My Movie Mania Day

So this past weekend, I had the Fortress of Ineptitude to myself. With wife and daughter on a trip elsewhere, I had a chance to live life free and unfettered from familial concerns.

I was going to live for ME, dammmit! I could do whatever I want! Go wherever I want!

Nothing's gonna stop now!!!

So I wound up watching a lot of TV.  

Sunday was Movie Mania Day where I watched some movies that I may well have not seen under normal circumstances. Two of these movies occupied extreme polar opposite points on the cinematic scale.

First: Bad Moms

Amy Mitchell (Mila Kunis) is an overworked and overscheduled mom with two kids; Amy prepares healthy, handpacked lunches for her children and goes to all of their extracurricular activities. Amy is also a active in her school's PTA, run by the draconian Gwendolyn James (Christina Applegate). She also has a job as a sales rep with a hip coffee company which run by some young guy who’s totally lost without her.  And she does all of this with zero support from a husband Mike she has caught having an online affair. 

All this pressure leads Amy to a bar where she meets meets Carla (Kathryn Hahn), an aggressively sexually-active single mom with an extremely laid back approach to parenting.  And there’s Kiki (Kristen Bell), a stay-at-home mom of four; she has a  domineering husband who  expects her to take care of all the kids and the house with no help whatsoever because that's HER job. 

From this meet up Amy makes new friends and realizes that life doesn't have to be the constant stress fest it has been.  As with the way with movies, things get worse before they get better: therapy with Mike just drives home that their marriage is over. Kip fires Amy from the coffee company. Her kids actually choose dad over her because her less uptight lifestyle is not going over well.  Hell, even the dog chooses to go live with dad. (Well, he is staying at the Waldorf which has a great indoor-outdoor pool and is pet friendly. Amy reminds Mike this is a divorce, not a vacation.) 

Ultimately, everything works out. Amy finds the balance between freedom and control. So yay for moms who drink during the day and discover the number of fucks they have to give can be greatly reduced. Amy also gets her job back with more pay because, well, the movies. 

Hell, Amy, Kiki and Carla even make friends with Gwendolyn. Gwendolyn has a private plane. Of course she does.  

Bad Moms is a raucous movie with fun performances and some good laughs. A lot of these come from Kathryn Hahn as Carla. Carla threatens to bang the other mom's husbands if they don't vote for Amy as PTA president. At a drunken free for all p[arty at Amy's house, Carla also makes out with some of the other moms. Kathryn Hahn plays Carla with a total no holds abandon and absolutely zero shame. 

Still, as put upon as these moms are, they still do seems to manage a lot of extra curricular time away from the kids. There never seems to be a problem finding a sitter. 

Or having money to pay for all those many, many cocktails they're always drinking. 

And yes, Amy's boss was being a dick but she was blowing off work. I couldn't help but think that for most moms in the real world, none of this shit these ladies get away with would fly for a second. Yes, I know Bad Moms is escapist fantasy for any mom (or dad for that matter) pulled in a million different directions at once. But cynical me couldn't get past how far from reality this was.

I will never share Jell-O shots made by Martha Stewart (with a shit load of vodka) with Mila Kunis which has been my lifelong dream for about 5 minutes now.  

Sigh. 

There is  sequel on the way: A Bad Moms Christmas as of November 3, 2017 .  

On the other side of the scale from Bad Moms, I also 
watched Bridge of Spies.  

In 1957 New York City, insurance lawyer James B. Donovan (Tom Hanks) is prevailed upon to defend Rudolf Abel, charged with spying for the Soviet Union.  Committed to the ideal that the accused deserves the best defense, Donovan represents Abel all the way to the Supreme court. For his principles, Donovan and his family are subject to harassment.    

1960 and James Donovan's number comes up again, to negotiate a trade, Rudolf Abel for an American graduate student named Pryor, recently arrested in East Germany.  The Unite States are more interested in getting back someone else, Gary Powers, a pilot in the CIA's top secret U-2 spy plane program shot down over the USSR. 

The CIA unofficially asks Donovan to go to Berlin to negotiate the exchange; he arrives just as The Wall is going up*. 

*No there was not some pompous orange skinned fat buffoon on the East German side threatening to make West Germany pay for it.  

Contrary to CIA orders, Donovan insists both Pryor and Powers should be swapped for Abel. Donovan puts up a strong front with the communist leaders and bluffs there will be no deal unless both Powers & Pryor are released in exchange for Abel. The bluff works and Abel's return to the Soviets successfully secures the release of both Americans.  

Later, back in the United States, the government gives Donovan his public due for saving these two Americans which does a lot to bolster his public image.

During the end credits the audience also learns that Donovan helped negotiate the release of fighters captured during the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. (Should save that one for the sequel: Bridge of Spies II: Electric Boogaloo.) 

 
Bridge of Spies is a quiet movie, fraught with pensive silences and terse exchanges. It is by it's a nature a slow movie but it kept me engaged and that owes to the Cold War atmosphere conjured by director Steven Spielberg and Tom Hank's everyman charm as James Donovan who is not a spy by training but is nonetheless thrust into a world of subterfuge and hidden meanings, Donovan navigates some treacherous territory not expecting victory but only because its the right thing to do, to save both men.   

In addition to Bad Moms and Bridge of Spies, I also saw a documentary called All Things Must Pass, a look at the rise and fall of Tower Records, a record store in Sacramento, CA that grew into a music retail behemoth and pop culture icon. From 45" singles to vinyl albums to CDs, there seemed to be no direction for Tower Records except... up! Expanding to other cities in the United Sates and around the world with a virtually limitless collection of music in a variety of genres, Tower Records seemed destined to survive and prosper forever. 


Until it didn't. With the advent of digital music, the days of customers milling about a store, rummaging through the bins to find something new, something lost or forgotten, something different... those days were gone.  

Al things Must Pass was directed by Colin Hanks. Yep, Tom's son*.   

*To be honest, I was just guessing but it's true: Colin Hanks is the son of Tom Hanks.  
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Also got to see Major League. OK, part of it.

This is one of those movies that I've seen before never in a row. Saw the middle 15 minutes here, caught the last 20 minutes there, watched the first half hour another time. Over time and in bits and pieces, I've seen the whole thing.

This time, I saw the last 45 minutes so finally, I believe my viewing of Major League is now complete.  

This is the story of hapless Cleveland Indians and their biter harpy of an owner who wants to get the fuck out of Cleveland and set up shop in Miami which has the prime advantage of not being Cleveland. To make her plan work, she needs the Indians to suck even more than they already do so attendance at home games will bottom out.  So the team brings on some washed up has beens and untested newbies and all of them have issues. And damn it, they start winning games! Attendance starts going up as this team of losers keep spinning a narrative of winning. 


It is a bit uncomfortable how woman come off in this movie.  There are three notable female parts and two of then are not very nice people at all. 
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Speaking of females roles, I did wind up on the lifetime Movie Network where I caught the last half of a movie called Trapped Sisters.

It's about these sisters.

Who are trapped.

OK, here's some more background on that.  

The sisters are two young women who are swimming in a pool at an aquatic center right at closing time when a plexiglass shield extends out over the water, leaving the two sisters... well, trapped.

There is just enough space between the surface of the pool and the plexiglass covering for the women to breathe. But the crazy woman up top* not only won't open the covering but actually threatens to add water to the pool.

*Yes, of course there's a crazy woman. It's a freakin' Lifetime movie, for crying out loud.

Eventually, the crazy woman has a change of heart and decides to roll back the cover. Except the codes to turn on the machine doesn't work. Then, instead of calling 911, crazy woman leaves because she can't go back to prison.

Below the plexiglass, things ain't too good. There's air to breathe but the water is really cold so the trapped sisters are facing death from hypothermia. And because I came late to the movie, I missed some back story where the sisters have some real messed up shit in their lives they've had to deal with. Apparently, these sisters were trapped by life before being trapped by plexiglass.  

Ooh, that's deep.

Anyway, one of the sisters breaks loose a grate from the bottom of the pool using the power of love or something, the uses the grate to smash a hole in the plexiglass.   

Physically spent but free of their water prison, they realize their real prisons were inside of them... all along.
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And that was my Movie Mania Day on Sunday. Sometimes, a guy needs to watch a bunch of thematically unconnected movies to get though a day.  

More about how I spent the Saturday before that in tomorrow's post. 

Until next time, remember to be good to one another.