For starters, please let me say that I do not call, and have
never called, my wife or any person with whom I have been romantically linked “my
baby.” But for the purposes of this post, let’s pretend I do.
However, even allowing that concession, there was some
uncertainty whether I’d call this post “Baby
with my baby” or “Baby without my
baby.”
You see, once my children were packed away to their aunt’s
house for the second straight Saturday of MIFF – thanks for the consecutive
sleepovers, AL! – my wife decided to come along with me to my 1:30 screening of
the Chinese film Baby at Hoyts
Melbourne Central. (And I’ll say that before I decided to call my last MIFF
post “Mid-week at Hoyts,” I should have looked ahead to recognize that my two
Saturday screenings were also here.) She’s still trying to burn through the
extra tickets of the second minipass she was given.
The only thing is, the sleepover didn’t start quite as early
as we’d hoped. My sister-in-law was a little later than she said she’d be in
picking them up, a fact I mention only in the context of this story, and not
to make her feel bad about it, even though she will likely never read this. Our
gratitude knows no bounds. And because we were indeed getting a second straight
Saturday night/Sunday morning to ourselves, it did not seem very sporting to
hurry her along to pick up the kids.
So the time to leave for Baby
came, and my sister-in-law was not yet there. I offered to stay back with my
wife, but she insisted that we should not both miss the movie. As I had had
this on my schedule from the start, and she was a late add, I guess she thought
that was sufficiently convincing logic that I should go ahead while she stayed
back.
There was still the chance she’d make it on time, but when I
disembarked the tram in front of Melbourne Central, she reported via text that
her sister had not yet arrived. I considered it a lost cause and made my way up
to the movie, leaving no open seat for her next to me.
Imagine my surprise when I turned on my phone after the
movie and there were texts from her saying “I’m almost there! Hopefully won’t
miss too much” and “I’m here.” The funny thing is, I should have seen her
walking in as she couldn’t have crossed my line of vision without me noticing
her, but apparently she did. So while we both saw the movie, I didn’t actually
see it “with” her, per se.
Unfortunately, when I saw these texts, I had been all ready
to text her saying “Consider yourself lucky. That movie sucked.” Maybe the key
to liking it was the difference between watching it from the start and arriving
15 minutes late, because she said she did like it. I got off on the wrong foot
with it and never recovered.
The movie is about an 18-year-old orphan who has reached the
age of maturity where she must move on from her foster parent. She had
congenital defects that required multiple surgeries but has come out the other
end mostly intact, though she can’t have her own children. She’s working at a
hospital and she sees another baby with similar medical problems to hers, where
the parents have decided not to give the child potentially life-saving surgery
because her life will be so hard. This angers the main character and she plots
to change their mind or kidnap the baby.
That plot summary makes the movie sound good, but I found it
pretty amateurishly acted and made. The dialogue is extremely on the nose and
the whole thing is procedure and exposition, with no subtle character moments
or moments of grace. As I said previously, director Jie Liu et al bungled
laying the groundwork, such that I had some basic assumptions about the setup that
ended up being wrong. I didn’t buy a number of the things that happened,
including the parents deciding to let their daughter die. It’s not that this
might not be a true choice people in their position would make, but the film
didn’t convince me of it, and struggled to convince me of a number of other
things. It just didn’t work for me. In fact, I probably would have given it
less than the two stars I ultimately awarded it, except that my wife’s moderate
affection for it made me reconsider whether I was being too hard on it.
I went home for a nap – ah, the luxury of having the
children out of the house! – and then the two of us both returned that night
for a second movie, only this time not the same one. The thing is, I think my
wife would have also accompanied me on this one if she’d properly realized what
I was seeing. That second movie was an Irish paranormal film called Extra
Ordinary, and it features American comic actor Will Forte, whom we both love. I
think at the time I recommended it to her, she was too busy with other things
and the recommendation went over her head. By the time the date actually rolled
around, she had picked another movie, also at Hoyts starting at the same time,
so we could arrive and leave together. (Before that we had drinks at a cool laneway
bar and a chicken sandwich at a not-cool restaurant in the food court.)
According to my original schedule, Extra Ordinary was going to be my 2019 MIFF midnight movie. See, on
Friday and Saturday nights, MIFF has a show that starts at 11:30, and I’ve gone
to two of those in the past: Baskin
in 2016 and The Night Eats the World
last year. I had to exchange my ticket for last Friday’s 11:30 showing of Extra
Ordinary when my wife had a conflict, but ended up seeing it this Saturday instead.
(And that exchange warrants a word or two, as a MIFF customer service rep had
to help put it through when the website thought my minipass was full. But she
was a credit to MIFF as she got it processed for me straight away, no fuss no
muss.)
Anyway, this was a fun and cute movie. It involves an Irish
woman who is the daughter of a TV medium who can talk to ghosts, a talent he
passed on to her. She doesn’t do that anymore, though, and makes her living at
the moment as a driving instructor. Of course, she gets pulled back into the
game when an American one-hit wonder (Forte) makes a deal with the devil to get
his music career back on track, and that involves the sacrificing of a virgin,
the daughter of a local townsperson who seeks out her services to help. I
laughed a fair amount and the movie is pretty clever, but I’d be lying if I
said that Forte’s brand of humor blended perfectly with the core Irish humor of
the rest of the characters. It did also have Claudia O’Doherty, the Australian
comedienne late of Netflix’s Love, so
that was a bonus.
Oh! The popcorn.
My wife wanted to get a “choctop” – a prepackaged ice cream
cone that has a hard chocolate shell holding the ice cream in – so I also
decided to pick up a box of nacho flavored popcorn. The funny thing is, my
popcorn came with a free popcorn. I guess the coconut flavor was not selling,
so now they were just giving it away. I didn’t need two popcorns, but you can
bet I ended up eating both of them. And I pity those who have turned their
noses up at the coconut flavor. It’s only a hint of coconut, and really, the
thing just tastes like kettle corn, which is a flavor I like quite a bit.
After a fairly intense first ten days of MIFF, I’ve now got
a huge break. I don’t go back until Thursday, when I will see my final two
movies of 2019. Assuming no cancellations (or additions), it’ll be a personal record 13 MIFF
movies this year. Hallelujah.
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