It's not the next year until you've watched something random

I had had eight nights between finally finishing my 2023 viewings and Thursday night, exactly half of which had featured a movie. (While the other half, you may have figured out by your brilliant skills of deduction, were a "night off." You might not have known, because your skills of deduction wouldn't have helped you here, that two of those nights involved the crucial two episodes of The Crown involving the death of Princess Diana, which I thought were very good.)

All of those four movies, though, were "obligations" in some way -- movies I chose to fulfill a specific goal of mine according to my own self-imposed requirements. They were:

1) Halloween III: Season of the Witch - the movie I was supposed to watch in January for Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta

2) Charlie's Country - the movie I watch involving indigenous Australian subject matter each year on Australia Day

3) Role Play - needing to start building my 2024 movie list

4) Shaft - my first installment of my 2024 monthly series Blaxploitaudient

But the great thing about finishing watching movies from the previous year is that you can watch anything you want, and after eight days, I finally did that.

And what did I want to watch?

Apparently, that was Wagons East.

Or, Wagons East!, as some sites insist on calling it, even though no exclamation point appears in the movie itself. 

It was the result of a lot of scrolling through the options on Amazon, and I'd be lying if I didn't acknowledge it may have been subliminally influenced by hearing a podcast earlier that day where they were talking about that old computer game Oregon Trail.

Although I hadn't specifically remembered this at the time I chose it, this was the movie John Candy was filming when he died in his sleep in March of 1994. The movie itself came out that August. Since I've already seen his second posthumous release, Canadian Bacon, that made this the most recent Candy movie I hadn't seen. And I was always a big fan of this guy, so I probably should have seen this earlier, middling to negative reviews notwithstanding. 

This is not a great movie. It's not even a good movie, though sympathy for Candy, and its ultimate innocuousness, steadily raised my star rating from the one I thought I was going to give it in the first half, to a high of the two I finally did give it by the end. It has almost no jokes that work but it is inoffensive enough. The premise is the best part: that a group of settlers, having struck out in the west, defy logic by deciding to back east again. 

One thing I found interesting, though, is that it does not seem as though there were any scenes Candy obviously hadn't yet filmed when he died. It's not the type of movie that has large leaps in logic and scenes obviously missing. 

It was a little sad to watch it, though, because Candy just doesn't seem like himself. There's no oomph in his performance. He's supposed to be a character with demons -- his wagon master is supposed to have previously led the Donner party, chuckle chuckle -- but it feels like the man himself is the one with the sorrow, beyond the character. We know Candy had demons and often indulged in his vices excessively in order to combat them. It led to his early demise at age 43.

Okay, now that I have gotten my first random watch of 2024 out of the way, I think I might revisit some favorites this weekend -- as well as continue feeding the new 2024 beast, which has only two movie so far and is understandably hungry.