Delayed Reaction: The Wedding Year

[Note: This is part of a project I'm calling "A Century in a Month". The idea is that I'm going to start with a movie from about 100 years ago and pick a series of connected films until I get to the present. The rules I set this time are release years, per IMDB, can't be more than 5 years apart. I can't repeat the same connection although I can reuse the same type of connection. That means if I use "movies directed by Scorsese" to connect two, I can't use Scorsese as a connection again but I can use a director as a linking element again. I'm not really sure why I'm doing this, but it seems like a fun game.]

Connection to Goodbye to All That: Both Star Anna Camp

 

Premise: A commitment-phobic women gets put to the test when her longtime boyfriend and her get invited to numerous weddings within a year.

 

I get annoyed when people talk about the death of the RomCom as if people aren’t still making them. It’s true that they aren’t a force in the box office anymore. The leads aren’t often A-list stars, and they definitely can’t reach A-list status by starring in RomComs. The budgets aren’t the same as they used to be. But, it doesn’t take a lot of looking to find a half dozen movies like The Wedding Year that hit all the right beats and star a half dozen actors you recognize.

 

That said, I do think the RomCom has run into a problem similar to the multi-cam comedy. Since the mid-2000s, the laugh track comedy, shot on a sound stage in front of an audience has largely disappeared. There are only a few network hold outs. If you watch the few that are left, they aren’t very good. Not compared to the days of Friends or Cheers or Everybody Loves Raymond. What happens is that fewer people make that kind of sitcom, so fewer people know how to make that kind of sitcom. Institutional knowledge that was once passed down from I Love Lucy to The Mary Tyle Moore Show to Family Ties gets lost. So now, if someone actually does want to make a good multi-cam sitcom, there are fewer people around to learn from.

 

I think the same has happened to RomComs in a lot of ways. Even when the casting and the beats are right, something feels off. They don’t look right or the chemistry is off just a little. I liked The Wedding Year, even though it has the feel of a picture that was copied, then the copy was copied, and that copy was copied, etc.

 

The important thing is that Sarah Hyland and Tyler James Williams are winsome enough leads. Both have sitcom backgrounds and know how to hit their marks. I think Tyler James Williams is better at it but not distractingly so. The nature of the movie means the cast is big and most actors aren’t needed for more than a couple scenes. I enjoyed Wanda Sykes injecting some life into it a couple times. Anna Camp and Matt Shively are solid RomCom sidekicks. I don’t have strong feeling about the movie. You’ve seen versions of it before. But it’s a 90-minute RomCom that works like a RomCom should.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Goodbye to All That

[Note: This is part of a project I'm calling "A Century in a Month". The idea is that I'm going to start with a movie from about 100 years ago and pick a series of connected films until I get to the present. The rules I set this time are release years, per IMDB, can't be more than 5 years apart. I can't repeat the same connection although I can reuse the same type of connection. That means if I use "movies directed by Scorsese" to connect two, I can't use Scorsese as a connection again but I can use a director as a linking element again. I'm not really sure why I'm doing this, but it seems like a fun game.]

Connection to The Extra Man: Both star Celia Weston

 

Premise: A man tries to get back into the dating scene after his wife abruptly leaves him.

 

I’m starting to think people don’t know what a dramedy is supposed to be. They treat it like a lazy word when it’s actually a disciplined word. Yes, a dramedy is a movie that is part comedy and part drama. That gets wildly misinterpreted though. Some use it for a drama that happens to feature a lot of comedic actors. Others use it for any movie with a sad part and a funny part. Most commonly, it’s used for any movie someone doesn’t want to define. However, a proper dramedy is really supposed to use both the drama and comedy intentionally. It should be funny. The humor shouldn’t step on the drama though. Perhaps it’s an intentional release for the dramatic moment. Or maybe the dramatic moments ground the comedy. This is why a lot of black comedies work as dramedies. The jokes cope with the hard truths in the film.

 

Goodbye to All That is a drama, albeit one with low stakes and a few mildly comedic moments. I can see why it’s called a dramedy. Paul Schneider was fresh off Parks & Rec. Melanie Lynskey, Anna Camp, and Heather Graham work in a variety of genres, but if I was ever told they were in a movie, ‘comedy’ would be my first guess. Michael Chernus and Amy Sedaris are comedy people. The movie has enough slapstick to stick in a trailer. But, really, it’s about a guy forced into a mid-life crisis after his wife left him. He doesn’t know what he’s doing anymore. He’s struggling with custody for his kid. There’s even a random side-plot about how if he keeps running, he could lose his foot.

 

The problem is, I don’t really know what the movie is trying to do. The comedy is rather forcefully stuck in, like there was a mandate to include it. The divorce stuff felt a lot like a screenwriter working through his own feelings about a divorce. Melanie Lynskey essentially just wants out of the marriage because Paul Schneider is boring. Meanwhile, we see her ambush him with the divorce in a therapy session*, will barely explain anything to him, is callous about keeping their daughter away from him, and was carrying on an affair. I don’t know. It seems like they could’ve approached the divorce from a place that didn’t make Lynskey such a villain. Anna Camp’s character is way broader than the rest of the movie only for it to use her as a third act voice of reason, sort of. I felt pretty duped by how little Heather Graham was in the movie. Her placement on the poster gave me the wrong impression.

 

*Side Rant: The therapist scene is a great example of how the balance of the comedy and drama is all wrong here. The scene in which the therapist essentially breaks up with Schneider for Lynskey is meant to be darkly funny. That sets up a more absurdist perspective to the film, yet it then switches back to expecting the audience to take it all seriously at other points, when it’s convenient.

 

Yeah, I didn’t like this movie much. I think it may be that I just don’t care for Angus MacLachlan as a filmmaker. He also wrote (but didn’t direct) Junebug which I had similar issues with. I like few of the characters and the conflicts feel artificial.

 

Verdict: Strongly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: The Extra Man

[Note: This is part of a project I'm calling "A Century in a Month". The idea is that I'm going to start with a movie from about 100 years ago and pick a series of connected films until I get to the present. The rules I set this time are release years, per IMDB, can't be more than 5 years apart. I can't repeat the same connection although I can reuse the same type of connection. That means if I use "movies directed by Scorsese" to connect two, I can't use Scorsese as a connection again but I can use a director as a linking element again. I'm not really sure why I'm doing this, but it seems like a fun game.]

Connection to As You Like It: Both star Kevin Kline

 

Premise: A young man moves to New York City after losing his job and rents a room with an odd, failed playwright.

 

I’m on the home stretch of my “Century in a Month” project at this point. By 2010 and beyond, I’ve seen a lot of the movies I want to see. The options start to get thin. I’ll take anything that gets me closer to the end, and I’m likely to find out why I never sought the films out before.

 

I hated The Extra Man, and in hindsight, that should not have been much of a surprise. It’s adapted from a Jonathan Ames book. I don’t know a lot about Ames. I know that I checked out immediately from his HBO show, Bored to Death, because the humor didn’t work for me. I recall reading some columns of his in Playboy*. He felt pretentious in those. The Extra Man carries over the exact tone that bothered me from my other exposure to Ames’ work.

 

*I had a subscription for several years as some sort of statement that I actually read the articles. I’ll add this to the list of reasons why I must’ve been insufferable in college.

 

This leans into all of Paul Dano’s worst “sad boy” instincts. The story about him being an aspiring crossdresser didn’t sit well with me. It felt like it was written by a non-crossdresser trying to imagine what a crossdresser’s motivation was. It reminded me a bit of in high school when a straight kid would ask a gay kid if he ever looked as his own penis and got aroused” * He clearly just isn’t getting it. Kevin Kline is instructed to go buck wild throughout the film. It’s reminiscent to a poorly-written Frasier Crane. Making a high-minded or obscure reference is only funny if it is crafted around a joke. In Frasier, people aren’t laughing because they get his opera reference. They laugh because it’s delivered like a joke and the punchline is that he sounds full of himself. As a result, Kline is just insufferable from beginning to end. He’s making smart comments whimsically, not comedically. This is a 1h48m movie and I was checking how much time was left 30 minutes in.

 

*I’m not trying to absolve myself there. I made many comments to gay friends that I thought passed as wit at the time.

 

I’ll be generous and suggest that there’s a very specific audience this movie will work for. I was not that audience. It very much had the feeling that I was someone’s ‘plus one’ at a medical convention where the keynote speaker kept cracking med school jokes.

 

Verdict: Strongly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: As You Like It

[Note: This is part of a project I'm calling "A Century in a Month". The idea is that I'm going to start with a movie from about 100 years ago and pick a series of connected films until I get to the present. The rules I set this time are release years, per IMDB, can't be more than 5 years apart. I can't repeat the same connection although I can reuse the same type of connection. That means if I use "movies directed by Scorsese" to connect two, I can't use Scorsese as a connection again but I can use a director as a linking element again. I'm not really sure why I'm doing this, but it seems like a fun game.]

Connection to Texas Rangers: Both star Alfred Molina

 

Premise: The Shakespeare play As You Like It but transplanted to 19^th century Japan.

 

By now, I think I’ve made my stance pretty clear about Shakespeare adaptations. Basically, I’m tired of films trying to strike a balance. Either use the story and release yourself from the shackles of the dialogue or embrace the fact that we are watching a play. I appreciated what the 1944 Henry V does, literally starting as a stage production so we can appreciate it as an audience in his time would’ve. It then drifts into something more cinematic. It fully embraces the theatricality. What I struggle with are the adaptations where they try to bring life to Shakespeare’s language in a real-world setting. The characters are speaking in verse. I’m sorry. By design that’s not supposed to sound natural. I find it tedious.

 

I do appreciate that As You Like It moved the setting of the film. That late 19^th century period in Japan when it rapidly tried to embrace the modern world looks cool and isn’t explored enough in film. I liked the epilogue, where Bryce Dallas Howard addresses the camera directly from the film set. I would’ve appreciated more of that throughout the film. As long as everyone is speaking the Shakespeare language, the audience isn’t going to forget that this is a play in the same way that while characters sing an audience won’t forget something is a musical. So, embrace that this is a play with a budget that a play would never get. Be a Romeo + Juliet.

 

All that said, I suppose if someone is going to do another Shakespeare film, Kenneth Branagh has the credentials. While I don’t understand the decision to avoid casting many Asian actors, the actors they did get provided a good variety. Bryce Dallas Howard, Kevin Kline, Janet McTeer, Alfred Molina, and David Oyelowo all carry themselves like they’ve done Shakespeare productions before. The movie does look pretty. In a world where I wasn’t so tired of Shakespeare adaptations, this would be ok.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Texas Rangers

[Note: This is part of a project I'm calling "A Century in a Month". The idea is that I'm going to start with a movie from about 100 years ago and pick a series of connected films until I get to the present. The rules I set this time are release years, per IMDB, can't be more than 5 years apart. I can't repeat the same connection although I can reuse the same type of connection. That means if I use "movies directed by Scorsese" to connect two, I can't use Scorsese as a connection again but I can use a director as a linking element again. I'm not really sure why I'm doing this, but it seems like a fun game.]

Connection to Big Bully: Both directed by Steve Miner

 

Premise: A group of young men are recruited to be Texas Rangers and stop a band of criminals in the Wild West.

 

Here’s what I find most entertaining about this movie. I am confident that most people who kind of remember this movie actually don’t. They do remember a 2001 movie about the Wild West with a cast of young stars and a modern sensibility. That movie is American Outlaws, starring Colin Farrell, Scott Caan, and Ali Larter. That’s the one that got a healthy nationwide release and ad campaign. Texas Rangers came out a few months later and bombed hard enough to make American Outlaws look like a success. We love to talk about the Hollywood production siblings like Dante’s Peak and Volcano or Deep Impact and Armageddon. We tend to forget the times when both movies tanked, like Texas Rangers and American Outlaws.

 

Texas Rangers is bad in a nearly kitschy way. It’s got James Van Der Beek, Rachael Leigh Cook, Ashton Kutcher, and Usher, which may make it the most 2001 cast ever. And Dylan McDermott being the veteran of the group, cresting on The Practice success even dates it. That’s a lot of people who have achieved a level of fame and don’t know what to do with it. Van Der Beek and Kutcher are trying to turn TV roles into leading man careers, as Leonardo DiCaprio, Will Smith, and George Clooney had done that decade. Cook was looking for the project that would cement her status after She’s All That. Usher was making one of his many attempts to move from singing to film. There’s a hunger to all of them that shows.

 

It doesn’t help that director Steve Milner is about as journeyman as it gets. His early fame was from Friday the 13^th sequels and directing episodes of The Wonder Years. I don’t know how to explain this, but it shows. He was my connecting point to get from Big Bully to Texas Rangers for “Century in a Month”. He directed both. TV was made fast back in the days of The Wonder Years, the rare single-cam comedy of the era. You forgive a lack of detail in a show. The period clothes aren’t going to be as worn. The house doesn’t always look that lived in. The same can be said about horror. It’s made quick and cheap in most cases. The focus isn’t on the detail work. Someone who starts a career like this (horror and TV) can get used to shortcuts that don’t work elsewhere. That’s why there’s a “kid who just made his first PowerPoint presentation” feeling to this movie. The shots and transitions call a little too much attention to themselves. The sets and costumes look like they were borrowed from a Wild West theme park. There’s an artificiality to the movie that’s not helped by the stars all looking very modern. All the pieces together combine into a movie that works so poorly that there’s almost a charm to it. Like, if the movie had embraced how anachronistic it felt, it could’ve worked a lot better. This was the same year as A Knight’s Tale. That’s the Texas Rangers template that could’ve worked. Not this glorified extended pilot.

 

Verdict: Strongly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Big Bully

[Note: This is part of a project I'm calling "A Century in a Month". The idea is that I'm going to start with a movie from about 100 years ago and pick a series of connected films until I get to the present. The rules I set this time are release years, per IMDB, can't be more than 5 years apart. I can't repeat the same connection although I can reuse the same type of connection. That means if I use "movies directed by Scorsese" to connect two, I can't use Scorsese as a connection again but I can use a director as a linking element again. I'm not really sure why I'm doing this, but it seems like a fun game.]

Connection to White Sands: Both produced by Berber & Robinson

 

Premise: An author returns to his home town and runs into his childhood bully, who resumes torturing him.

 

One thing that became quickly apparent as I watched Big Bully was that I’d absolutely seen this movie before. That happens sometimes. I’ve spent hundreds of hours tracking and recalling movies I’ve seen, but it’s hard to recall every movie I caught when I was 10 on HBO at noon, after Fox Kids was done and I refused my parents’ pleas to do something outside. In general, if I’m not 90% certain I’ve seen a movie, I err on the side of caution and don’t count it. So, for the purpose of this “Century in a Month” project, this still counts as an eligible movie.

 

I hate to “only 90s kids will understand” a situation, but I do think it’s true that the 90s were particularly lousy with a type of theatrical film that had no interest in appealing to the adults. It was a mix of conditions. The invention of PG-13 in the 80s fractured the landscape, ghettoizing the G and PG space even more. The rise of Nickelodeon by the 90s created a profitable landscape for targeting only children. By the 2000s, outlets like Disney Channel were making their original movies and the major studios leaned even more heavily into animation. By now, with the disappearance of the film budget middle class (only blockbusters and indies) and the rise of streaming, it’s hard to come by a Big Bully anymore*.

 

*I’m saying the 90s, but the era I’m talking about is more accurately late 80s-late 00s.

 

This is a bad movie that almost accidentally stumbles into some really interesting stuff. There’s a lazy Stand By Me riff at the beginning that goes on a little too long. Then it moves to Rick Moranis and Tom Arnold as adults. And that’s where the interesting ideas pop up. I like that Moranis and Arnold’s kids swap places, with Moranis’ son bullying Arnold’s son. The film starts with them fulfilling the lie every bullied kid’s parent tells them, with Moranis as a reasonably successful author and Arnold’s life going downhill since his days as a bully. Arnold has turned into a nice guy over the years, but something in his brain snaps when he sees Moranis again. He realizes that life was good when he was a bully, so he decides to be a bully again…And his life does improve. The movie never reckons with that really striking idea: bullying improved his life. Really though, it’s tied to confidence more than bullying. Moving back home is a ding on Moranis’ pride that opens him up to bullying again. Arnold gets confidence from the power he feels bullying. Both are looking for the same thing but from different ends.

 

The movie ultimately does nothing with this. Instead, it’s a bunch of childish pranks and characters not taking the 15 seconds required to diffuse any situation. This isn’t surprising. It is a rightfully forgotten movie from 1996, aimed only at children, so there’s no reason to expect more. It was weird though watching this and realizing they actually stumbled onto some good stuff.

 

Also, can we take a second to talk about how weird it is that Rick Moranis was a big star in the 90s? The only reason he doesn’t have the same string of increasingly disappointing family movies as Steve Martin and Robin Williams is because he specifically stepped back from his career. That guy was a top of the poster star though. Let’s just say Big Bully wasn’t the best use of him.

 

Verdict: Strongly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: White Sands

[Note: This is part of a project I'm calling "A Century in a Month". The idea is that I'm going to start with a movie from about 100 years ago and pick a series of connected films until I get to the present. The rules I set this time are release years, per IMDB, can't be more than 5 years apart. I can't repeat the same connection although I can reuse the same type of connection. That means if I use "movies directed by Scorsese" to connect two, I can't use Scorsese as a connection again but I can use a director as a linking element again. I'm not really sure why I'm doing this, but it seems like a fun game.]

Connection to The January Man: Both star Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio

 

Premise: A small town sheriff accidentally becomes part of an FBI investigation.

 

Complete transparency here. I was racing to finish this “Century in a Month” project in a month, and prioritized watching the movies to writing the Reactions. So, I’m writing most of these about a week or two after watching them. There are benefits to doing that sometimes. It gives my thoughts time to crystalize about a movie. I might come up with an angle that I didn’t have right after watching. The problem is that some movies just slip away in my mind. That’s White Sands. At best, this movie is OK. I might’ve had some interesting initial thoughts after watching it, but most of what’s left now are pretty broad.

 

The cast is what I found most notable about the movie. Like, Willem Dafoe. I forget about his leading man era. Sure, there are the art films like The Last Temptation of Christ, but they also tried to pitch him as a populist movie star. The kind of guy who could’ve been played by any actor and not specifically by Willem Dafoe. There’s a reason why they didn’t last. He’s a very specific actor. It’s strange to me how Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio just kind of went away. I don’t think she had big bombs attached to her. I don’t think she was black balled by anyone. After 1995, her work got very sporadic. She had a couple children at some point and started working on the stage more. I wonder if this was a natural shift for her or did she hit her mid-30s and the roles dried up? It’s a shame though. She’s generally pretty good in stuff. Mickey Rourke I just don’t like. Even in his star days he seemed off. More accurately, he seems like a prick and I’d believe he was no fun to work with. He’s not even interesting to me as a villain. It’s kind of like how I can watch Ed Norton play a neo-Nazi in American History X and appreciate the performance, but if the role was being played by an actual neo-Nazi it would be off-putting. I can’t watch Mickey Rourke be a prick in a movie because it feels too much like his natural state.

 

Anyway, White Sands is a pretty enjoyable forgettable movie. There’s a brand of crime movie from the 90s that would probably be forgettable TV series today. They are character-based and feel episodic. It’s very easy for me to imagine the 8-episode limited series of this movie that would be about 3 episodes too long. It makes me realize that when people ask where the mid-budget movie for adults went, the answer is “to streamers as series”.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: The January Man

[Note: This is part of a project I'm calling "A Century in a Month". The idea is that I'm going to start with a movie from about 100 years ago and pick a series of connected films until I get to the present. The rules I set this time are release years, per IMDB, can't be more than 5 years apart. I can't repeat the same connection although I can reuse the same type of connection. That means if I use "movies directed by Scorsese" to connect two, I can't use Scorsese as a connection again but I can use a director as a linking element again. I'm not really sure why I'm doing this, but it seems like a fun game.]

Connection to Once Upon a Time In America: Both star Danny Aiello

 

Premise: A brilliant former NYPD detective get brought back in to solve a string of murders.

 

Hold on a second. People hated this movie? It has a 24% on Rotten Tomatoes and the likes of Roger Ebert himself absolutely panned it?

 

You see, this is why I’ll admit that reviews immediately upon the release of a movie can be useless. No matter how smart or self-aware we think we are, we are prisoners of the moment. I know I’ve written dozens if not hundreds of Reactions that I’ve gone back to later and wondered why I was being such a prickly ass. I’ve talked about this before in regards to Must Love Dogs. That’s a perfectly enjoyable RomCom that was panned for being a perfectly enjoyable RomCom in an era where there was an abundance of perfectly enjoyable RomComs. However, I watch a movie like that now and wish we could get more RomComs that were that competently made. I suspect the same thing happened with The January Man. When there’s a deficit, you miss the days of surplus.

 

There was a mini wave of crime comedies in the late 80s and early 90s. It started with the buddy cop movies like 48 Hours and later Lethal Weapon. Over time, it evolved into movies that tried to have the best of both worlds like A Fish Called Wanda, Dead Again, and The January Man, trying to be funny, exciting, and romantic. Or more generally, this was an era of an abundance of mid-budget, non-franchise movies targeted at adults. It could be hard to stick out, and if a film felt too much like another film, even if both were well-made, they could be panned by critics and audiences alike. Because, let me be clear. It wasn’t just critics who rejected The January Man. It was audiences too. The film only made $4.6 million at the box office.

I only watched it because it fit my “Century in a Month” timeline and the cast was great. This movie has Kevin Kline, Susan Sarandon, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Harvey Keitel, Danny Aiello, and Alan Rickman. That’s very strong; especially for 1989.

 

Is The January Man thin? Yes. It feels like an extended pilot for a new cop series in a lot of ways. Does The January Man try to do too much? Absolutely. It can shift wildly from slapstick comedy to romance to crime and violence in ways that don’t always fit neatly together. Did I enjoy the heck out of the movie? Very much. In an age of gritty crime dramas where each movie is trying to be darker than the last, it’s nice to watch something that’s willing to play around.

 

The key, I discovered later, is the screenwriter of the movie: John Patrick Shanley. A year after this, he went onto write and direct Joe Vs. the Volcano which is a magical movie that mixes RomCom trappings with bizarre magical realism. In 2020 he wrote and directed the absolutely unhinged Wild Mountain Thyme that I’m ashamed to say I kind of loved. He wrote Moonstruck too, which is a beloved movie that I really need to rewatch. He mostly works in the theater and the rest of his movie output is mixed. I do think what I love so much about him is his sense of play. He takes a tame idea and wonders what it would look like if he threw something crazy in for no reason. It probably should bother me. It does when a lot of other writers/directors do it, but I like how he does it for some reason.

 

It’s a shame that true channel surfing doesn’t exist anymore, because The January Man is a quintessential channel surf movie. If I talk anyone into watching this, it will probably underwhelm. It’s an unassuming movie. The best way to watch this is as a surprise. You see Kevin Kline is in this movie. You like Kevin Kline. You don’t have anything else to do for the next 90 minutes. Might as well watch this for a bit to see what it’s about. Despite that, for my surprise factor alone, I’m calling this a rave.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Persuasion

Premise: A heartbroken 19^th century woman with herself to blame finds herself around the man she loved and spurned years before.

There are times when it’s better to just not read books. I don’t think this movie ever stood a chance, because those Jane Austen fans can really mobilize when they aren’t pleased. Apparently, the novel has a lot more romantic tension. The protagonist is more wound up. Beyond the basics of the story, this film adaptation doesn’t seem to have much at all in common with the book.

 

I thought this movie was fine though. It’s thoroughly average. Dakota Johnson is odd casting. She wouldn’t fit in a normal costume drama. She reads as too modern, but in a take like this one, where it’s Jane Austen by way of Fleabag, she works well. The best word to describe the movie overall is ‘jaunty’. There’s a little drama with Johnson and the love she left behind who has returned. You could throw it in the middle of a Bridgerton season and it wouldn’t feel out of place.

 

So, from what I’ve gathered, if you’ve read the book, avoid this movie. The changes will piss you off. If you haven’t read the book, watch this if you like Dakota Johnson. It’s perfectly watchable.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Once Upon a Time in America

[Note: This is part of a project I'm calling "A Century in a Month". The idea is that I'm going to start with a movie from about 100 years ago and pick a series of connected films until I get to the present. The rules I set this time are release years, per IMDB, can't be more than 5 years apart. I can't repeat the same connection although I can reuse the same type of connection. That means if I use "movies directed by Scorsese" to connect two, I can't use Scorsese as a connection again but I can use a director as a linking element again. I'm not really sure why I'm doing this, but it seems like a fun game.]

Connection to Hair: Both star Treat Williams

 

Premise: A group of Jewish gangsters thrive then fall apart with the passing then repeal of prohibition.

 

There’s a special section of my movie list for movies I’m sure I’d like, but who has the time? It’s full of movies like Heaven’s Gate, the original Solaris, and Shoah that I’m certain I’ll like or at least appreciate but it’s so hard to convince myself to spend 3+ hours on one movie. Thankfully, this “Century in a Month” project backed me into a corner when I could either watch Once Upon a Time in America or 2 other movies to get to the same place in the timeline.

 

This movie is an infamous bomb. It was released in 1984 with a massively shortened cut. I won’t say that all 3 hours and 49 minutes of the re-release cut were essential, but the breadth of the story couldn’t handle the 90 minutes of cuts made to it. I hope I never have to see that version.

The full version of the film is familiar but good. Yes, it does feel like people keep making the same movie about New York City just in different decades (The Godfather, Gangs of New York, Goodfellas). You either like that kind of movie or you don’t. I do enjoy it.

 

This cast is crazy. Until the very end, new faces keep popping up. Even one of the kid roles went to a future Oscar winner (Jennifer Connelly). I’m so used to Grudge Match-era Robert De Niro, that I can forget how much of a god damn movie star he was back in the day. It’s almost frustrating how good James Woods was in the 80s, because he’s such a public prick now.

There are definitely worse ways to kill 4 hours.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend