Ally is at the wheel, and as their plans are forming she takes out her phone to glance, for a moment, at a map. Ally sells wholesale pharmaceutical drugs for a living, and feels a bit guilty about it, but she’s a soulful (if non-professional) piano player and singer, and her party rendition of the Velvet Underground’s “After Hours” is an ideal mood-setter.Ī scene or two later, she and her future sister-in-law, Molly (Nichelle Hines), and Molly’s husband, Jesse (Toby Onwumere), are driving into New York City for a shopping expedition and possible theater outing. We’ve just been to the engagement party of Ally ( Florence Pugh) and Nathan (Chinaza Uche), who live in New Jersey and are radiantly in love. Talk about happiness crashing and burning. But “A Good Person,” early on, has a scene that’s a sophisticated version of the auto-accident-out-of-the-blue disaster, and it’s remarkably effective. That cliché has become an assaultive and overly programmed way of doling out The Hand Of Fate. If there’s any movie cliché I’d be glad never to see again, it’s the one where you’re watching happy characters for the first 5 or 10 minutes, and they’re driving in a car, and then - BASH!! - a huge vehicle comes out of nowhere and sideswipes them, and so much for happiness. It’s a story of lives that have been frozen by tragedy, and of how the unfreezing happens. It’s not a melodrama about scraping bottom. The movie creates a highly specific situation - about its heroine, and about an entire family - that it carries right through. Yet beneath the middlebrow situational conventionality, there’s a core of raw feeling and truth to it. It’s an addiction drama that has scenes you can bicker with, a few contrivances, and other peccadilloes. “ A Good Person,” the fourth feature written and directed by Zach Braff (and the best one that he has made since his first, “Garden State,” in 2004), is exactly that kind of movie. What it does need to do is tell the truth about itself - to not cut corners, to make the trauma of its characters honest and relatable. A good addiction drama doesn’t have to be art, any more than therapy is art. That’s why when you’re watching one, you can be aware of the emotions it’s manipulating, even the buttons it’s pushing, and still be drawn in and moved by it. And dramas of addiction, like “Clean and Sober” or “The Way Back,” have so many rhyming touchstones of behavior that they almost become a kind of therapy for the viewer. We live in a profoundly addictive society whether or not you, I, or anyone else happens to be an “addict,” we all carry shadings of the addictive temperament. Or caught that.The ritual, when it comes to this topic, extends to the audience. Gabrielle Union immediately dubbed the brazen insect an “ American hero,” and Zack Braff dryly quipped, “that fly just drank homophobic robot blood.” Star Trek icon and political activist George Takei didn’t hold back when he tweeted that “flies are attracted to s**t.” And Sarah Jessica Parker posted on Instagram, Is that a fly? On his head. Viewers at home immediately flocked to Twitter like a fly flocking to a conservative politician’s hair to sound off about the bizarre moment. Vice President Mike Pence, unaware that a fly has taken up residence in his hair at the VP debate, 10/7/20 (AP) Pence didn’t know that the little guy was there, and if Senator Harris did, she didn’t say anything. It was an unmistakable presence in the Vice President’s white hair, especially to viewers at home. The October 7 vice presidential debate was supposed to be between Kamala Harris and Mike Pence, but a third guest appeared onstage halfway through the event: the large housefly that made itself at home on Pence’s head.
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