Or is it #4? Does Thursday night count?
Anyway, yesterday was the day I got tried of long form content. I watched as much baseball as I possibly could, and then three more movies. My cold (not COVID) has progressed from nose to throat today, in terms of the location of the phlegm, and some coughing. I'm pretty sick of it and it remains to be seen how many movies I feel like I can watch today. I'd really like to get out -- I'm rubbing Ben Gay on my lower back, which hurts from lying all day on, and then sleeping on, the couch in our garage -- but I'm just not up to it.
And of course there were more coincidences.
The one I'm going to tell you about today stretched from my last movie on Friday night to my first movie on Saturday afternoon.
"But Vance," you ask, "Certainly with that kind of gap, you must have had the themes of Friday night's movie in your head when you chose the first movie to watch on Saturday afternoon, at like 3:30 after all the day's baseball was done?"
No.
And besides, one of the worst movies I've seen this year -- Netflix's Fear Street: Prom Queen -- was jammed between these two, watched partially on Friday night and finished Saturday morning.
There are no coincidences involving Fear Street: Prom Queen.
Fleur Fortune's The Assessment and Sean Anders' Instant Family were on two different streaming services, Amazon and Netflix respectively. The first had been on my radar for more than a week as a promising option to add to my 2025 in-progress rankings, and it turned out to be. The second was just from what has been my go-to for this sick period, selecting from "comedy movies" on Netflix.
But both movies were about a couple needing to rapidly develop parenting skills, due to being responsible for kids they didn't have just a few days earlier.
The intriguing concept of The Assessment is that a future couple, living on an isolated island that may not be on planet Earth, has to undergo a week-long assessment by an external assessor if they want the government's okay for them to have children. The couple are played by Elizabeth Olsen and Himesh Patel, their assessor by Alicia Vikander.
They think this is going to be a standard series of questions about their fitness for parenting, checking of their house for safety hazards, that sort of thing. But that sort of thing doesn't take a week.
Instead, on day 2, Vikander's Virginia begins acting like a child. She doesn't tell them that this is what she's doing, but they catch on pretty quick when suddenly she's no longer a prim and proper bureaucrat who seems like she might have stepped out of the world of The Handmaid's Tale, but instead a screaming, crying child who pushes every boundary they can imagine to see how they will handle it. It's a great concept and it plays out in satisfying form.
The circumstances of Instant Family are a little different, but they also involve a previously childless couple being thrust into the intense rigors of parenting to see how they will handle it. And it is essentially also a timed trial period.
Mark Wahlberg and Rose Byrne play a couple who had never had children, by choice, but have started wondering if something is missing from their lives. Instead of going through the standard process of conceiving children, he makes a joke about adopting a couple kids in order for them to move into a house they want to renovate but that is too big for them. Something lodges in her mind, though, and before long they've accepted foster parenting responsibilities for a 15-year-old girl (Isabela Merced) and her two younger siblings (Gustavo Escobar and Julianna Gamiz).
Instead of needing an external assessor to simulate the overwhelming experience of children and the variety of types of problems they present at different ages, the pair gets three children with built-in damage from the fact that they never had a known father and that their drug addicted mother went to prison. And many of the same sorts of disasters result as in The Assessment ... though the different genres of the two movies suggest that the outcomes might be a bit different.
Just so I don't have to write it as a different post, I thought I would leave you with one bonus coincidence that also comes from Instant Family and from the next movie I watched, La Dolce Villa. (This last, though not bad, might have been the one that finally wore me out.)
When I started watching La Dolce Villa, I thought I might have a bigger coincidence on my hands than the one I'm going to tell you about. In addition to Felicity alum Scott Foley, who was good to see again, the movie stars a young actress who I thought was also Isabela Merced. It's actually a young actress by the name of Maia Reficco, but if you look at them side by side, I think you can see where the sense of deja vu came from. (They are about exactly a year apart in age, and Google does autocomplete their names together, so obviously this has been searched before by others.)
This is Isabela, followed by Maia:
The bonus coincidence would still be a coincidence even if they did not look alike.
In both Instant Family and La Dolce Villa, their characters don safety glasses and are invited to participate in the demolishing of a house, which they do with gusto, using a sledgehammer.
The circumstances are a bit different. For Merced's character, it's a way to get out a life's worth of frustrations, an alternative to the previously unproductive ways she's been acting out. For Reficco's character, it's beginning the renovation of the house she's bought in a small Italian town for one euro, in hopes of turning it into a cooking school.
But the image of both of these doppelgangers wearing safety glasses and taking out chunks of walls and cabinetry with sledgehammers, not an hour apart, was pretty surreal for me, I must say.
Incidentally, this was not the only identity confusion I had about Isabela Merced. When this actress first came on my radar, it was in Transformers: The Last Knight, a year before Instant Family came out, and there she was referred to as Isabela Moner. When I looked her up now, she's in IMDB as Isabela Merced. I thought I'd made a mistake in my Transformers review and was even going to go so far as to fix it, but then I noticed she's undergone a change in the way she's professionally credited -- which I hope is not the result of any real-world issues with her real-world biological parents.
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