White Elephant Blogathon | Jump Tomorrow (2001)

For the past few years I've participated in the annual White Elephant Blogathon, where participants submit movies for other bloggers to watch and review. It's all random, so you have no idea who will get/have to review your submission or whose submission you'll have to review. It started out mostly as a way to make other people review horrible movies (which is really fun, I'm not gonna lie), but in the past couple of years there's been a push for participants not to just submit the most awful movie they can think of, but to also consider under-appreciated movies that may be legitimately good. That's the route I went this year and happily, that's the route taken by the person who submitted the film I was assigned.

I'd never even heard of Jump Tomorrow before the assignment showed up in my email inbox. I hoped that meant a pleasant treat, but I wasn't sure. And honestly, fifteen minutes into the film, I still wasn't positive how I was supposed to be taking it. It's obvious right away that Jump Tomorrow is a quirky, independent film, but as I started it I realized that that's no guarantee of quality. That's the thing about White Elephant. You have no idea if what you're getting is awesome or crap.

Jump Tomorrow is about a young man named George who is originally from Nigeria, but is now living in Buffalo, New York. He's known since childhood that he's supposed to marry his friend Sophie and the time has finally arrived. She's flying in from Nigeria to meet him and the two of them are supposed to drive to Niagara Falls for the wedding. Trouble is, George isn't at all excited about it. He even goes to pick her up at the airport on the wrong day. She arrived the day before and is already in Niagara waiting for him. George's uncle and aunt (who raised him) are furious, so he has to get up there as quickly as possible. Only more trouble arrives when George meets a cute woman named Alicia at the airport. She invites him to a party and he begins to have doubts about his commitment to Sophie.

Complicating matters further is another person George meets at the airport. As George was waiting to meet his future, Gerard was having his crushed. Gerard proposed to his girlfriend just as she was trying to board her plane, but she turned him down. Despondent, Gerard goes to the bathroom for a good cry where he meets George. It's totally awkward for poor George, but he sees an opportunity to take Gerard to Alicia's party, making George not feel so awkward about attending alone while also helping Gerard take his mind off things.

So it's at this point that I'm getting a little concerned. I've seen plenty of movies about people in arranged marriages having to escape those situations to be with the person they really want. I've seen plenty of movies about painfully shy people like George (though Tunde Adebimpe is instantly likeable in the role). I've seen plenty of movies about fun-loving, full-of-life women who draw troubled men out of their shells. And I've seen plenty of movies where the main character has a wacky, impulsive sidekick like Gerard. I know the tropes and spotted enough of them in the first act to make me wonder if maybe I'd been given a bad movie after all. But I kept watching.

And here's the thing. Jump Tomorrow never completely escapes the expectations of its genre. George learns that Alicia has a boyfriend, but he keeps fantasizing about her. When he also finds out that she and Nathan are hitchhiking to Canada where they too will get married, he takes Gerard up on his offer to drive George to Niagara, making sure of course that they take the same route that Alicia and Nathan are. This is all standard stuff. But the more I watched, the less I cared about predictable plot elements. Instead, I found myself falling deeply in love with the characters.

George is painful to watch at first. From his clenched-jaw expression to his rigid posture and unstylish suit, he's a study in stiffness and repression. Gerard is just the opposite: emotional and impetuous. But the more time I spent with them, the more dimensions they revealed to me. George loves telenovelas, for instance. He has passion; it's just buried deep, way down. But he envies people like Alicia and Gerard and the people on TV who are better able to express what they're feeling.

For Gerard's part, he knows that it's not always healthy to do the first thing that pops into his mind. So the movie isn't about these two men teaching each other to change their natures; it's about their encouraging each other to tap into something that's already there and move just a little bit away from the extremes where they've found themselves.

It's the same with Alicia. She's not a Manic Pixie Dream Girl who's only purpose is to draw out George. That's really more Gerard's job. Alicia has her own problems. She's in a relationship with a man she clearly admires and respects, but she doesn't find any joy in him. That makes George an odd choice for her attention, since on the surface George is far more inhibited than Nathan. But Nathan's passions are selfish ones. He and Alicia are never going to be a team; it will always be what Nathan wants as Alicia tags along. With George... well, like I said, George is painful to watch. You can't help but want to draw him out. That this attracts Alicia to him doesn't make her a flat character; it makes her like everyone else in the movie. Heck, it makes her like me as I'm watching it.

I started the movie uneasy about what I was getting into, but ended it completely invested in the happiness of these three, very real-seeming people. All of them have crucial adjustments to make if they're going to find any kind of peace. They're all headed for things that are going to dramatically change their lives forever. George and Alicia have their weddings and Gerard is so focused on romantic love that he's in danger of destroying himself if he can't have it. There's a reason that the ultimate destination of the movie is Niagara Falls, a place as well knows for its suicides as for its honeymoons.

Like so much else about the movie, the parallels between marriage and death aren't new observations. But it does have something important to say, which is right there in the title. George gives Gerard some advice early on when Gerard is on a roof and feeling suicidal. It boils down to not resigning yourself to your fate today, but seeing what else life has in store for you first. George of course is confronted with his own advice when it comes to Sophia. Does he have to get married right now because that's what's expected? Or can he jump tomorrow? That's what the movie's about. And while it may not be unique or earth-shattering in its conclusions, it is absolutely beautiful and sweet in the way that it reaches them.

Thunderbirds are PROCEED WITH CAUTION

I somehow missed participating in the White Elephant Blogathon last year. That’s totally on me, but thankfully host Paul C. from the Silly Hats Only blog reached out to remind me this year. I had a blast being forced to review The Legend of Boggy Creek in 2011, so of course I was all in for this year’s.

If you’re not familiar, the idea behind the White Elephant Blogathon is for participants to submit the name of a movie that they’d like to see someone else have to watch and review. It can be a good, classic movie, but it’s more fun if it’s divisive or out-and-out crap. (My submission falls into that last category: The Beast of Yucca Flats.) Paul then puts all the submissions into a hat and divvies them back out again. This year, I drew Thunderbirds are GO.

Paul can pick movies for me to watch anytime, because like Legend of Boggy Creek, this is something I’ve wanted to watch for years and just needed the proper push. I’d never seen an episode of the Thunderbirds TV show and it was in 2004 that I realized that I was missing out on a large part of ‘60s pop culture. That was not only the year in which Team America: World Police parodied the show, but it was also when Jonathan Frakes directed a live-action version starring Bill Paxton, Anthony Edwards, and Vanessa Hudgens. Getting assigned Thunderbirds are GO (the 1966 feature film sequel to the TV series) was an excuse to finally see what this was all about.

To prepare for Thunderbirds are GO, I first wanted to see the show. My initial plan was to watch all 32 episodes, but I only got a couple or three in before I realized that wasn’t going to happen. The premise of Thunderbirds was pretty genius, but the execution wasn’t so much.



Thunderbirds plays off of two things that were super popular in the late ‘60s: disaster movies and James Bond. Series creators Gerry and Sylvia Anderson had the truly brilliant idea of making a show in which a wealthy family uses high tech gadgets to save people from a different disaster each week. Something else that was pretty popular in the late ‘60s was Bonanza, so Thunderbirds’ Tracy family follows a similar model to the Cartwrights, with widower Jeff Tracy living with his grown sons: Scott, Virgil, Alan, Gordon, and John. The sons were all named after Mercury Seven astronauts and Jeff was himself a former astronaut in the show. Also like the Cartwrights, the Tracys were served by an Eastern manservant (Bonanza had Hop Sing; Thunderbirds had Kyrano). Replace the Pondarosa Ranch with an awesome, secret island and throw in an Emma Peel-esque super spy with a tricked out, pink Rolls Royce and you have the makings of a great show. At least in theory.

Even if you’ve never seen an episode of Thunderbirds, if you’ve heard of it you know that it was filmed with marionettes instead of live actors. The Andersons used that technique on several shows including Supercar, Fireball XL5, Stingray, and the Thunderbirds spin-off Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. “Supermarionation” (as they called it) gives the show a distinctive look and helps integrate the characters better with the world of miniature models that they live in. It does take some getting used to though, and it also limits how exciting the action can be when the characters can’t run realistically or even move very fast. It’s that sluggishness that ultimately dooms the show (and the feature film that followed it).

The slowness isn’t just the puppets’ fault; it’s the whole pace of the show. I gave up my plan to watch every episode when I recognized a repeating formula after the second or third one. A disaster would occur, the local authorities would attempt a rescue and fail, then the Tracys (aka International Rescue) would get called in. Sometimes IR’s attempt would succeed on the first try, but sometimes they’d have to regroup and come up with a new plan. It was a lot like watching a real-life rescue operation on the news: interesting to see them engineer new solutions, but not very thrilling.

There would also be long sequences of just looking at the models that make up the world of Thunderbirds. To be fair, they are fantastic models and I want to live in that world. If Thunderbirds were made today, there’d be a endless line of toys and playsets to buy and I would get every single one of them. Thunderbirds is like porn for people who enjoy scale models, but that also means that the show lingers on the money shots a lot instead of moving on with the story. Thunderbirds was an hour-long show with only a half-hour’s worth of material.



In my revised watching plan, I picked out episodes that sounded less formulaic. Any episode prominently featuring Lady Penelope (the Emma Peel-like character) was bound to be enjoyable because those were spy stories. There was also a fantastic episode (my favorite that I watched) in which scientists created an animal-growth serum in their swamp lab, but it got into the swamp and turned the gators huge.

I tried watching a few episodes with the show’s recurring villain, The Hood, but those were usually the least interesting. The Hood was Kyrano’s half-brother and he had some kind of remote-control, hypnotic power over the Tracys' servant. The Hood’s plans usually involved creating some sort of disaster so that International Rescue would have to come out, then he would try to take pictures of their vehicles (the titular Thunderbirds) to sell to shady dictators or whathaveyou. It’s always understood on the show that it would be The Worst Thing in the World for pictures of the Thunderbird vehicles to get out. Absolute secrecy was a non-negotiable requirement for any rescue mission they agreed to undertake, and attempting to kill the Hood was always a justifiable response to his shutterbugging.

So I have very mixed feelings about the show. It’s slow and occasionally stupid, but the model porn is awesome and some of the stories are really cool (like the one with the runaway monorail). All of these strengths and weaknesses are magnified in Thunderbirds are GO.

The plot of the feature film revolves around (but doesn’t at all focus on) the first manned mission to Mars. On the initial launch, the Hood sneaks on board the spaceship for reasons I don’t entirely understand and accidentally causes it to malfunction and be destroyed. Suspecting intentional sabotage, the government asks International Rescue to oversee the second launch attempt. The Hood again sneaks on board (again, for a purpose that escapes me), but IR is all over him. He escapes, but Lady Penelope chases him and – after an extended sequence over land, sea, and air – shoots down his helicopter and kills him. This is all in the first twenty minutes or so of the movie, so if you’re wondering what drives the rest of the 93-minute film, you’re on exactly the same page I was at that point. Maybe you’re also like me and figure that maybe the Hood wasn’t really dead, but would return to cause more trouble. If so, you’re wrong.



What actually happens for the rest of the movie that actually has anything to do with its plot is that the spaceship goes to Mars and the astronauts have a pretty cool fight with some awesome-looking Martian rock-snakes. This has nothing to do with the Tracys, but there is a random mechanical failure on re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere, so International Rescue gets to come in for that part. While the astronauts are on Mars though, IR’s simply having some downtime, with youngest brother Alan pouting about having to stay at home with dad while older brothers Scott and Virgil hang out with Alan’s crush, Lady Penelope. There’s an extended dream sequence in which Alan fantasizes about going with Penelope to a space nightclub, which would be enough to get Thunderbirds are GO on the White Elephant list all by its lonesome.

Having struggled so much with the TV show and Thunderbirds are GO (I couldn’t bring myself to watch the second feature film, Thunderbird 6), I hoped that Jonathan Frakes’ live-action Thunderbirds would be exactly what I needed. I remembered it being panned in 2004, but I was still hopeful that live actors and good CGI could do exciting things with this cool concept. Unfortunately, I couldn’t even finish the thing.

About halfway though, I realized what was going on and got on IMDB to check a theory. Sure enough, Spy Kids was released in 2001, with two sequels following in 2002 and 2003. In 2004, there was no new Spy Kids movie and Universal saw the opportunity to fill that hole. It’s just too bad they used Thunderbirds to do it.

Instead of being about a retired astronaut and his five, grown sons, the live-action Thunderbirds has Bill Paxton as a still-active Jeff Tracy leading his four oldest sons on rescue missions. Picking up the theme from Thunderbirds are GO, youngest son Alan feels left out, but it’s because he’s a freshman in high school. While he’s home on Spring Break, the Hood (played by Ben Kingsley in a performance that reminds me how nervous I should be that he’s in Iron Man 3) takes over Tracy Island and incapacitates the older members of International Rescue. Alan teams up with the children of Kyrano and Brains (the nerdy inventor of the Thunderbirds in the TV show) to save the day and prove that kids can be heroes too or some such stuff. Brains didn’t have a kid in the TV show and Kyrano’s daughter was a grown woman, so a lot of tampering had to be done to force Thunderbirds into the Spy Kids mold. I turned it off, longing to see marionettes punching each other.

The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972)

I don’t remember who told me about the White Elephant Blogathon, but if you’re not familiar with it, it’s based on the concept of the White Elephant gift exchange where everyone brings a (usually crappy) gift and hijinks ensue as people open them and fight over who goes home with what. The Blogathon does the same thing, but for movies. You submit a movie to be reviewed, and then write about another blogger’s submission. The movie I drew was The Legend of Boggy Creek.

I was actually kind of excited about this one because it’s all about a bigfoot-like creature that lives in the swamps of southern Arkansas. How bad could it be? And since I’ve got a Bigfoot story coming out in the Mondo Sasquatch anthology next month, it’s a timely movie for me to be watching and talking about.

I admit that my heart fell though when I opened the Netflix envelope and read on the sleeve that The Legend of Boggy Creek: A True Story is a documentary with interviews and reenactments of encounters with the shaggy swamp creature. I had a flashback to this other documentary my dad and brothers and I saw in the late ‘70s that was marketed to look like a sci-fi adventure film, obviously piggy-backing on the popularity of Star Wars. (That tragic disappointment may have been Are We Alone in the Universe?, but I remember the title’s being catchier than that. [Edited to add: My brother reminds me that it was The Outer Space Connection.]) If Boggy Creek was anything like that, I was going to be upset. But it wasn’t. It was oh so much more.

Though the production is crap and the direction amateurish, The Legend of Boggy Creek is incredibly watchable. Like Catfish, whether it’s true or not doesn’t matter. In fact, it’s best to think of it as completely fictional; a precursor to The Blair Witch Project, only way more imaginative. Boggy Creek combines several genres – investigative documentary, nature film, slice-of-life, horror, and musical – in an utterly fascinating way.

It takes about twenty minutes though before the movie gets good. There’s an interminably long pre-title sequence that shows nothing but shots of swampland and wildlife to the sounds of animal cries. That might’ve been okay had the production values been decent, but the film quality is miserable and the camera’s as likely to focus on twigs or the base of a tree trunk as it is on a beaver or a flying crane. After that, there’s another endless bit with a kid running through a field, frightened by noises he’s heard in the woods. He eventually makes it to a general store to tell the old timers there about the shaggy man in the woods, but they of course laugh it off.

The kid turns out to be the narrator as a young boy and from there it’s a lot of him talking about the small town of Fouke, Arkansas and the many sightings of the swamp creature by Fouke’s residents. There’s scene after scene of this farmer or that housewife seeing something hairy lurking out in the trees and just as I’m starting to despair that this is the entire movie...

Musical Interlude [starts around 1:30]:



That, my friends, is fantastic.

That’s not the only one either. There’s another number a little later that’s all about this one kid and how he enjoys going out hunting in the woods and visiting the hermits who live there. Absolutely, thrillingly meaningless.

The musical numbers clued me in though that something awesome is working in Boggy Creek. After those, I was suddenly less bored by the ceaseless shots of the swamp and the town. Instead, I began to be lulled into this lazy, Southern mood and found myself dreaming wistfully of some of the small, rural communities I grew up around. That carried me through the next half-hour of the film, which is where the horror movie kicks in and something like a plot begins to take shape.

There’s little warning of what’s about to happen. Up until now the film’s been nothing but a montage of people talking about their sightings, hunting the creature to no effect, and – in one very long sequence – never having seen the monster at all. But the incidents have been building in intensity with the creature’s now killing some animals and getting awfully close to houses and trailers.

When the narrator introduces a pair of young couples who have moved to the area with their kids, it sounds at first like he’s just setting up the latest in the series of “reenactments.” But something’s different about this one. Maybe it’s because the characters are young; maybe it’s because they’re all sharing one house in the middle of the woods, but I immediately thought that this sounded like the set up to a potentially interesting horror movie. And indeed, that’s where Boggy Creek goes with it.

The husbands work nights on a local ranch, leaving the wives and the kids alone in the cabin when the creature appears. This time though, he’s coming up on the porch and trying the doorknob, something he’s never done before. I won’t blow the ending, but it plays out in a legitimately suspenseful way and is downright frightening at times. What the hell does this thing want?

The narrator has been relentlessly reminding us the entire film that no one knows what’s going on in the creature’s brain. But he just as insistently persists in using variations of the word “lonesome” to describe the beast and its calls. Though it’s never revealed exactly what the creature wants in the cabin, the ultimate implication is that loneliness may be driving it mad.

Which, now that I think about it, is something approaching a theme. The whole movie is full of long, lonely shots. The characters in the film interact with the narrator as they tell their stories, but never with each other. It’s a portrait of isolation.

The Netflix sleeve also describes The Legend of Boggy Creek as a cult film and I can see why. I can’t think of a single person I know who would enjoy it or appreciate it as much as I did, but I’m already thinking about watching it again.