew movies are doing now, and people are co-parenting with their gay exes while learning from their toddlers and going vegan and eating healthier and trying not to just hang out in front of the Quik Stop dealing drugs all day.  But at the same time, they're all smoking more weed than ever - maybe that's just Jay and Silent Bob.

The goal is the same - get to Hollywood in under five days, to stop a movie based on them from being made - which you might be able to do in a van if you do nothing but drive, don't stop for sleeping or any other distractions.  But OF COURSE they stop for distractions, so therefore the drive is impossible.  So is getting tickets for Chronic-Con on such short notice, but of course they find a way to do that, too.  Ben Affleck plays the magical comic-book writer with badges for everyone who also makes veiled references to playing Batman while giving us life lessons about raising kids.  (BARF!). Meanwhile Matt Damon is reduced to a quick cameo who makes veiled references to playing Jason Bourne while narrating the journey west and talking about being the angel from "Dogma".  (Again, Kevin Smith plays himself, a guy who debates whether he should cast his talentless daughter in a movie while giving us life lessons about eating healthier to avoid heart attacks.)

In the last film that focused on Jay and Silent Bob (who are really the C3P0 and R2d2 of the View Askewniverse, if you think about it - only they don't make "Star Wars" movies about the droids) they hooked up with four women who pretended to be animal rights activists, but were really diamond thieves, or something, and all that slowed down the mission, but was at least interesting.  The big difference in this film is perhaps that our heroes travel in a similar van but with four very different women, an ethnically diverse and partially handi-capable group of teens who met in a chat-room for girls who grew up without fathers (hint, hint) and somehow feel that appearing in a crowd scene in the "Bluntman and Chronic" reboot will go a long way toward alleviating their various long-standing emotional problems resulting from their past traumas.  Umm, it won't.  But hey, look how woke our franchise is now!

For extra liberal bonus points, the group of girls plus Jay and Bob take down a pedophile and the Klan - softball targets if ever there were any.  (Is this "Drunk Parents" or "The Blues Brothers"?). Is it OK to beat up a pedophile and take his van?  Is it OK to take down a Klan rally with the Alec Baldwin speech from "Glengarry Glen Ross"?  Does that even make sense?  And how does this get us any closer to Hollywood?  I suppose it makes more sense than hiring an Uber driver to take them cross-country, but really, not by much.

The good news is that things do perk up once they finally make it to the convention - there's so much to make fun of at a big geek convention!  (Or at least there was, back in the before times, when you could have a big geek convention...). Everybody at the convention is dressed like Jay and Silent Bob, so they blend right in, to the point of almost disappearing.  And Kevin Smith/Silent Bob does a riff on that famous Marx Brothers routine from "Duck Soup" where two people who look alike make you think that somebody's looking in a mirror, when it's the look-alike seen through an open door.  Can't beat the classics, really, all you can do is rip them off.  Here's where another zillion cameos come into play, too, from the reunited cast of "Clerks" to the reunited cast of "Chasing Amy" to the reunited cast of "Comic Book Men", which was one reality show that I never watched.  You're also advised to stay away from this film if you don't know who played the lawyer in "Zack and Miri Make a Porno", just like if you didn't see "Ant-Man and the Wasp", you're not going to understand the jumping-off point in "Avengers: Endgame".

Look, I've been doing this a long time, I've seen sequels, prequels, remakes and reboots.  I've seen sequels that were also prequels, remakes that were also sequels, prequels that were also reboots.  But I guess I've never seen a sequel pretending to be a reboot but that was really a remake.  So, that's...something?  I can't even tell, because I'm still thinking about that flight to nowhere, and in its own way, this is that - it gets off the ground, sure, but then, really it's almost got no place to go.  Well, OK, it definitely goes somewhere, but it's no place new, and then it lands back at the same airport, so what was the point, except to kill a few hours when we've got nothing better to do?

I really wanted to like this film, because I'm a fan of what Kevin Smith has accomplished, he created a whole universe where many different stories can be told, so he should be up on a level with Stan Lee, George Lucas and Stephen King.  But he's not, because something seems to be holding him back and making him unmotivated. (Gee, I wonder what...). Also, he needs to remember how to be funny, it seems that heart attack made him just a bit too serious.  And the jokes he tells are still racially charged - you just can't cast a diverse cast and then STILL make fun of their ethnicities, because then you've negated the mitzvah.  Dude, this is your universe, you're like its God, and you just want to keep doing the same plotlines and the same jokes, over and over?  (Oh, sorry, you threw in some references to "The Shape of Water" and "Justice League", have a damn medal.). I'm glad you survived your heart attack, but maybe that should have been a wake-up call to make something new and positive instead of the same old tired story.

Also starring Jason Mewes (last seen in "Yoga Hosers"), Kevin Smith (allegedly last seen in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), Harley Quinn Smith (last seen in "Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood"), Shannon Elizabeth (last seen in "Love Actually"), Aparna Brielle, Jason Lee (last seen in "Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip"), Joey Lauren Adams (last seen in "Big Daddy"), Jennifer Schwalbach Smith (also last seen in "Yoga Hosers"), Brian O'Halloran (last seen in "How Do You Know"), Treshelle Edmond, Alice Wen (last seen in "The Laundromat"), Craig Robinson (last seen in "Dolemite Is My Name"), Frankie Shaw (last seen in "Dreamland"), Justin Long (last seen in "Still Waiting..."), Donnell Rawlings, David Dastmalchian (last seen in "Bird Box"), Chris Jericho (last seen in "MacGruber"), Kate Micucci (last seen in "The Last Laugh"), Diedrich Bader (last heard in "Superman: Unbound"), Melissa Benoist (last seen in "Danny Collins"), Val Kilmer (last seen in "The Snowman"), Tommy Chong (last heard in "Zootopia"), Ben Affleck (last seen in "Smokin' Aces"), Matt Damon (last seen in "Ford v Ferrari"), Fred Armisen (last seen in "The Wizard of Lies"), Molly Shannon (last seen in "Other People"), Ralph Garman (last seen in "Once Upon a Time in Venice"), Rosario Dawson (last seen in "Rent"), Adam Brody (last seen in "Shazam!"), Dan Fogler (last seen in "Love Happens"), Mickey Gooch Jr. (last seen in "The Clapper"), Joseph D. Reitman (last seen in "Money Monster"), with the voice of Stephen Root (last seen in "Drillbit Taylor")

and cameos from Jason Biggs (last seen in "Saving Silverman"), James Van Der Beek (last seen in "Downsizing"), Method Man (last seen in "Paterson"), Redman, Chris Hemsworth (last seen in "Men in Black: International"), Robert Kirkman, Keith Coogan, Stan Lee (last heard in "Teen Titans GO! to the Movies"), Marilyn Ghigliotti, Ernie O'Donnell, Scott Schiaffo, John Willyung (last seen in "Chasing Amy"), Walt Flanagan, Bryan Johnson, Ming Chen, Mike Zapcic, Chris Wood, Jesse Rath, Ben Gleib, (last heard in "The Book of Life") Brian Quinn, Marc Bernardin, Jake Richardson (last seen in "Clerks II"), Nick Fehlinger, Johnny "Bananas" Devenanzio.

RATING: 4 out of 10 Hater Totz

Drunk Parents

Year 12, Day 269 - 9/25/20 - Movie #3,662

BEFORE: Will Ferrell carries over from "Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga" - but that's not why I was rushing to get to this one this week.  I was trying to get a birthday shout-out sent out to actor Ben Platt, born 9/24/93, so Happy 27th Birthday, Ben!  I know it seems like I'm a day late because this post is dated 9/25, and may not get posted until 9/26, but I started watching the film in the late evening of 9/24, just before midnight - so my birthday salute is in there, just under the wire.  You may know Ben Platt from the "Pitch Perfect" movie series (films 1 + 2, but not 3) or maybe his Tony Award-winning performance in the Broadway musical "Dear Evan Hansen", back when there were such things as Broadway musicals.

But now I REALLY have to work my skip days in - so no movie tomorrow, the next film on 9/27, then 9/29, and then I'll kick off the horror chain on 10/1.  Yeah, that can work, I just have to stop looking up celebrity birthdays.

THE PLOT: Two drunk parents attempt to hide their ever-increasing financial difficulties from their daughter and social circle through elaborate neighborhood schemes.

AFTER: This is a bad movie, let me be clear about that.  It may even be a terrible movie, but how the hell was I supposed to know that going in?  More to the point, WHY is it a bad movie, and HOW is it a bad movie, and why did someone keep on making it and distributing it if it's such a bad movie?

Let's start with what I know, first off.  Nothing's funny about it, not one little bit of it.  How do you set out to make a comedy and forget to tell everybody involved to make it funny, how does that happen? Nobody sets out to make a BAD movie, for sure, everybody thinks they're making a good movie, it's just that some people are wrong, or perhaps lack the ability to distinguish.  I bet Alec Baldwin thought he was being funny here, maybe nobody had the nerve or the contractual obligation to tell him?  Salma Hayek certainly wasn't funny, she just kind of put her head down and over-emoted and over-reacted to things, because clearly she knew that eventually the shoot would end.  Now Jim Gaffigan, I expect him to be funny - I find his stand-up routines funny, though I wouldn't be surprised to find out I'm in the minority there, because some comedians are like, umm, acquired tastes.  I just appreciate his particular brand of self-deprecating humor because he's constantly poking fun at his own pale whiteness or his terrible eating habits, and I think in that latter case he ends up being sort of a spokesman for fat, lazy, white Americans, who would all be doing sweet stand-up gigs if they could.

But, oh, the dreadful material that even the funny people here were given to work with.  Gaffigan is cast as a registered sex offender who rents a house from the title couple, only he fails to mention that little detail until he's required by law to knock on the door of every house on the block and inform the neighbors of his status.  See?  That's not funny, not even a little bit.  It's a terrible situation that could happen to you, you could easily rent a house or a room to somebody like that, then you'd be in a shitty situation and you certainly wouldn't be laughing.  Then Gaffigan's character spends the rest of the film either doing weird exercises while half-naked, or apologizing for doing something else to the house that any sane person would know that they wouldn't be allowed to do.

Later, the Drunk Parents are forced to switch houses with the registered sex offender through a very contrived plot point, and this leads a group of local vigilantes to kidnap them, thinking they're a sex offender couple (umm, no such thing, I think), throwing them in a van, driving them out to the woods and nearly shooting them.  Not funny.  If you think this is funny, then you were probably doubled over with laughter when Q-Anon factions shot up that pizza joint in Washington DC because they read online that Democrats and Hollywood celebrities were using the pizzeria's basement to stash kidnapped kids, when there was no basement in the building at all.  If you think it's funny to call in a SWAT team to do a drug raid on your innocent neighbor's house, then maybe this is the film for you.

Let me look at an overview, then go back to the beginning - this film has no logical structure whatsoever, it's just a bunch of random occurrences strung together that form no coherent point.  The Drunk Parents aren't even drunk the whole time, they drink one bottle of wine at the start of the film, and that apparently sets off this whole chain reaction that leads to them wandering around their Long Island town (?) aimlessly (just like the plot), looking for another relative to spend the night with.  Very little logic is involved here, like there's a way for one plot point to lead to the next one, but this is just random things like wearing a wig full of spiders, or a bum setting himself on fire (which happens TWICE, but repetition of an unfunny thing is not comedy, either).

At the start of the film, the couple (Frank and Nancy) is seen moving furniture from their living room to their front lawn - why?  Is it a yard sale?  Passersby ask them this question, and they deny it several times.  OK, maybe they're being sarcastic and it IS a yard sale.  But then they never put price tags on anything, they don't put up signs, they certainly don't try to sell furniture to anybody, but later on in the film, all the furniture is still there - WTF?  Still later in the film, another tenant rents the house next door (they repeat this renting-the-house-on-craigs-list-though-its-not-their-house bit TWICE, too) and steals all the furniture - but he doesn't steal the furniture that's just sitting out on the lawn of the house next door?  This doesn't even make sense, and it feels like somebody wasn't even trying to make it make sense!  Or they didn't know how to make the plot make any sense, which seems even worse somehow.  

The repo man comes to take their fancy car away, and that's when we finally get an inkling of what's going on here, they're behind on their payments for, well, everything, apparently, and credit card companies keep calling them throughout the film, and Frank usually responds with a racist voice (not funny) to get rid of them.  Their daughter is just off to college, so this maybe explains why they need money, but it does NOT explain how they got into this situation in the first place.  Didn't they have like eighteen years to save up for her college tuition?  Were they just buying fancy furniture and expensive coffee makers instead all that time?  Did they have $50,000 saved up and then it suddenly disappeared somehow, were they victims of identity theft or bank fraud?  It's so very unclear, instead we're just left with a vague conception that they had money at one point, then maybe he lost his job, or they bought a house and leased a car that they really couldn't afford, spread themselves too thin and now they're in some serious debt.

It's a shame that there's an inkling of a maybe-important storyline in there somewhere, but the film refuses to address it head on, so it therefore loses all social relevance or timeliness to any current recession or depression or post-sub-prime-mortgage financial collapse.  Instead let's have the main characters illegally rent out the neighbor's house to strangers and watch the comedy never quite get off the ground.  Let's have them go to a service station to buy a candy bar and accidentally stumble into a drug-smuggling bust, which isn't funny either.  Let's have them sleep over at her sister's house so their nephew (?) can falsely accuse them of molestation - definitely not funny, and in very questionable taste, also.

It all just seems so misguided, too - I know there was no indication when they filmed this that there would be a global pandemic and millions of people who work in stores, restaurants and movie theaters would be unemployed, but looking at this film as a distorted mirror of reality (which may be a stretch, I know) only highlights that there were dozens of better ways out of their situation than the road that they chose.  They could have continued with the yard sale idea, for one.  Or one of them could have taken a job in a department store or supermarket, which they might have if they weren't so worried about what their rich neighbors might think.  They could have gotten a reverse mortgage, how come they considered selling their burial plots, but not that?  Look, when times get tough sometimes you have to buckle down and take a job you don't want, maybe just for a while until you find something better, because the bills and the college tuition has to get paid.  This is not the time for "Hey, let's see if the teen nerd next door has any ideas for niche web-sites that we can pitch to the investors down at the golf club."  And how are they still members at the golf club, anyway, if they don't have any money?  That's just one of several hundred small details here that don't make any sense.

Huge NITPICK POINT: the epilogue of the film is set at Thanksgiving, which is preceded by a title card that reads "Two months later".  Therefore, counting back, the week of outrageous non-funny circumstances depicted in the film takes place in September, which makes some sense, because their daughter has just left for college.  But somewhere on Day 4 or 5 of that week there's a huge snowstorm, which would be extremely rare during a New York September, especially when you factor in recent climate change.  Then on the next day, all the snow is magically gone, and all the furniture that's been out on the front lawn still seems fine.  Sure, a freak snowstorm with several feet of snow and it all melts in one day.  Did nobody in the editing or continuity departments notice this?

This film is now officially in the running for Worst Film of the Year, and it's going to be tough to beat.

Also starring Alec Baldwin (last seen in "Motherless Brooklyn"), Salma Hayek (last seen in "How to Be a Latin Lover"), Jim Gaffigan (last seen in "13 Going on 30"), Joe Manganiello (last seen in "Rampage"), Natalia Cigliuti, Ben Platt (last seen in "Ricki and the Flash"), Aimee Mullins, Sasha Mitchell, Treat Williams (last seen in "Once Upon a Time in America"), Olivia Luccardi (last seen in "Money Monster"), Aasif Mandvi (last seen in "The Proposal"), Scott "Kid Cudi" Mescudi (last seen in "Killing Hasselhoff"), Michelle Veintimilla (last seen in "Fathers & Daughters"), Kelly Aucoin (last seen in "The Wizard of Lies"), JoJo Kushner (last seen in "The Intern"), Dan Soder (last seen in "Trainwreck"), Stephen Gevedon, Matthew Porter, Eddie Schweighardt (last seen in "The Skeleton Twins"), Jeremy Shinder (last seen in "Going in Style"), Meg Wolf, Mark Gessner (last seen in "Youth"), Brian Donahue (last seen in "She's Funny That Way"), Adam Enright, Peter Gaulke, with a cameo from Colin Quinn (last seen in "Sandy Wexler").

RATING: 2 out of 10 spider bites

Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga

Year 12, Day 268 - 9/24/20 - Movie #3,661

BEFORE: I'm quickly running out of September movies here, with just four films left until I hit the planned start of the October horror movies chain.  Did September go by super-fast for everyone else, or was it just me?  After today I'll have 3 films and 6 days left in the month, so if I don't alternate then there's got to be a few days of down-time.  But this will be nothing compared to the down-time planned for November and December, because I really overloaded the first half of 2020, so I have just 12 movies scheduled for the last two months of the year.  What the hell am I going to do with all that free time?  Like everybody else, I'm waiting for news of some kind of vaccine, which could greatly affect my lifestyle then - I'm trying to find a part-time job that won't put me at risk or completely crush my spirit, and that's not easy.  Maybe by November it will be a different situation, and I can somehow fill my days with something other than movies and TV.

There's no New York Comic-Con, theaters and shows and concerts are still a no-go, and even road trips are still somewhat problematic.  Halloween's not really my thing, nor is the Thanksgiving Day Parade, which is also going virtual, and who even knows what Christmas is going to look like when people still can't gather safely in groups.  The whole year's pretty much a wash-out, and that included the 2020 Olympics (which are now the 2021 Olympics) and the 2020 Eurovision Song Contest.  This film was originally going to be released theatrically in May when the event usually takes place, but since the real-life event was cancelled, the film got released on Netflix in June.  Took me three months to work it in somewhere, for me that's not too bad.

Dan Stevens carries over from "Lucy in the Sky".

THE PLOT: When aspiring musicians Lars and Sigrit are given the opportunity to represent their country at the world's biggest song competition, they finally have a chance to prove that any dream worth having is a dream worth fighting for.

AFTER: As someone who's been watching thousands of movies over the last 12 years, and tracking the careers of countless actors, many of whom are somewhat under the radar, it brings me a strange sense of joy to finally find a movie that features both semi-prominent Icelandic big, bearded character actors - of course, I'm talking about Olafur Darri Olafsson and Johannes Haukur Johannesson, but you knew that, right?  I'm guessing these two have been up for many of the same roles over the years, and I'm not sure if they're terrible rivals or there's just a bit of friendly competition between them.  FINALLY they're in the same movie, along with, I'm guessing, nearly every other noteworthy actor of Icelandic descent.

Look, all I really know about Iceland, apart from hot springs and fjords, is that there's a thriving music scene there, which produced many acts, such as The Sugarcubes, and also Björk (who started out in The Sugarcubes) and...well, that's it.  Here I have to go to the web to find out about Sigur Ros, Thor's Hammer, Of Monsters and Men, and Pursaflokkurinn, which I think is Icelandic for "We're Not a Band". But the Icelanders are a scrappy bunch, to be sure.  I guess you kind of have to be, to live in Iceland and be descended from Vikings.

Lars Erickssong is a scrappy Icelander, in his own way.  His dream is to win the famous annual Eurovision Song Contest, by singing with his friend, potential love-interest, and possibly (but hopefully not) sister, Sigrit Ericksdottir.  The naming conventions in Iceland are complicated, I know - the pair's last names suggest that they're both possibly descended from somebody named Erick, but perhaps it was so long ago that they're not sure if it's the SAME Erick, or two different ones.  Lars' father is also named Erick, so maybe that's a big red flag here.

But Lars also still lives at home with his father, despite being a middle-aged man.  This is where "Eurovision Song Contest" starts to resemble nearly every other star vehicle for Will Ferrell, because all of his characters seem to be these stunted man-children who are quirky in different ways, but are otherwise retarded (this is the correct usage of the word here, I promise) in their personal achievements.  Yet they're all aiming really high, the only thing that seems to change is the sport or contest they want to win, whether it's NASCAR ("Talladega Nights"), basketball ("Semi-Pro"), ice skating ("Blades of Glory") or the coveted news desk position in San Diego ("Anchorman").  A case can be made for Ferrell spending the majority of his acting career just following a formula, essentially re-making the same film over and over.  (Though I'll admit there are notable exceptions, like "Megamind", "Stranger than Fiction", "Winter Passing" and "Everything Must Go".)

I think I'd almost prefer to watch a documentary about the Eurovision Song Contest, though, because on some level it seems like the event is probably crazier than any fictional film made about it could be, but then I guess that documentary would end up looking a lot like the contest itself.  So instead they sort of followed the "Pitch Perfect" formula, which in turn is based on every underdog sports film, going back at least to "Rocky".  Because why re-invent the wheel at this point, if you don't have to?  There's even a take on the "riff-off" battles seen in the "Pitch Perfect" franchise, only here they call it a "song-along" and it's not competive, it's cooperative.  But still, it's completely impossible for that many singers to sing that many lines from different songs, to create an improvised arrangement that is flawless.  Most singers are not also song arrangers, and there's no group mind that kicks in at a party to create a song montage. Giant NITPICK POINT, though it is a great song arrangement here.

The film was a bit confusing for me at first, because before competing in Eurovision, Fire Saga first had to win the Söngvakeppnin, which is the Icelandic pre-selection competition.  Each country only gets to send one act to Eurovision, so I guess each country has some kind of smaller contest to figure out which act gets to go to the big, EU-wide singing contest.  It's a little like making somebody win "Pennsylvanian Idol" or "Indiana's Got Talent" in order to qualify for the big nation-wide reality competitions.  But Eurovision's been around even longer than the EU - the band ABBA famously won the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest with "Waterloo" near the start of their career.  (This is shown at the beginning of the film, inspiring both Lars and Sigrit, but this was also a bit confusing, it led me to think that Fire Saga was a Swedish band, not an Icelandic one.  I guess ABBA transcends most major national borders.)

Fire Saga was not the greatest band in Iceland, but the joke is that they needed 12 acts for the Söngvakeppnin, and they only had 11, so they needed a ringer to round out the competition, and comply with the rules.  Then a different logic takes over and drives the plot forward, which is an interesting one - since the cities that host large events like the Olympics often lose money in the process, and since the country that wins the Eurovision Song Contest has to host the next one, it seems there's a motivation to NOT send the best act to the finals.  A certain element on the Iceland government committee would prefer to not have their country invaded by thousands of crazy music fans and watch the country go bankrupt as a result of some silly band's success in a music competition.

So if the goal of a country is to send a band to Edinburgh (Moscow? Stockholm? Honestly, I wasn't sure) to compete and lose, perhaps that explains a lot.  In that case, Fire Saga is just the band for the job.  Lars and Sigrit have no clue, of course, they think that maybe the little elves of Iceland are working their magic to insure that Fire Saga succeeds on stage.  Umm, yeah, Sigrit believes in elves, and apparently so do half the citizens of Iceland.  That seems sort of quaint and innocent, when compared with the fact that half of Americans don't believe in the coronavirus.

We can also predict with some certainty that these two crazy naive non-kids are also destined to be together, but they've got to work out their differences and acknowledge their attractions to each other, and also survive the fires of temptation when they each meet other potential partners competing at the Eurovision finals.  Again, it's clearly a formula here, but at least it's a safe, proven one.  We know that Lars and Sigrit will probably end up together, we know that Lars will find a way to win the respect of his disapproving father, and even if they don't win Eurovision, we know these two will probably at least find themselves in the process.

It turns out a lot of work went into this, because Will Ferrell was on hand for the real 2018 Eurovision Song Contest, which was in Lisbon, and hung out with the Swedish delegation for the whole process. Will Ferrell's wife is from Sweden, so that maybe explains how he got interested in the first place. plus that sort of fits with the whole "band inspired by ABBA" idea, so I wonder why they switched the band's country of origin to Iceland.  Maybe they got a tax incentive from Iceland, or a grant from the Icelandic Tourism Board or something.  Maybe Sweden's appeared in too many movies already, and Iceland represents fresh comedic territory?  Similarly, the real-life 2020 contest was scheduled to be held in Rotterdam, and the film moved the location to Edinburgh, but this is perhaps a minor point since the film doesn't specifically mention the year.  They did take some footage of the crowd at the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest in Tel Aviv, but they shot the performances for the film on a soundstage in London.

Despite the comic plot point of the host cities ending up in financial trouble, the Eurovision Contest rules only require that a host city have an arena that can hold 10,000 people, plus have hotel accommodations for another 2,000 journalists, delegates and spectators, although the 2001 competition in Copenhagen had 38,000 attendees.  Another interesting point about the Eurovision voting is that entries from five countries don't even have to compete in the semi-finals, they go straight to the Finals! (The host country's entrant also gets a bye, so sometimes it's SIX countries that are guaranteed spots in the finals!)  This is apparently because those five countries (including Spain and the U.K.) are the biggest financial contributors, but this seems a bit unfair, and this would never stand in an American competition - though I guess it's a bit like the "Golden Buzzer" winners on America's Got Talent, who go straight to the semi-finals and don't have to worry about the quarter-final shows. Yep, it's another NITPICK POINT because the Top ten depicted here probably should have had those five countries already confirmed at the start of the announcement.

The real ESC also uses only pre-recorded backing tracks, the contestants do sing live, but none of the acts are allowed to play instruments live.  Sorry to burst your bubble, if you're a big Eurovision fan. Also, some singing in an entrant's native tongue is allowed, not forbidden.  But English is apparently encouraged for the widest possible appeal, I guess. Or perhaps it's because most people who speak other languages also know English, but most English-speaking people don't know other languages?  That would be my bet, anyway.  One thing the movie does get right, however, is that the competition is for best SONG, not best act performing a song.  I think maybe sometimes the voters may choose an act because they like them more, however they're supposed to be judging the quality of the song.  One time a participant (from Iceland) had a stroke and died right before the contest, and six of his friends came together to sing his song at the event - so the acts are replaceable, but the songs are not.

The voting and delegates process - I didn't understand that at all.  It seems to be based on the U.S. Electoral College, or perhaps the process where states vote during the Democratic and Republican primaries.  Which, of course, means that upsets are unlikely, but possible.  So are ties, but really, the two things you don't want in any kind of an election are upsets and ties.  Let's remember that, everybody!

Also starring Will Ferrell (last seen in "Between Two Ferns: The Movie"), Rachel McAdams (last seen in "State of Play"), Pierce Brosnan (last seen in "Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again"), Mikael Persbrandt (last seen in "The Girl in the Spider's Web"), Olafur Darri Olafsson (last seen in "Murder Mystery"), Melissanthi Mahut, Joi Johansson (last seen in "Flags of Our Fathers"), Bjorn Hlynur Haraldsson, Demi Lovato (last seen in "Zoolander 2"), Graham Norton, Jamie Demetriou (last seen in "Paddington 2"), Elina Alminas (last seen in "Ex Machina"), Jon Kortajarena (last seen in "A Single Man"), Alfrun Rose (last seen in "The Favourite"), Elin Petersdottir, Christopher Jeffers, Rebecca Harrod, Josh Zaré, Bobby Lockwood (last seen in "Dunkirk"), Elena Saurel, Eleanor Williams, Johannes Haukur Johannesson (last seen in "Where'd You Go, Bernadette"), Natasia Demetriou, Hanne Oli Agustsson, Bjorn Stefansson, Tomas Lemarquis (last seen in "Blade Runner 2049"), Zack Propert, William Lee Adams, Chris Beaumont, Alfie Melia, Sophia-Grace Donnelly, with cameos from real Eurovision contestants John Lundvik, Anna Odobescu, Bilal Hassani, Loreen, Jessy Matador, Alexander Rybak, Jamala, Elina Nechayeva, Conchita Wurst, Netta, Salvador Sobral, Molly Sanden, Petra Nielsen, and archive footage of ABBA.

RATING: 5 out of 10 Russian lion dancers

Lucy in the Sky

Year 12, Day 267 - 9/23/20 - Movie #3,660

BEFORE: I know, I know, I said I'd take a day or two off, but then I made the mistake of looking through celebrity birthdays on IMDB for the next few days, and I see where one film could line up with the calendar if I DON'T take a day off, so I'm going to keep on keeping on.  Since I don't really have any other method of determining when my skip days are going to be, I'm going to go with this.

Nick Offerman carries over from "Hearts Beat Loud", and I'm back to my original plan, just one slot off, and postponing "Downhill" in a couple days will get my number count back to where it should be.  (In the original plan, Dan Stevens would have carried over here from "The Call of the Wild". Dan may not make the year-end countdown now, but some sacrifice needed to be made.)

THE PLOT: Astronaut Lucy Cola returns to Earth after a transcendent experience during a mission to space and begins to lose touch with reality in a world that now seems too small.

AFTER: For starters, this is based on the real-life case of an astronaut that stalked her ex-lover, who was also an astronaut, and intended to kidnap his girlfriend.  But her name wasn't Lucy, it was Lisa.  Obviously many details have been changed here, primarily the lead character's name, but they wanted the cool riff-off from the famous Beatles song.  Another key difference seems to be that the real-life Lisa set off on that cross-country drive to kidnap the girlfriend, but here Lucy really seems to be intent about doing harm to her ex-boyfriend.  Famously, the news made mention of the fact that Lisa wore adult diapers during her drive so she wouldn't have to stop.  But that plot point is absent from this film, possibly because they didn't want the critics calling this "Lucy in the Sky with Diapers".

If you're looking for that Beatles song, it does appear in the film - well, part of it, anyway.  For many years I collected cover versions of Beatles songs, so I'm something of a connoisseur - I've got covers of Beatles songs in every musical genre, from country to heavy metal, folk to reggae, and from the incredibly inspired ones to the truly terrible. I think at some point I was planning to write some kind of book about Beatles covers, listing them, rating them, discussing them - but there were two problems.  One was that bands kept releasing them, so the collection and the listing thereof would never be finished, and the other was that I'd probably be the only person in the world interested in buying that book, so sales would be minimal.  The version of "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" heard in this film was performed by Lisa Hannigan and Jeff Russo, and, well, it's OK.  A little spooky and ethereal, perhaps, but they use it at a particular moment in the film where Lucy's encountered a family tragedy, and feels very disconnected from reality as she travels across the city to visit someone in the hospital, and so that fits because she feels like she's floating and it's a POV shot to represent that she's mentally not there, and may not even know how she's getting from here to there.

The entire film, though, has to bend itself over backwards and sideways in an attempt to justify why a woman would drive from Houston to San Diego to track her ex-lover down, with a car loaded with ropes, gloves, duct tape, rubber tubing, garbage bags, cans of pesticide, cans full of gas, a blonde wig,  a trenchcoat (and in the real world, also a folding knife and a drilling hammer).  The real Lisa also had a BB gun, but the fictional Lucy has a loaded handgun, but there's a completely different reason why that gun is in her car, it wasn't purchased for the kidnapping attempt, and here it really feels like the film is desperate for any way to cut her any slack at all.  Because generally when you find a loaded gun in someone's glove compartment, you tend to discount all of the very acceptable and perfectly reasonable explanations for why that is there.  Really, it's the people who stock up on rubber tubing that you have to watch out for, right?

But let's back up a bit, and we'll get back to the rational explanations for irrational behavior in a minute.  Lucy was on a space shuttle mission, and if we follow the real-life Lisa's career, that was a mission where Discovery shuttle docked with the International Space Station.  The real-life Lisa did show signs of space adaptation syndrome, which is a form of motion sickness that develops when everything around you appears to be moving, but you don't feel like you are, because in zero gravity your body doesn't feel the motion that your eyes are telling it that it should be feeling.  But other than that, Lisa's space mission was uneventful, she completed all of her tasks, but the other astronauts noted a general reluctance to pitch in with other tasks, to volunteer for things.  Normally that could get you voted off the island on "Survivor", but in space, there's really no place to go.

What nobody knew at the time was that after training and before her shuttle flight, Lisa had begun an extramarital affair with another astronaut, which technically is contrary to the Military Code, it qualifies under "conduct unbecoming of an officer", and it turns out that most astronauts were also Navy officers, because this was back before the creation of Space Force.  When she came back from space, Lisa went with other astronauts on the standard promotional tour, appearing at schools and sporting events, doing interviews and such.  A few months later she separated from her husband, and also the astronaut she was having an affair with.  It really wasn't until the other astronaut started dating someone else that she kind of went off the rails, the tipping point seemed to be when the new girlfriend asked her to stop storing her bike at her ex-boyfriend's place.  This is what led to Lisa stocking up on hardware and weapons and driving to Florida (not San Diego) to confront her ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend at the Orlando Airport baggage claim.

The film uses a somewhat different timeline for the fictional Lucy, we meet her just after her return from space, and while preparing for possible selection for the next space mission, she bonds with a male shuttle pilot who takes her bowling, because she's now "part of the club", namely people who've been to space.  This leads to the affair, then the separation and finally the airport confrontation in San Diego (not Florida).  We kind of end up in the inevitable same place, despite going through slightly different steps to get there.  (And with my chains AND my first marriage, I do know a thing or two about that.)

Look, break-ups are hard, there's no getting around that.  But there's so much ambiguity here because the film couldn't pick a road.  We're supposed to draw the conclusion that being in outer space somehow changed Lucy, either physically or emotionally, as if once she saw the world from far away, and it looked really small, when she came back down to earth somehow her whole situation, her house, her relationship, also felt very small.  I'm not sure that's a logical progression.  It's also possible that her husband just wasn't a very interesting guy, in the film he worked at NASA too, in the publicity department.  By comparison, the other guy was a SHUTTLE PILOT, he had a cool job, he was dynamic, exciting, dangerous, plus he looked like Jon Hamm.  (Jesus, I'm straight, but he is a definitively good-looking man...)  I can see why she picked Jon Hamm over Dan Stevens, right?  I mean, that's why they were cast that way, and not the other way around.

SO we've got these two theories - being in space changed her, somehow, and then she couldn't go back to her everyday domestic life, OR she met another guy who was sexier and more interesting and then she couldn't go back to her everyday boring husband.  The film defiantly refuses to pick a road here, so I guess whichever explanation you prefer for her trip to Crazytown, you can go with that.  For the record, retired astronauts (Marsha Ivins for one) have disputed the notion that astronauts who spend an extended period of time in space begin to lose their grip on reality.  For God's sake, we're taking applications now for astronauts to go to Mars, which is a hell of a long trip, can we count on anyone arriving there safely and sanely after so much time alone?  Or worse, having terrible interactions with their fellow astronauts?  Maybe that explained why they left that guy behind in "The Martian", maybe the whole trip there he was a terrible, super-annoying roommate, so the crew took the opportunity to get rid of him.

Further evidence comes when you consider the case of Michael Collins, who was part of the Apollo 11 mission, but circled the moon alone while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin went down to the moon's surface.  He orbited the moon 30 times over 21 hours, and was by himself - sure, maybe he went a little loopy, but when he came back, he didn't start knocking over liquor stores, after the promotional touring he took jobs in the Department of State, then became the director of the National Air and Space Museum.  Later he worked for an aerospace firm, then started his own consulting company.  That doesn't sound like the resumé of a man who became unhinged from reality.  So I think we can file Lucy (and Lisa) away in the "crack-up due to break-up" department.

Anyway, I look at the situation from the point of view of the husband that got cheated on and left behind, but that's probably because of my own experiences.  People often say that men will only be as faithful as their opportunities, but I say that might be true of some women, also.  Lucy had an opportunity that seemed better, so she took it.  That can happen to any marriage or long-term relationship, especially one where the romance has faded or one partner is as interesting as dirt.  Marriage is essentially a staring contest to see who blinks first, and most often it's ended by the person who's encountered something better, and is therefore more motivated to move all their stuff. And that person is going to move on and date the ONE PERSON who will drive their ex-spouse absolutely the craziest, which I think is a much easier way to explain how somebody can find themselves driving 900 miles without stopping, with garbage bags and duct tape in the trunk.

NITPICK POINT: I'm also fairly sure that the real Lisa made that trip alone, and I don't know if she even had a niece.  The niece character here doesn't even really seem to be an integrated part of the film, mostly whenever she's introduced it's just to complain about being ignored.  Then she's asleep for a good portion of the rest of the movie.  I'm willing to bet this character was created just to do ONE thing in ONE scene (you'll know it when you see it) and if not for that, you could cut her right out of the movie and it wouldn't even make a difference.

Reese Witherspoon is listed as an executive producer here, which usually means she bought the rights to something and intended to star in it.  Wikipedia confirms this and says Witherspoon dropped out and was replaced by Natalie Portman, but the IMDB says that Portman was originally cast, then dropped out and was replaced by Witherspoon, who then had a scheduling conflict, so she dropped out and Portman came back.  And I'll lay even money that Portman developed her Southern accent here by listening to Holly Hunter movies.

Also starring Natalie Portman (last seen in "Paris, Je t'Aime"), Jon Hamm (last heard in "A Single Man"), Zazie Beetz (last seen in "Joker"), Dan Stevens (last seen in "Norman"), Colman Domingo (last seen in "Selma"), Ellen Burstyn (last seen in "The Age of Adaline"), Pearl Amanda Dickson, Jeffrey Donovan (last seen in "Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile"), Tig Notaro (last seen in "In a World..."), Jeremiah Birkett, Joe Williamson (last seen in "Please Stand By"), Stella Edwards, Arlo Mertz, Tobias Schönleitner, Diana DeLaCruz, Arnell Powell (last seen in "Hidden Figures").

RATING: 5 out of 10 therapy sessions

Hearts Beat Loud

Year 12, Day 266 - 9/22/20 - Movie #3,659

BEFORE: About a week ago, I ran through my Emmy preview, since I'd just watched "Bad Education", nominated for best limited series or movie.  Sunday was the Emmys broadcast, which was kind of like the world's biggest Zoom meeting, by necessity.  It took me a couple of days to get through the whole show, but now it's time for my Emmy wrap-up.

I probably should have known from the news that there was no star-studded audience in attendance - but I figured it out anyway, after about two minutes I realized they were using stock footage of the stars reacting to the opening monologue, so I was three minutes ahead of the reveal.  I got it NOT from logic or common sense or the fact that everyone had made the same fashion choices as they did in a previous year, but I got it from the EDITING - the reactions all came just a bit too quickly, some editor forgot that when they cut to a star in the audience, there's usually about a half-second before that person realizes they're on camera and they have to laugh or do a take or act insulted.  Something was clearly just a bit...off, and it was the timing.

The show was quite watchable, for once, maybe that's the fact that I watched only an hour at a time, in three sessions.  Allowing essential workers to read the nominees was a nice touch, putting the focus on the fact that television production workers aren't nearly as important to society as medical professionals, freight delivery workers, mail carriers and bus drivers.  Yet at the same time, the show pointed out repeatedly that with most people still stuck at home, either unemployed, furloughed or working from home, that the entertainment TV provides is more important than ever.  So, umm, is television important or not important?  Seems to be a bit of a mixed message there.

Some of the shows I'd watched regularly won a bunch of Emmys - which is not normal, because I tend to not watch the mainstream network shows any more except for a select few, and I've really been watching shows on the fringe lately.  I watched "Schitt's Creek" from the beginning, for example, and only recently after airing on Netflix does it seem like other people have joined the party.  That show swept the comedy awards, ironically only after airing its final season - but after becoming a clear voice for gay rights and marriage equality, so any rewards are well-deserved.  "Watchmen" also won a bunch of Emmys in the Limited Series category, and I watched the heck out of that when it aired, so I'm ahead of the game there, too.  "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver" won for best Variety Talk Series, but since I watch 4 out of 5 shows nominated in that category, I was probably going to score there, no matter what. By contrast, I watch 2 out of 5 programs in the Competition Program category, so it went to "Rupaul's Drag Race", which I do not watch.

Since I choose my TV more carefully than my movies, it's kind of astounding - there are dozens of dramas that I've heard good things about that I just don't have time to watch.  "Succession", "Ozark", "Big Little Lies", "Little Fires Everywhere", "The Crown", 'The Handmaid's Tale", "Better Call Saul" - it's impossible, I don't have any time to even START chipping away at this list.  And while that limited series on HBO with Mark Ruffalo playing two parts ("I Know This Much Is True") looks very intense, honestly I'd rather watch that limited series on Netflix with Paul Rudd playing two roles ("Living with Yourself") - because the episodes are shorter, and I could probably get through that in a week if I buckled down, and then my Netflix queue will be that much shorter.  It's all about making reasonable choices, I think.

"The Good Place", "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel", "Black Monday", "The Morning Show", "Killing Eve", "GLOW", "Mrs. America", "Hollywood", "Unbelievable", "Unorthodox", "Normal People", "The Kominsky Method" - they all seem like quality shows in different ways,  and people seem to be enjoying them, but to really partake in TV's Golden Age I would need to stop watching movies, quit my job and watch TV around the clock, and I just can't do that.  Maybe I should have been watching "Curb Your Enthusiasm" from the start, but I couldn't be bothered, and now it's nearly too late.  Maybe one day when I'm in a nursing home or hospital for an extended period of time I can go back and catch up on these shows that I missed, I just don't see any other way.  I already spent a good portion of my pandemic hours watching the entire runs of "Arrested Development" and "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee", and now I wonder if I properly prioritized things.

If I get beyond the televised awards and look at the craft awards, aka the "Primetime Creative Arts Emmys", which is a confusing title at best - congratulations to "Bad Education", which won Outstanding Television Movie, "Saturday Night Live" (which I hate-watch, I'll admit) for Variety Sketch Series, and "Dave Chappelle: Sticks & Stones" for Variety Special (Pre-Recorded).  "The Mandalorian" also won SEVEN Emmys in various production categories, none of which aired during the main telecast, but it also LOST in eight other categories.  All my other shows were also-rans, like "McMillions", "Tiger King", "Shark Tank", "Drunk History", "Laurel Canyon", "Westworld", "Drunk History", "Bob's Burgers", "Survivor", "Top Chef", and I think even "The Simpsons" came up empty.  Clearly "Survivor" and "The Simpsons" are played out, they've got nothing left in the tank at this point. (JK!)

I'm just going to keep on watching what I think will make me happy, and doing what I can do, which is maybe taking on one new show at a time, until they start cancelling my shows and I've got some kind of opening.  I'm starting "Star Trek: Discovery" this week, season 1, episode 1, so I've got no time for anything else, not right now.  But if you feel like you're always playing catch-up with TV because there's so much of it, you're not wrong.  Also, welcome to my world.

This is the second of two films airing on Hulu that needed to be added at the last minute to get me back on track after postponing "The Call of the Wild".  Adding two films in place of one meant I had to drop another film, and the best candidate was "Downhill", available on iTunes for $9.99 but not yet airing on cable, and also the middle of three films with Will Ferrell in them, so therefore easily dropped - er, postponed.  As I've said many times, there's just no rhyme or reason to the release schedule for films on all our multiple broadcast and streaming platforms - as many times as I've scheduled a film in advance with it popping up just before I planned to watch it, it's possible that just as many times, that tactic has not worked, because some films just take longer than others.

So now Toni Collette carries over from "Please Stand By", which is fine, and then I'll reconnect with my planned chain tomorrow.  There are several other films on my list with Ms. Collette in them, so I could spend another five or six days on her films, easily.  But with only so many slots left in the year, adding any more than two here would then cause something to be removed from the end, and right now the chain's ending where I would like it to.  So most of the time it makes sense to get to a certain actor or actress and knock out all of their films, but that only works in the first 2/3 of the year, where there are spaces galore.  When there's a limited number, I have to remind myself that it's all connected, choices I make today are going to affect my options at the end of the year - the goal seems to be to gradually narrow down my options as the amount of remaining slots also gradually decreases,  until there's one link left to make and one slot to do it.

Adding any more Toni Collette films would also be a bit off topic (some, like "Muriel's Wedding", are tentatively saved for February) and also mess with my ability to have two roads in November - one to take if "Black Widow" is released and another should it be delayed until 2021.  So there you go.

THE PLOT: A father and daughter form an unlikely songwriting duo in the summer before she leaves for college.

AFTER: This is one of those films that's been on my list for a few months, with the rationale that it might make for a good Father's Day film, if the linking allows it at that time.  Tangentially, the mention of some romance-based plotlines, plus the word "Hearts" in the title, might have encouraged me to find a spot for it in February, again, if the linking allowed.  But then obviously the casting choices of both Toni Collette and Nick Offerman suddenly shot this to the top of my list, since it allows me to make the EXACT connection I needed to prevent me from tearing apart my late September schedule and re-building it from the ground up - assuming such a thing were even possible, thankfully now I don't have to find out that it's not.

But I think I lucked out, so maybe the Linking Gods sometimes know what they're doing.  This is an adorable, meaningful film that could have worked anywhere, be it February or Father's Day or, as it turned out, a Tuesday in September.  Since part of the plot concerns Sam Fisher one late summer as she prepares to enter UCLA for pre-med studies, maybe unofficially this is "Back to School" film #5 for September 2020 (following "The New Guy", "Thirteen", "Bad Education" and "Liberal Arts" - OK, that works).

At the same time she's getting ready to enter college, Sam starts a romance with her friend Rose, and similar to films like "Bad Education", we seem to have reached a point where we can have a gay character in a movie, and that's not the entire focus of their story arc.  They just happen to be gay, and it doesn't completely define them on the screen, that's more of a big deal than most people realize.  Sam's father isn't even shocked by the news that his daughter has a girlfriend - about 20 years ago, the whole movie would have been about this.  Nick has his own potential budding relationship with his landlord, but it's not moving forward the way he would like, since he keeps seeing her out on dates with other men, and in public she introduces him as "her tenant", not as "her boyfriend".

These are characters who just keep suffering from bad timing, which inevitably brings them to question their choices.  Frank's been running a record store in Red Hook, Brooklyn for the last 17 years - but is it really a good time to sell physical media, when people can instantly buy an album as a series of digital files and immediately listen to it on their phones?  Selling a vinyl record for $3 that customers can't hear until they get home, assuming they even own a working turntable, may not be the best continual business model.  For that matter, selling a few discount records each week may not be a viable plan considering that he has to pay rent and also somehow come up with college tuition for Sam to attend UCLA.  Sure, there's financial aid, but then she's going to spend the first half of her medical career repaying student loans.

In another instance of bad timing, one of Frank and Sam's jam sessions produces a pretty good song, "Hearts Beat Loud".  Frank's dreams of forming a band with his daughter are suddenly revived, even though there are only a few weeks before college starts.  After mapping out a whole concert tour schedule and hearing Sam complain, "Dad, we're not a band!" Frank uploads the new song to Spotify, and it makes it to some influencer's New Indie Mix.  Congratulations, and man, what horrible timing. The new track by We're Not a Band is an internet sensation, and clearly the down-side of any success, in any media, is that it calls into question what we're doing with our lives, and makes us think we should be doing THIS instead of the path we're currently on.  Admit it, if you win a game of darts or bowl a great set of frames, the next logical step is quitting your job and going pro in that sport, right?

Also, life is complicated when you've got an elderly mother who can't help shoplifting, a daughter nearing adulthood and a questionable relationship with a business partner (this theme was also seen recently in "Stuber") - how the heck does anybody figure out if they're on the right path, or if it's time to burn everything to the ground, move to South Dakota or Montana and make the best out of whatever's there?  Does Frank want to keep his record store going, even if that means re-working the "flow" and adding a barista to keep the hipsters coming in?  I vote no - it's not worth it, Frank.  Plus nobody young even goes to Red Hook, there's not even a subway line that goes out there.  Still, it's a wonder that anybody at all is still buying vinyl records, or that we still have bookstores.  Amazon's takeover of society is nearly complete, except for a few stalwart holdouts.

Eventually, we learn what happened to Sam's mother, and it's one of those New York-centric reasons why somebody passed away.  It explains so much about why Frank has been stuck in neutral for so long, or maybe it's standing on the crossroads, afraid to make a move in any direction for fear of failure, or even worse, success.  Nick Offerman is so great at playing these characters, like Ron Swanson, who've been internalizing their emotions for a long time, then slowly letting them come to the surface in complex ways.  Somehow a smile means so much more when you've seen a character being deadpan for an extended period of time, you know what I mean?

I realized I haven't seen Ted Danson in a movie for a long, long time - I guess he's been focused on TV lately with "The Good Place", "The Orville", "Fargo" and other shows, but that shouldn't mean he can't make movies during breaks.  Here he plays the owner of a Red Hook bar - come on, who's going to buy Ted Danson as a bartender?  Looking at his IMDB page, it seems he has been in several movies in the last decade, just nothing I would have seen except for a cameo in "Ted".

Yesterday was the first day of fall, and today's film is all about the changes in life during one late summer as autumn and the new school year are approaching.  Somehow, quite accidentally, after scrambling for a replacement film, I'm right on point.  Once again, I praise the Linking Gods and offer up my time as my sacrifice.  Now back to some catch-up television, and I'll be back here in a couple of days.  I still have to work three more skip days into the September schedule somehow, that's not going to be easy.

Also starring Nick Offerman (last seen in "Bad Times at the El Royale"), Kiersey Clemons (last seen in "Lady and the Tramp"), Blythe Danner (last seen in "What's Your Number?"), Sasha Lane, Ted Danson (last seen in "She's Having a Baby"), Quincy Dunn-Baker (last seen in "The Big Wedding"), Alex Reznik, Will Rogers, Rafael Poueriet, Kim Ramirez (last seen in "Special Correspondents"), with a cameo from Jeff Tweedy.

RATING: 6 out of 10 Brooklyn Brewery East IPAs

Please Stand By

Year 12, Day 265 - 9/21/20 - Movie #3,658

BEFORE: Well, this is the point I talked about before, where I was planning to watch "The Call of the Wild", with Karen Gillan carrying over from "The Circle".  That film is not yet available to me unless I want to pay $15.99 on iTunes, so like most everything else this year, it's being postponed.  Not cancelled, just postponed - until next year, which is when we're all going to have to do two or three years' worth of partying and other fun activities to make up for this year.  If you're out partying now, you're exempt from that process because, well, you may not be with us any longer.  Sorry.

So now Patton Oswalt carries over from "The Circle" instead - which I'm totally fine with, because this ensures he'll make my year-end countdown, and that's always a good thing.  Heck, it's usually a good thing when Patton is in a TV show or a movie or has a new comedy special out.  I have not met the man, but I did mail him a check when he did a voice-over for an animated short my boss made, and made sure his check was properly processed through SAG-AFTRA with all of their deductions and pension payments and such.  I did see him once, walking through the San Diego Convention Center after hours, alongside Brian Posehn, but I chose not to bother him and act like a total fanboy.  I think I made the right call.

Also, this film has something to do with "Star Trek", and this week I'm finally going to watch my first episode of "Star Trek: Discovery" when it airs on TV, as all shows should, not just on a streaming service.  You can't blackmail me to get CBS AllAccess by using "Star Trek" shows as a lure - see, something good did come out of this pandemic, CBS was so desperate for new fall shows that they're dipping in to their streaming shows, and I get to see new "Star Trek".  I admit, the pandemic has been full of really, really bad things across the board, this is just one teeny tiny little consolation prize - I'm not comparing the two things in terms of relative importance.

THE PLOT: A young autistic woman runs away from her caregiver in an attempt to submit her 500-page manuscript to a "Star Trek" writing competition in Hollywood.  On her journey there, she must conquer an unknown world full of challenges.

AFTER: This turned out to be the perfect role for Patton Oswalt, late in the film he plays an L.A. cop who spots this missing woman, and based on what he knows about her, he speaks to her in Klingon to prove that he's honorable and means her no harm.  Then, later at the police station, he listens to her recount her proposed "Star Trek" script and is blown away by its complexity.  This is 100% right in his pocket, umm, except the being an L.A. cop thing.  I'm not sure he'd pass their fitness requirements, but hey, it's only a movie.

I'll admit I still don't understand much about autism, the only documentary I've seen on it was that "Life, Animated" one I watched - jeez, last year, but since that was in the before-times it feels like 10 years ago - and that one was about a father reaching his autistic son through their shared love of Disney movies.  So I get that autistic people can focus on some things if they want to, but the rest of the disorder is mysterious to me.  Wendy here has a similar focus on "Star Trek" TV shows and movies (this film is based on a play from 2008, so they mention "Deep Space Nine", but not the newer J.J. Abrams movies, and certainly not the newer TV shows like "Discovery" and "Picard") and she's written a script to enter into a competition.  I know there are fan-made films, and other fan fiction, but I'm not aware of Paramount opening up the writing duties on any "Star Trek" series or movie to the fans.  But whatever, this is just the engine driving today's plot forward.

When Wendy realizes that she's missed the deadline for mailing the script, and since the post office doesn't accept mail on Sundays (which is a bit weird, because we're supposed to have a separation of church and state in the U.S.) she suddenly realizes her package won't arrive by Tuesday's deadline.  OK, a couple of NITPICK POINTS here - first off, there IS next-day service offered by the mail, or at least there was back in 2017 - I've noticed recently that 2-day/3-day Priority Mail is taking about 4 days.  And she's in San Francisco, so next-day service (which used to be called Express Mail, but is now Priority Mail Ultra or something) seems quite possible, IF she mails first thing Monday morning.  Secondly, most contests and competitions I'm familiar with all have postmark deadlines, meaning as long as she gets it in the mail by a certain time on a certain day, her entry will count.  This is usually done so a contest doesn't favor people who live closer to the delivery address.

But let's assume that somebody at Paramount was having a bad day and decided to be a hard-ass about the contest rules.  And let's assume that Wendy isn't aware of Express Mail, because she's something of an unreliable narrator, in that she has trouble understanding how the world around her works sometimes - but she does take a lot of notes about things, and does have some cognitive ability to figure things out on her own.  Still, her life is very structured and she has to maintain a strict memorized schedule so nothing will be out of place, not her daily hygiene or walking her dog or remembering to wait for the "Walk" signal before crossing the street.

I guess it's the visit from her older sister that sets her world upside-down, she'd been hoping that her sister would take her out of the group home and let her move in with her.  However, her sister just had a baby and she's concerned about how Wendy might act around the baby.  After this disappointment, and the one where she realizes that it's too late to mail in her script (even though it isn't), Wendy sets out to take the bus down to L.A. and hand in her script in person.  OK, a couple more N.P.'s here, to do this she has to break several of the rules that she's been living by, and the film JUST got finished telling us that she needs to follow these rules in order to function.  On the other hand, this story still needs to keep moving forward, and that's only going to happen if Wendy crosses Market St. and makes it to the other bus station.

Her dog (or is it the group home's dog?) has followed her, and she realizes that pets aren't allowed on these intercity buses, so she tries to hide the dog.  But once again, this is Wendy breaking the rules, and she's spent the last few years learning to not break the rules in order to fit in to society better.  So with every rule that she breaks, I found the story a little less likely to believe - from what little I know of autism, it seems like someone with the condition caught in a moral quandary like this would be more likely to shut down than to quickly devise a way around the rules.  But again, I'm not an expert, and again, these decisions have to be made a certain way to keep the story moving.  At some point it's just a fait accompli because we've come so far, that we can't just have her turn around and head home, or call her caregiver for a pick-up.

Her caregiver is a woman nick-named Scottie, which is very convenient for a Star Trek fan.  And her older sister is played by Alice Eve, who was in one of the "Star Trek" movies from the re-booted movie series.  (If there are other Easter eggs here, I guess I missed them.).  Once Scottie realizes that Wendy is missing, she and Wendy's sister set out separately to search the highways between San Francisco and L.A.  Meanwhile, Wendy, having learned the hard way that strangers on the road aren't all friendly, is involved in a bus accident and is taken to a hospital.  Still, she manages to not freak out, get herself out of there and continue on her journey, though she keeps losing companions, possessions and portions of her script.

What's redeeming about this story is that I've seen plenty of films where writing is depicted as hard, and in every single one of them, that novelist or screenwriter persists, and ends up with either a best-selling novel, or the genius script (often for the movie with the same title as the one you're watching - ugh, I hate that so much...).  And you have to figure that's imbalanced, for everyone in the real world who writes a successful book or script, there should be at least 99 who either don't finish it, or do finish it, and it's garbage.  You just never see those stories told in Hollywood movies, obviously.  I'd love to see that sometime - the writer in a movie spends hours, days, working on his masterpiece, comes out of his writer's room and announces, "I'm finished!  And it's terrible!"

Wendy gets some very positive feedback about her script, not only from her caregiver's son, and that L.A. cop, but from the people at Paramount.  But winning the competition would perhaps be too simple, plus we're well aware that her script, while complex and intricate and involving time travel through several different "Trek" franchises, could very well be unfilmable.  That's actually refreshing, when compared with the inevitable success of writers in nearly every other Hollywood movie about writing.  But she's learned more about herself and what she's capable of, and that somehow feels more important in the long run.  Kudos for that - but points off for falling back on the very, very tired and overused "My script has been knocked out of my hands, and it's flying around the parking lot!" trope.  So essentially, that's a wash.

EDIT: I've just learned that the production teams working on "The Next Generation", "Deep Space Nine" and "Voyager" did allow amateur fan writers to submit scripts for consideration, some of which got turned into actual episodes.  But, they never ran a formal contest for submissions.

One more NITPICK POINT: When she makes it to Paramount, Wendy is able to walk right on to the lot.  But we all know that most companies and especially movie studios have strict security.  While she's seen evading security when she sneaks on to a bus, I have a feeling the Paramount lot would have been a tougher nut to crack.  OK, OK, two more: What the heck happened to all of the senior citizens who were on that bus?  For that matter, who took care of the other people in the group home when Scottie drove off to look for Wendy?

Also starring Dakota Fanning (last seen in "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood"), Toni Collette (last seen in "Knives Out"), Alice Eve (last seen in "The Con Is On"), River Alexander, Michael Stahl-David (last seen in "Cloverfield"), Jessica Rothe (last seen in "La La Land"), Tony Revolori (last seen in "Spider-Man: Far from Home"), Jacob Wysocki (last seen in "Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising"), Stephanie Allynne (last seen in "Pacific Rim: Uprising"), Robin Weigert (last seen in "Bombshell"), Denise Dowse, Matty Cardarople (last seen in "Drillbit Taylor"), Bill Kottkamp (last seen in "Fist Fight"), Edward Hong, Heath McGough, Shawn Roe, John Prosky (last seen in "Straight Outta Compton"), Joseph A. Nunez, with cameos from Marla Gibbs (last seen in "Lemon"), Laura Innes.

RATING: 6 out of 10 fun-size Snickers bars