The Battle of the Plot Hole Police

It may seem fairly obvious for some, but I may not know how to watch film the right way. I generally seem to miss the plot holes and inconsistences in a film that I enjoyed or I don’t notice them in a film that I did not like because I did not have a proper response to the material. Much to my disappointment, I can not have a career as a member of the plot hole police on You Tube or any other site trying to earn a click in this cut throat eceonomy of likes, retweets, and viral opinions. I’m a simple person. I like things to be in focused, for the jokes to work, and engaging performances. If that’s all up on the screen, then I have blinders for the most part (Most films can stand to lose about five to ten minutes). If someone or if I watched a video about these problems, I would see their point and still stand by my inital opinion or pretend to feign agreement so the conversation can move along. I never got caught up in plot problems until recently.

There are a couple of scenes in JC Chandor’s film, Triple Frontier that broke my brain and temprorarily placed on the plot hole police task force. Early on in the picture, Oscar Isaac begins assembling the crew for his job in South America. Isaac meets up with Ben Affleck after a failed apartment showing somewhere. Then Isaac and Affleck go to an ex wife’s house to pick up some beer and Affleck’s teenage daughter. After a stop at a liquor store, Affleck drops Isaac off at a local MMA fight where he happens to meet up with the three guys involved in the aforementioned heist. Then Affleck drops his daughter at school and proceeds to go back to the MMA where he meets up with the guys and consumes a couple of brew dogs. I’m under the impression that all of those scenes occurred over the course of one single morning, possibly a week day morning. How do all of those events perfectly line up on single day and probably happen before 10am? Is Affleck suppose to be such a bad father that he doesn’t know when his daughter actually goes to school or is she a bad student and has Saturday school? Or is it a military base community thing? I couldn’t get beyond the utter convenience of how all of those key moments synced up together…. Maybe that’s why Kathryn Bigelow ultimately bailed on the project? No matter how rewrites she did with Mark Boal, they just couldn’t find a way to speed up the story without a bizzaro Friday morning where Affleck has an apartment showing at 7am and there’s an MMA tournment happening at the local community college’s gymnasium. I couldn’t stop thinking about how all of those events lined up so nicely together. It briefly stopped me from realizing how spot on Chandor’s casting of Affleck was. Aside from a few lines here and there, Affleck’s character does not express a lot of desperation, but we the audience see Affleck primarily as a desperate figure in real life. The Sad Affleck memes, the photos of him vaping, and everything that in a way has gone wrong for him, post Argo/Gone Girl.  All of that baggage makes the character seem much more desperate than it probably was on the page. As for the picture, it was fine. We can certainly tell that JC Chandor is a Michael Mann/William Friedkin enthusiast. I don’t know, I couldn’t get pass that convenient line of events, but it did remind just how good Metallica’s “Orion” is.

With Us, I did not notice any of the plot problems/conveniences. I was enjoying myself too much to notice. Like I said, earlier, I may not know how to watch movies the right way. I can let some glaring things go by the wayside while I become obsessed with a simple decision just to get the main crop of characters to their central location.

While some other Award Season influencers have already declared the top picks for 2020 presidential race, we, the royal we, will remain quiet until it’s actually 2020. I have my top five picked out, but it’s too early to call. Speaking of too early to call, the current front runners for next year’s Best Actress race are Julianne Moore for Gloria Bell and Lupita Nyong’o for Us. Richard E. Grant’s recent decision to spill the tea on Moore’s firing from Can You Ever Forgive Me? may hurt her chances besides it being late March and Gloria Bell is an A24 picture without a lot of legs to it. Lupita will probably go the distance because it’s a great performance and the competition doesn’t seem as stacked as in year’s past.