Immediate promotions

You know how I've been telling you that I have a hundred 2022 films in my watchlist and yet I keep watching 2022 movies that were never in it?

Well maybe I didn't tell you that second part. But I have been.

Of the three movies I watched last weekend -- Troll, Violent Night and The Perfumier -- only Violent Night had been on my radar for more than a week, and it wasn't much more. It's not very satisfying to remove movies from your watchlist that had only been on there for a day or two, or are not on there at all.

That happened in the extreme on Friday night.

As my wife and I were getting ready to watch episode 6 of the third season of The Boys with our dinner, the one ad that appears before everything you watch on Amazon was for a movie I'd never heard of called The People We Hate at the Wedding.

An hour later, I was watching it.

Why did I engage in this sort of instant promotion?

1) It was already 10 o'clock on a Friday night. It's been a long and busy week.

2) My rental of Tar still has another two weeks left. No way I'm starting a 158-minute movie after 10 on a Friday night.

3) Not only was it late, but we have a birthday party for my younger son today at the house. (He doesn't turn nine until January 1st, but all the kids get scattered to the winds in the summer so you need to have the party a few weeks early.)

4) Not only are we having a birthday party for my younger son today at the house, but I had already planned to mop the floor in our hardwood kitchen and living room after whatever I watched, so it would be dry by morning without anyone needing to walk on it.

5) That title. It's a good title.

And of course Kristen Bell. Bell has transformed herself into one of our funniest and most likeable screen presences for women of a Certain Age -- she's actually only 42, but I better enjoy her now because Hollywood could ruthlessly put her out to pasture any old time.

Although within this same film there's also a woman who has repeatedly defied the typical Hollywood age ceiling, as a 63-year-old Allison Janney still looks great (there's a scene where she's trying on dresses and she really looks fit), and more to the point, still brings both the comedy and the pathos. (This movie has a surprising amount of the latter, making up for the fact that the former isn't quite to the level you would hope it would be.)

I was also happy to see Dear Evan Hansen star Ben Platt in a movie that showcased his abilities a lot better than the role he's known for. 

Then there was also Dustin Milligan, who played one of Alexis Rose's boyfriends on Schitt's Creek, who I always liked on that show.

Anyway, the whole thing finished a lot more satisfyingly than it started out, though it also finished after 12:45 a.m. after I snoozed my alarm three consecutive times after a ten-minute "nap."

And now I have to start getting the house ready for this party. 

But from here I think I really need to cut out these immediate promotions from watchlist -- yes I did actually add The People We Hate at the Wedding to my watchlist for the sake of posterity -- to screen. Fortunately, we're about to go into a release dead zone before Christmas, where almost everything that's still hitting theaters in December doesn't debut until Boxing Day (Avatar being the lone main exception). 

I'll need this time to finally start sending the watchlist in the other direction.