Snow in September and other Drunk idiocy

Describing what makes bad movies bad can be a pretty fruitless exercise. You may get a great negative energy going, but there's a "you had to be there" quality to bad movies, as the poor concept and execution can manifest themselves in ineffable details -- a bad line delivery here, a weird reaction shot there, an abrupt edit here, a shoddily delivered piece of exposition there. You know it when you see it but you can't always describe it to someone else. You find yourself using the word "bad" a lot and feeling sort of dissatisfied by how you've conveyed the movie's awfulness.

But sometimes there are details of a movie that are so disastrous that they speak for themselves and bust out of the limitations of context specificity.

Drunk Parents, a movie my wife and I thought would be fun to watch on Saturday night because it stars Alec Baldwin and Salma Hayek, starts out with the two main characters delivering their daughter to college. Unbeknownst to her, they are the fallen rich, destitute and indebted to creditors after the medical product they invented started getting bad headlines and draining them of all their profitability. Their return to an empty house -- soon literally as they put much of their furniture out on the lawn -- kicks off a seven-day binge of drinking and bad decisions that are supposed to be funny. They're not, but that doesn't have anything to do with my setup here.

To make sure we never lose track of the fact that this movie takes place only within a week, the words "Day 2" and "Day 3" and "Day 4" appear on screen at various intervals.

On "Day 6," I think it was, there is a snowstorm.

The snowstorm is as unnecessary to the plot as any other detail shoved into this story, including the waste of cameos by Will Ferrell and Colin Quinn as homeless people. So its inclusion is all the more careless and egregious because it occurs in September -- in early September, at that.

The latest you could possibly deposit your daughter at college would be about September 5th, with an August start date much more likely, especially for incoming freshmen, who sometimes get to campus before the older students return. I know at my college, I got there around August 20th to go on a pre-orientation canoeing trip. So conceivably, this snowstorm could actually be in August.

I'm not going to say there has never been a snowstorm in the U.S. in August or September, but if there had been, it would have to be in Alaska. And there's no indication whatsoever that these people live in Alaska. I'm not sure if the location was mentioned (though I have to admit that I stopped paying attention to every detail), but I imagined this movie to take place somewhere in New England. There's a guy with a Boston accent, anyway, though he's the only one.

If you want to convince me that the appearance of snow in September is meant to be another absurd improbability that adds comedic value to the whole enterprise, I'm not really buying that, or they needed to make more of the fact that the snow was unlikely, if that were the case. Instead, the only explanation seems to be that they had such a short shooting schedule that when it snowed, they just had to incorporate it into the action because they didn't have any other choice.

If you want to try to convince me that Baldwin and Hayek were dropping their daughter off after winter break, well, that doesn't make sense either. It's clear that their nest has only just been emptied, especially given the tenor of their departure from her (the big emotional hug, the proclamations of love, the listing of how far away they are by car or by plane if she needs anything).

Oh, and here's the definitive proof of when it takes place -- at the end the action jumps "two months later," to a Thanksgiving dinner.

So this really is just the continuity person being drunk, or maybe that hilarious shooting schedule compromise.

If trying to account for the utter disaster that is Drunk Parents, someone from the production might try to explain away a detail like this as an intentional bit of meta absurdity. The movie very unwisely tries to be meta on a couple of occasions, as when one character observes the fact that the parents are hard to keep track of because they're in a new location "every 16 minutes" -- which seems to be a description of movie screen time, based on the conventions of constructing a screenplay, rather than real-world time. Then there's the fact that the bums (Baldwin refers to them to their faces as "Bum" on multiple occasions) played by Quinn and Ferrell are named, um, Colin and Will. Someone must have thought that was hi-larious.

I did emit surprise laughter on a couple occasions in the first 20 minutes of the movie, so you might think it wasn't a total loss. But really, it is, and by the end I was inspired to give this movie only a half-star, a Letterboxd rating that I reserve for the worst of the worst. That's Cats territory. If this were just a bad (there's that word) or inept comedy, it might have earned a full star, but it commits the dual sins of bad taste (there are a lot of questionable jokes about a sex offender played by Jim Gaffigan) and undignified slapstick (most of it performed by Hayek). It really is shit.

Because I can't resist discussing one technical gaffe, I'll say that I can't remember seeing a film where the mix between the sound and the dialogue and/or the narration was more unbalanced. For no reason I could discern, there is a bookend narration by Quinn's character, but especially with the end one, you can barely even hear what he's saying because the end music dominates it. So not only did no one watch this film before deciding it was finished, they didn't listen to it either.

Perhaps the film's most fundamental failure is that it cannot even see its premise through to the end. If this movie is designed to occur over a week's time, and it's called Drunk Parents, at the very least we should see them continuing to pickle themselves over the course of the running time, and the regular consumption of alcohol informing the increasingly unhinged choices they're making. Instead, if memory serves, they take their last drink on about Day 2.

Each February 29th I watch the worst movie I can find, a tradition I started back in 2008. I'll write more about that when the end of this month rolls around. But because I keep track of such things, I can tell you that each of my previous February 29th viewings was the worst movie I saw that month -- easily the worst, I would venture.

My 2020 February 29th viewing already has some early competition for that dishonor.