Feelings double feeture

Yes I know I spelled "feature" wrong.

I wrote earlier this year about the existence of two 2023 films with the word "feelings" in the title, but since their U.S. release dates were separated by a month, I didn't envision that they would make a viable theatrical double feature.

Fortunately, in Australia their release dates were separated by only a week.

Nicole Holofcener's You Hurt My Feelings hit cinemas on June 15th, with Gene Stupnitsky's No Hard Feelings following suit on June 22nd. On Tuesday night, I saw them back to back, because I was not missing that opportunity.

As an extra novelty, my wife joined me -- but only for the first film. (She felt someone needed to go home to feed our kids dinner.) We think it was the first movie just the two of us had seen in the theater together, without our kids present, since Joker, which was not a pleasant experience for either of us.

The extra casualness with rules -- leaving our 12-year-old at home in charge of our nine-year-old -- was a result of it being school holidays. I usually get off work around 4:30, and judged that we could make it to Yarraville by 4:50 to see No Hard Feelings. (And only just did -- I didn't factor in the extra time it would take during rush hour traffic.) Then with only about ten minutes in between them, You Hurt My Feelings would follow at 6:50. Popcorn and peanut M&M's would suffice as my dinner.

Neither film reached the heights I had hoped. As it's been out longer, I wrote a review of You Hurt My Feelings first, which you can find here. I expect to write my No Hard Feelings review tomorrow if you want to check the link to the right. 

I've already landed on a 7/10 (3.5 stars) for Holofcener's film, which I think might be a little generous -- and if I end up with the same rating for Stupnitsky's, it will also be a little generous.

But because I really don't want these films to disappear from the theatrical release schedule, since these represent two of the more endangered types of mainstream films, I don't mind if I assess them a little more generously than they deserve.

And anyway, I really don't want to hurt their feelings. 

Neither Elemental nor The Flash

I've been sick on and off for about two weeks, so that also means I haven't really gotten out to the movies. I'd say I haven't gotten out at all, except that's not exactly true -- though more on that in a minute.

In fact, because I started to get sick two Tuesday nights ago, I hadn't been to see a movie since the Saturday night before that when my older son and I went to see Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. That was 17 days ago, an eternity in my world.

I'm a grown-up and I can wait to get back to the movies. But my website can't wait -- or at least, that's what I tell myself. You need to keep feeding reviews to your hypothetical audience or else they will leave you.

There haven't been any good streaming releases lately, and the offerings at the cinema hadn't really been wowing me either. That is, until all the sudden in one burst they started to.

Last Thursday saw the release of DC's The Flash, Pixar's Elemental and Nicole Holofcener's You Hurt My Feelings, all of which I planned to see and review. And by this past Sunday, I was feeling well enough to take my kids to one of them -- though probably not the one starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus as a woman in a co-dependent relationship.

My first instinct was Elemental, since I still consider Pixar movies to be events and since I knew there would be no issue of the content appropriateness for my younger son. I knew it would probably rule out my older son, but he's getting pretty indifferent to movies in general -- or wanting to watch things like Scream VI, as I wrote about yesterday.

The problem with Elemental is that the younger one is going to daytime activities at his school some of the days during school holidays, which starts at the end of this week. One of those is going to see Elemental, and my wife didn't want to lose that as a carrot on the end of the stick to get him to go to those activities without complaining.

So I shifted to The Flash. Bad idea. 

The older one still didn't want to go -- he's a bit superhero'd out -- and the younger one agreed with a shrug, which seemed to say "I wouldn't have considered it, but okay." He's still at the age where any activity with his daddy is a good activity.

But my son has a couple sensory issues, and one of them is an aversion to loud noises. The cinema assumes the opposite of its viewers, that the louder they play it, the better. So the Sun in Yarraville played it as loud as reasonable, which was exactly the right amount of loudness for someone like me.

Not for him. He clamped his hands over his ears quite a number of times in the first 25 minutes, which I didn't interpret as an attempt to shut out the movie entirely. I figured it was kind of like how some people will put cotton balls in their ears at a concert so they can hear the music better but block out all the noise.

I can't tell you what he did after the first 25 minutes, because that's when we left.

It's been a long time since I've had to leave a movie prematurely -- never with this one, and only once or twice that I can remember with his older brother when he was several years younger than the younger one is now. But I soon realized that whatever was ailing my younger son was not going to be fixed by telling him to close his eyes for a minute.

No, see, he told me he felt like he was going to pass out. 

He asked if he could go outside. Now, I'm embarrassed to admit what I'm about to tell you, but because I ultimately did the right thing I am going to proceed. I tried to arrange a plan where he would go outside for a few minutes and then come back in once he felt better, and was trying to make sure he had a ticket so he could get back in. You'll be glad to know that I abandoned this train of thought after no more than ten or 15 seconds. I left the theater with him, knowing that we probably wouldn't be back. For a movie completist like me, it's either see the whole thing or you might as well have seen none of it.

You'll also be glad to know that my son was fine. He wasn't having a medical episode and he didn't throw up. I just think the movie was too intense for him. The volume got him off on the wrong foot, and then things like Batman involved in a shootout with fleeing criminals on his Bat cycle just ramped up the intensity beyond what he could handle. I suspect it didn't help seeing Barry Allen's mother having been stabbed in a flashback.

He never told me what exactly it was that had bothered him to a point that reached critical mass, and because I didn't want to make him feel any worse than he already did, I didn't ask. It appears he was worried he had disappointed me by making me leave the movie -- and though that's true, I can't really help that and I really don't think I let on. My first instinct may have been to salvage the viewing experience, but my next was to be there for my son, and I really don't think my demeanor suggested I was put out by it.

So Elemental would have been the right choice, right?

Not so fast. Then the next night at dinner, my wife mentioned the school program during the school holidays and how they'd be going to Elemental. He didn't look too pleased by the idea. Apparently some friends had seen it this weekend and they told him it was "really bad," and that "everyone was kissing," or something like that. 

So if neither Elemental nor The Flash is the right movie for this son, what is?

You may recall that this is the same son who was supposed to see Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse with some friends the first weekend it was out, with me as their chaperone. Those kids ended up getting sick, which is when he bowed out so he could go with them on another day while I went that night with my older son. Poor kid, he probably didn't figure the option to go was never going to come up again -- but I gotta say, that movie wore me out enough that I don't really think I can sit through it again. 

So now, neither Elemental nor The Flash may get reviewed on my site at all, depending on how the rest of this week goes. Instead of those two top prospects with You Hurt My Feelings as a promising third, on Sunday night I watched and reviewed ... Extraction 2 on Netflix. (Which I liked quite a bit, actually. You can read the review here.)

Hey, gotta feed that hypothetical audience. 

Feelings ... nothing more than ... Feelings

It's been a long time since I've written a "hey, that's a coincidence!" post, so here, this will slake your thirst.

Did you know there are movies coming out in 2023 called You Hurt My Feelings and No Hard Feelings?

Granted I am probably stealing material from myself for my year-end portmanteaus post, but I'm sure I'll think of something else to talk about at that point.

I had been aware of the former, which is Nicole Holofcener's latest and stars regular Holofcener collaborator Julia Louis-Dreyfus. (Well, they've collaborated one other time, at least.) Amber Tamblyn, Tobias Menzies and David Cross fill out the cast. That one hits theaters, in the U.S. anyway, on May 26th.

Only four weeks later on June 23rd, it's No Hard Feelings, which I only just learned about this past weekend. That stars Jennifer Lawrence, with Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Natalie Morales and Matthew Broderick co-starring. It's directed by Gene Stupnitsky, who directed 2019's Good Boys, which I really liked.

But Vance, you say. I'm sure there are multiple movies that come out every year with the word "feelings" in them.

Not quite. In fact, if you want to know how many other movies I have seen -- out of 6,375 total -- with the word "feelings" in the title, the answer is: zero.

IMDB does produce a smattering of other results when you search the word "feelings," including a couple other movies with each of these titles, but not a one of the results had I ever heard of before now.

In a couple months I'll be able to see if either of them gives me the feels.