House of D (2004)

Ignoring scathing reviews, we enjoyed much of this quirky dramedy about a man looking back on his high school days, his friendship with his school's mentally disabled janitor, his crush, his mother, and a compassionate stranger. David Duchovny and Anton Yelchin play Tom at different ages, Robin Williams is the janitor, his daughter Zelda is Tom's crush, Duchovny's then-wife Téa Leoni plays Tom's mother, and musician Erykah Badu is the stranger, a prisoner in the House of D, which is short for Women's House of Detention.

It's not only Duchovny's feature directing and writing debut, it's his only feature in those jobs, though he directed three and wrote eight of his 191 episodes of X-Files between 1993 and 2018 (I haven't seen a single one). I have, however, seen all 84 of his episodes of Californication from 2007-2014, of which he directed six.

The acting is flawless so I can only guess the critics took issue with some uneven timing.

Throughout November 2020 our internet kept going out, due to one broken receiver and an escalating series of errors by phone and chat technicians. So the day before Thanksgiving we were jonesing for a movie and dug up this DVD––remember those? We even watched the extras and learned that Leoni begged Duchovny to let her play the mother and that the vintage picture cars, i.e. the ones in the shots, were reused from scene to scene. And we learned that there was a women's prison in Manhattan back in the day, with windows high above the street, and family and friends and pimps of the prisoners used to congregate on the sidewalk.

The score by Geoff Zanelli isn't available online. Here's a list of the songs, including one that Badu sings in her cell.

Duchovny was last blogged for The Joneses, Yelchin for Thoroughbreds (he died in 2016), Williams for The Butler (gone in 2014), Leoni for Tower Heist (before her 120 episodes of Madam Secretary, all of which I watched), and Badu for What Men Want.

So how bad were the reviews? 10% critics' average on Rotten Tomatoes. Wow. But its audiences came in at 73. We liked it even better than that.

If you want to see for yourself, it can be found on Hulu, Amazon Prime, Starz, YouTube, and more.