“To All My Friends On Shore” – Even Cosby was Boring

by Drogsy

This film was exciting. It could have been something. We picked a random film and it starred Bill Cosby. This should have been, by all means, fucking gold.

After all, is there anyone more disgraced, more loaded in subtext and more encumbered with baggage than Bill Cosby? It seems unthinkable. Maybe Michael Jackson, or Kevin Spacey, or Jimmy Saville, but who else? What other fall from grace is larger than Bill Cosby? This should have been eminently mockable.

But that’s really the worst thing about watching this movie in 2019. You can’t help but hope for, or look for, some little indications of the man that would emerge, looking for something laugh-worthy, some awful implication or gesture or turn of phrase. But we were left entirely high and dry on this. This movie did not reward, could not reward, an ironic viewer. For a lot of reasons, not the least of which being that it lacked the basic depth for a subtext. It barely had text in the first place.

“To All My Friends On Shore” watches like a 70’s dad Christmas Carol, which is being incredibly generous. It’s missing basically all of the components of that, except for “grouchy dad has a turn of heart.”

This movie starts at an airport. Exciting! The movie involves friends on shore! It must involve excitement, intrigue, international travel? Big fat zero on that. No such thing. In fact, basically the entirety of this movie happens in three locations.

1. That house. Some house somewhere, a house that Cosby Dad wishes to buy for his family, and so he just keeps going to it, and god damn if it isn’t a complete piece of shit. A real and true waste of space. Fixer-upper would be kind. I don’t know why they chose this house. It doesn’t even show potential.
2. The apartment. The home in which this family lives in “the ghetto” (their phrasing, not mine) which genuinely looks better than the average home. Spacious, with a gigantic dining room and kitchen. This may say more about the difference between past and present standards of living than anything.
3. The ?hospital?. Honestly, it’s incredibly hard to tell what this is.

The entire middle of this movie is forgettable. I think this is the worst thing a movie can do. It can’t be forgettable. Of all things, a movie cannot be forgettable. It’s a core, existential crime. Be a bad movie. Be a good movie. Be a loud and embarrassing and obnoxious movie. Be a weird porno parody movie. But don’t be forgettable. A forgettable movie may as well not exist, and I think that this happened here all over the place.

Here’s an attempted plot summary: Cosby Dad wants to buy a house, but he’s a working class dude and has to slog it out. He runs a taxi (I think?) and also a scrap business. His kid wants to have fun like every other kid, and Cosby Dad spurns him for it, and hates his wife for being soft on the boy for wanting to have a life. The kid gets sickle cell anemia, which temporarily sobers the family, and makes Cosby Dad think about what is important, and he takes the family out to sea to show them what matters to him.

That’s it.

That’s the whole movie. God, do I wish there was more, but there really isn’t. That’s actually the whole plot.

Sure, there’s some window dressing about some school field trip that the boy can’t go on because he has to work, and there’s the kid who comes to tell Cosby Dad that his kid is in the hospital who Cosby Dad fucking leaves in a field, alone, by himself, after that kid bikes miles to get there. But does it matter? Does any of this matter? It doesn’t seem like it. So much of this movie doesn’t seem like any of its plot turns and decision points matter. Nothing has any consequence.

(By the way: cutoff grey sweatshirt over white longsleeve, with grey sweatpants. That’s the look.)

I am told this was a TV movie, from 1972, and it shows, in retrospect. We live in the nearly 2020s, a time where television has exploded in dramatic fashion. Just a decade ago, Breaking Bad detonated television as a property for high end drama. This was opened before them with prior blast charges by The Sopranos, which created an entirely new field of high drama.

We live in the golden age of TV. We truly do. It’s hard to appreciate it before the modern pedigree was laid out, but we are living in the middle of a tremendous expansion of an art form. For a great while, TV was not that. In many cases it was just a case of struggling to fill hours. And Bill Cosby at this point was a guy you could reasonably feel comfortable chucking hours of TV at. But this plays to none of his strengths or any of the reasons people watched Bill Cosby.

Don’t watch this movie. You will be disappointed. If you come expecting Bill Cosby on a boat being a creep at women (which we did, I think?) this isn’t what you’ll get. Just an angry dad, a sick kid, and no payoff.