sewhite2000
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Posts posted by sewhite2000
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25 minutes ago, misswonderly3 said:
I'd like to know exactly what he said.
One thing he said is if his son started showing gay tendencies, he would kill him.
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1 minute ago, Gershwin fan said:
that one time they brought in a bunch of random tourists and the stars were clearly very bored/ uncomfortable.
I feel like they did something similar two years in a row. The reaction of the tourists annoyed me. To a person, they got out their phones and started recording the movies stars they were feet away from. I mean, I suppose you're never going to be that close to Amy Adams again. Recording the moment is a natural instinct. But we couldn't even see the presumed joy on their faces, all of which were obscured by their phones. I'm so old that I usually don't even think about my phone until some recording-worthy moment is already past, but people under, say, 40, that's an automatic reaction for them.
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4 hours ago, CinemaInternational said:
Just remember, the last time they went without a host was the 1989 telecast..... and that telecast was certainly ....unforgettable..... for those that did see it.
I've watched every ceremony since Star Wars was nominated for Best Picture (my reaction at the end of the show: Annie Who? Woody what?), so yes, I saw this one. I watched in a college dorm room with my two besties, and our jaws were on the floor during that Rob Lowe/Snow White number.
I honestly don't remember it, but there was, I think, another big number that year showcasing the Stars of Tomorrow, some of whom went on to have careers, many who were never heard from again. There was a big article about it in Entertainment Weekly's Oscar issue last year.
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This just reported by Variety 12 minutes ago. Academy to go with no host at all, replaced by star-laden sketches and more music. Oh my God, not more music. This isn't the Tonys! This not confirmed by any other source yet.
https://news.avclub.com/the-academy-has-finally-realized-that-it-should-just-do-1831616642
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When is the ceremony? Has it been moved back to March again? We are surely no more than eight or ten weeks out, and no replacement host has been announced?
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I think times have changed where people just don't have the patience to sit through a ceremony of that length anymore. Three or four hours is just too long. I don't have the data in front of me, but I think viewership numbers have been steadily dipping. It takes James Cameron or a superhero movie to bolster ratings. I think the highest-rated ceremonies of the last 25 years have been the ones when Titanic and Avatar were up for a bunch of Oscars or that year Heath Ledger won posthumously for playing the Joker. That's why they wanted to create a Best Popular Picture category, or whatever they were going to call that. They're gonna try to make it shorter this year by giving out some of the awards most people say they don't care about during the commercial breaks and just announce them later in the show after those acceptance speeches have already been given.
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Given the words the autocensor won't let you say around here, I'm stunned to read your post above and see a word that it will let you say.
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These message boards are not secure, according to Google Chrome, which is my preferred browser. I still come here anyway.
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Oh, I disagree. There are many truly amazing cinematographic efforts on there post your cut-off date. I mean, right away, The Right Stuff at No. 75 is absolutely breathtaking.
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Jan. 8
Andy Hardy's Private Secretary (MGM, 1941)
Source: TCMMild Mid-Movie Spoiler Alerts
Since this movie was aired as part of Kathryn Grayson's SOTM tribute, I'll try to at least focus some of this commentary around her. While I think I've been suckered into watching at least a couple of films in TCM Andy Hardy marathons before, I was unfamiliar enough with both the series and with Grayson to be sure whom she was playing in this movie. I got home about one minute too late to watch the intro, so the opening credits were ending just as I turned on my TV. I assumed Grayson was playing either the newcomer Kathryn (the same first name seemed a reasonably obvious clue) or the role of Andy's eternally jealous and long-suffering girlfriend Polly. I wasn't sure, actually. Though after the movie ended, I looked it up on imdb and saw Polly was played by Ann Rutherford. I must admit, I've largely avoided the Andy Hardy movies when TCM has shown them for a number of years now, but from what I remember, Judy Garland, Esther Williams, Lana Turner and future Mrs. Mickey Rooney Ava Gardner all made very early career appearances in the series. So, potential star Grayson also getting a tryout in the series isn't surprising.
The movie is very Andy Hardy - rah-rah Americana with its early references to Abraham Lincoln and multiple references to how living in America is so much "awesomer" than anywhere else - that was the vision Louis B. Mayer wanted sledgehammered into his viewers' heads apparently. It's almost surprising that the fulfillment of a lifelong dream for the Land family (Grayson, her father played by Ian Hunter and her brother played by Todd Karnes) would be to go and contribute Dad's genius and labor to a completely different country, since Mayer's vision seems to be all other countries suck. But that's what they want, and that's what Judge Hardy (Lewis Stone) seems to arrange for them until Andy, I guess well-meaning, though this is a bit of a stretch, screws it all up for them.
The movie focuses more on the fact that Andy may not graduate high school after his appointments to the presidencies of about a dozen different graduation-related committees has so screwed up his brain that he fails his English final exam. Subsequent study for the exam reveals it to be really focused on esoterica. As someone very familiar with the public school system, I would say thorough knowledge of such concepts as appositives, infinitives and subjunctives is infinitely less important now than it was in 1941. Andy gets in such a hole in both of the situations he's completely fouled up, I must admit his ability to successfully emerge from these crises actually momentarily left me in doubt! "How can he ever escape from all this mess he created?" I actually asked myself, even though I've watched a hundred thousand movies and should know by now a happy ending can always occur no matter how hopeless the situation may seem. But it's some testament to the power of the movie that I was momentarily sucked in.
Some jokes about killing one's wife (!) and a woman's place being in the kitchen really fall flat in the Hashtag MeToo era. Also, Andy's purchasing silk stockings for his secretary is a gift no boss in 2019 could ever buy for his personal assistant unless he wanted to instantly lose his job and be shamed on social media for eternity. On the other hand, I found the whole bit of Andy shyly asking his mother to buy the stockings to be touching, and then when he decides to do it himself, and Polly arrives at the moment of purchase, even though I knew in advance there was a one thousand per cent chance that was going to happen, I still LOL'd.
I watched the first 25 minutes of Rio Rita, but I've got to go to bed. My initial impression is MGM totally dropped the ball in stealing Abbott & Costello away from Universal for three films, as at least what I saw in this movie is maybe one per cent as funny as Buck Privates. First of all, why would you have long stretches when they aren't even on-screen, and second why would you make everything they do so unfunny?
Total Movies Watched This Year: 10
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12 hours ago, LornaHansonForbes said:
A LETTER TO THREE WIVES is not entirely unlike RASHOMAN (only not as well constructed)- we all see the same thing, but interpret it differently.
and in the end everyone ends up arguing about what really happened.
I guess I'm arrogant enough I think the way I interpreted it when I saw it is what the filmmakers intended. But this alternate interpretation at least makes me want to watch the final scenes again.
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Jan. 7
Way Out West (MGM, 1937)
Source: TCMI also watched The Music Box (1932) and Busy Bodies (1933), but as far as adding to my total of "movies" watched this year goes, I guess I will confine myself to "features", although this "feature" clocks in at fewer than 70 minutes.
Well, TCM just aired two Laurel and Hardy shorts in prime time last month when John Landis became the network's first-ever two-time Guest Programmer, so another prime time devoted to them so soon seems odd. I suspect the Landis segment was filmed before anyone at TCM even knew there was going to be a film called Stan & Ollie. At least they didn't repeat either those just-aired shorts tonight (at least not in the first three and a half hours).
As I recall, Sons of the Desert, which I only watched the first 20 minutes of (got to go to bed sometime!) was a stronger feature. West has moments that made me guffaw, but at least in this instance, a 70-minute L&H felt like it had a lot more padding than a 30-minute L&H. I don't want to condemn all L&H features based on this one viewing, however.
So, the plot: Stan & Ollie are messengers in the Old West, though they're dressed exactly the same as they are in their films with contemporary settings. They've come to deliver a message to a local girl that she's inherited a highly profitable gold mine. The girl in question is working as a domestic servant in a saloon, but they first run into the proprietor of the saloon, who's the girl's legal guardian, and his showgirl wife. Since L&H have no idea what the girl looks like, the showgirl masquerades as her to obtain the deed to the mine in a duplicitous manner. It practically takes being hit over the head (well, in Hardy's case, literally, more than once) for the gullible pair to realize they've been duped, and most of the rest of the film is devoted to their attempts to retrieve the lease for its rightful owner, which usually end in physical pain for Ollie.
I would like to comment on what I think is another poorly written TCM intro. Dave Karger informs us that Hardy provided his own singing voice but that Laurel's voice was overdubbed by Chill Wills, who appears in the film with his vocal group, the Avalon Boys. While that's essentially true, based on my careful viewing, I believe Stan's voice is only dubbed when he sings solo, when his comically bass voice is obviously supposed to be exaggerated. If you listen to Stan and Ollie singing in two-part harmony, Stan's singing voice sounds exactly like his speaking voice, and I believe it's actually him in those moments. It's exasperating that no one at TCM was able to notice that distinction.
Movies I've Watched This Year: 9
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The great thing about movies is they're often open to interpretation! I think I still disagree with you, but I think you have an interesting way of viewing the ending!
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59 minutes ago, jamesjazzguitar said:
Yes, the rich guy was planning on running off with Ross but decided against it. He tells his wife and says that she can now divorce him but she says she can't hear him and they end up dancing.
No, Addie Ross didn't get any of those 3 based on my interpretation of the ending.
This.
Since the ending has been discussed, here's my interpretation: since it was revealed Paul Douglas was the one who (sort of) ran away, we can assume the message from Jeanne Crain's husband is completely innocuous. He says at the beginning of the movie he'll try to make it, and if he can't, he'll send her a message. The terseness of the message is indeed meant to throw us off momentarily, but once we know (Paul) Douglas is the one who actually was almost an adulterer, Crain's husband is at that moment exonerated.
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1 hour ago, midwestan said:
I would take issue with your closing statement that all three couples ended up on happy terms. Only two of them did, as one of the wives discovered that her husband is the one who ran off with the unseen siren, Addie Ross. At least, that's the takeaway I got from the film.
Well, I still contend it was a happy ending for all three couples. I can't get into why without just giving away the ending to the movie. The "running away" didn't turn out to be as big a tragedy as one might have thought.
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3 hours ago, Hibi said:
Then they show Mary being beheaded when she's still a young woman when in fact she was in her mid 40s and aged beyond her years after being imprisoned for close to 20 years
Yes, I made a mental note of that while watching.
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Jan. 6
A Letter to Three Wives (20th Century Fox, 1949)
Source: TCMSome Vaguely Hinted at Spoiler Alerts, I Suppose
My second time to see this film. While I remembered the basic scenario, I honestly had forgotten how it resolved. Ben Mankiewicz, whose great-uncle wrote and directed this film, said there were five women in the source material, but Joseph Mankiewicz cut out one of them in his screenplay, and then 20th Century Fox cut out another one. I didn't know if that meant the second cut was out of the screenplay before filming started or after. If there were scenes filmed with a fourth woman, I wonder who she was.
Three women (Jeanne Crain, Anne Sothern and Linda Darnell) from the same town are all about to head out as volunteers on a boating excursion that's taking community children to a location for a picnic. Just before leaving their homes, all three women separately discover their husbands have plans to do something different than what they originally intended for a Saturday. Just before the boat departs, a bicycle messenger brings a letter addressed to all three women from one Addie Ross, an apparently very attractive woman all three of the husbands knew before they met their future wives and whom the husbands all still seem to have enough a friendship with to make each of their wives uncomfortable. I say "apparently", because we don't ever actually get to see Ms. Ross. She's departed from the town in the present day scenes, and in the flashback scenes, she's always just leaving a room or passing by, noticed just a second too late to be on camera.
Addie declares in her letter she's run off with one of their husbands, though she doesn't say which one. The rest of the film follows them as they have to somehow get through their volunteer work, while each one is reminiscing in private flashback scenes about their husbands and a moment when they may have been drawn more to Addie than to each of them. The three couples are scheduled to meet at the country club that night, and each woman is terrified that she'll come home to find her husband isn't there to accompany them.
Most of the remainder of the film consists of flashback sequences detailing the nature of the relationship each of the women has had with their husband. We begin with Crain's flashback: she and her husband (Jeffrey Lynn) are both just out of the Navy, where they met and fell in love, and both readjusting to civilian life. He seems to be doing a lot better than she. Crain is an actress I usually like (and am very attracted to), but she is so tightly wound and seemingly on the edge of a nervous collapse in her scenes, my initial reaction was, well, this is the woman who got left by her husband, because she's such a basket case! Lynn gets dramatically less screen time than the other two husbands, so this relationship remains the most mysterious.
Meanwhile, Sothern is a script writer for radio shows, and in her flashback, we see a tense dinner at which she hosts her bosses and at which her husband (Kirk Douglas), a high school teacher with serious self-esteem issues after three hours of holding it together on behalf of his wife finally lets her bosses know his true opinion of scripted radio programming. These scenes are the most fun, with Douglas asking, "Do cigarettes cause cancer?", a politically radical concept cigarette manufacturers were no way admitting to in 1949, and Douglas also asking his wife's bosses if he's being investigated "for being a subversive", surely one of the incredibly few actual contemporary references in a movie of that era to the HUAC investigation. Props to Mankiewicz for getting these zings into his screenplay. Extraordinary to think that SEVENTY years after this film was released, Douglas is still with us. I hope he remains with us as long as living is a pleasant and happy experience for him. There are moments when we feel he's at the absolute brink of civility, and the sublimely tortured Douglas of Lust for Life, Detective Story and Gunfight at the OK Corral is about to emerge. He never quite gets there, but he comes close.
As someone who's been both a full time and a substitute teacher (that's a real teacher too! I will punch anyone who says otherwise), I was drawn especially to the Douglas scenes. The word "schoolteacher" is thrown around always instead of just "teacher", and that word for some reason gives the profession an especially emasculating ring. I hated to see Douglas so tortured with a lack of self-respect for his own profession. Just six years later, we see a supremely self-confident high school teacher facing, I presume, much more challenging circumstances played by Glenn Ford in Blackbord Jungle, and the profession that historically has always paid too low given the smarts it requires, seems to be accorded more respect in that film.
Finally, we see the backstory of how Darnell married her husband, her considerably older boss, played in his first leading film role by news/sports radio announcer turned movie actor Paul Douglas (no relation to Kirk). And, true to the script, Darnell was 26 and Douglas 42 during filming. On the surface, this seems to be the unhappiest of the three relationships and the one most likely to result in a philandering husband.
Also appearing in her first significant film role is Thelma Ritter as Sothern and Kirk Douglas' maid who's also a friend of Darnell's mother, so she ties into two of the flashbacks. Somehow, this absolute treasure for the Fox studio didn't even get listed in the credits, despite a substantial role. She has a hilarious bit trying to be a much more fancy maid than she actually is. I assume Mankeiwicz must have seen Alice Adams and modeled Ritter's scenes after Hattie McDaniel in that movie. The never-seen Addie appears only in uncredited voiceover format, supplied by Celeste Holm. Mankiewicz would immediately work again with both Ritter and Holm in All About Eve.
So, the very tiny spoiler I will provide is that one of the husbands does indeed run away with Addie, and yet, all three couples still have a happy ending. You'll have to watch to learn more.
Some of this film is a bit mannered. I don't find it Mankiewicz' strongest effort. He had an incredible one-two punch the following year with No Way Out and All About Eve, both of which, I think, are better than this movie. But there's a lot of interesting stuff going on, and it's worth watching. I particularly enjoyed getting to see (or at least hear) some of the Fox regulars who don't get to be TCM regulars: Crain, Ritter and Holm, for sure.
Total Movies Watched This Year: 8
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Jan. 6
Second Act (STX, 2018)
Source: TheaterTrailers typically annoy me because they usually give away the entire movie except for the ending. The trailer for this movie actually misled me into believing it was going to be a different kind of movie than it turned out to be.
The first third of the movie is exactly what you'd expect if you'd seen the trailer. Jennifer Lopez plays a 40-year-old who was forced by life circumstances to end her education with a GED. She's worked at the same value grocery store for 15 years and has risen to middle management, but her lack of education has caused her to hit the mother of glass ceilings, and her frustration reaches its limit when the regional manager (Larry Miller) brings in his own guy to spearhead a renovation that was largely her idea, throwing her only the crumb that she can be the new guy's "right hand". She's been living for years with the assistant coach of the Fordham University baseball team (Milo Ventimiglia from TV's This is Us), but the relationship cools over the issue of having kids - JLo is hiding a secret about why she's reluctant to do so - and she moves out of their shared apartment.
Leah Remini plays JLo's bestie. She doesn't really figure into the plot directly, but is a constant presence as a sounding board, conscience (there's more than one "I liked who you used to be" scene) and comic relief. If JLo is a middle-aged verison of Melanie Griffith from Working Girl, then Remini is her Joan Cusack. Remini has a college-age computer genius son, home from Stanford on holiday, who, after hearing JLo bemoan her lot in her professional life, forges a liberally padded resume and creates a phony Facebook page for her depicting her as a superwoman, replete with Photoshopped pics of her getting ready to scale Kiliminjaro and hanging out with Barak and Michelle at the White House Correspondents Dinner. This just as she's going into an interview for a consulting position with a trendy Manhattan cosmetics company headed by Treat Williams (used to love him! Where's he been?), ably assisted by his daughter, played by former Disney Channel star Vanessa Hudgens.
The phony credentials get her in the door, but her brutally honest itemizing of the pros and cons, especially the cons, of the company's products gets her the job. She's immediately placed in a competition of two teams of employees to revamp an existing line of products: JLo's team is going to try to make their product completely organic (of course), while Hudgens' team doesn't have that restriction. While Hudgens doesn't turn out to be a "bad guy", her team is loaded with all the company "bad guys", including Dave Foley of Kids in the Hall and News Radio as the pompous head scientific researcher. JLo's team has all the company oddballs (of course), including quirky actress Charlyne Yi as a height-averse assistant who begins the movie as a doormouse and emerges as sexually dominant (in a gentle way) when a co-worker gets a crush on her. There's also a smarmy British fellow who suspects JLo as fraud from the start.
There are some highly predictable scenes played for very broad comedy in which JLo's bosses expect her to utilize all these "superpowers" she claims to have on her resume, including commandeering a crew team and speaking fluent Mandarin. But then the movie takes a more serious direction not hinted at in the trailer. JLo is ready to come clean about her deception, especially after she learns it didn't really get her the job, but then because of a dramatic revelation about one of her co-workers, she feels like she can't tell the truth. And the movie becomes less of a screwball comedy and more of a personal drama after that point. This plot twist may be the reason JLo agreed to do the movie in the first place. I'm thinking she might consider herself above just straight screwball comedy, even though I find her more convincing in those scenes than the serious ones!
The odds of being able to get away for ten minutes with a resume so ridiculous, much less the several months the movie covers, really strains credulity in this age when technology and social media has made all our lives infinitely more transparent than they used to be. Although every year or so, you do still seem to read a story about some politician or corporate bigwig who faked a resume. Anyway, Second Act isn't going to win any awards, but it wasn't a terrible way to spend 90 minutes on a Sunday afternoon.
Edit: I feel obligated to mention the soundtrack is overloaded with pop songs aimed mostly at women. Every happy scene or sad scene is punctuated by a moment when the characters stop talking and walk away or stare out a window, and a new song starts playing. Also, Lord help us, there is a women dancing in the kitchen scene, this time to Salt N Pepa's "Push It"!
Total Movies Watched This Year: 7
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2 hours ago, LornaHansonForbes said:
I just tried making it thru LADY FOR A DAY (1933) for (I think) the fourth time.
No dice.
If you offered me 100 bucks, I don’t think I could.
I just can’t believe this tedious, tedious film went over gangbusters in such an otherwise incredible year for movies.
i also don’t get FRANK CAPRA.
I'm harder up than you, I guess! A hundred bucks? I would sit through it!
This is probably not the forum for a debate on Capra's pros and cons. I like a number of his movies, but this isn't one of my favorites. You would probably like his remake, Pocketful of Miracles, even less. It takes the exact same same story and tells it a lot more slowly - its' 40 minutes longer!
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3 hours ago, TikiSoo said:
I have two questions for you, oh so prolific sewhite:
1. Does this new MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS movie clarify that tangle of history you wrote about? I would love to be able to follow Mary's story, that cast of charactors set in a distant time period, but it just seems so complicated! Is it only complicated reading it and clearer in this movie? In other words, is this new movie easy to follow?
2. Have you ever read A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT? The parallel between life and fly fishing is very clear, illustrating the brother's different life choices. (very similar symbolism seen in BLACK NARCISSUS) While many find this kind of storytelling heavy handed (as in Capracorn) I find it exhilarating. Robert Redford seems to gravitate to this type of story, also seen in THE HORSE WHISPERER, one of the only "horsey" movies I truly love.
1. I must admit, to get all those characters' names and titles right, I had to hit Wikipedia! There is an overwhelming presentation of characters and situations to kick off the movie, and I felt pretty lost. They don't mess around, either; they get right into it. There are no opening credits - just a couple of paragraphs of text summarizing Mary's life pre-returning to Scotland, and then boom, off we go. But 20 or 30 minutes into the movie, I felt like I was following things pretty well. The movie can be enjoyed without getting as deep into the history as I did, as long as you know 1) Mary and Elizabeth are related; 2) Mary is Scotland, Elizabeth England; 3) Mary is Catholic, Elizabeth Protestant; and 4) A child from either of them could end up ruling both countries. And I think the movie makes all those things pretty clear.
2. I haven't read the book, but Redford himself reads directly from it in a number of voiceover passages, and it sounds like the kind of book I would like to read! I enjoyed the language of those passages very much.
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1 minute ago, LawrenceA said:
I've known of Craig Sheffer (bottom left) since Some Kind of Wonderful back in 1987. He also made an impression as the star of Nightbreed (1990), a cult horror film based on a Clive Barker novella. After River Runs Through It, he had a memorable role in the alien abduction drama Fire in the Sky (1993) which got a lot of publicity, and he co-starred in the football drama The Program. Since then his career started to dip into the direct-to-video market, and I recently watched him co-star with Steven Seagal in a terrible crime drama named Code of Honor (2016).
BTW, sewhite, what's with the giant blocks of blank space at the bottom of your posts? I'm enjoying reading them very much, but the dead space is a bit large.
I haven't figured that out! If cut and paste a movie poster image from imdb, it leaves these massive blank spaces at the bottom of my post. I see other people post movie poster images that are much smaller. I don't know if it's possible for me to resize them. I'm not very computer smart! I may just start leaving out those images altogether.
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Jan 5
A River Runs through It (Columbia, 1992)
Source: Amazon PrimeFirst of all, the plot description on Amazon Prime is crap. "Two brothers rebel against their stern father and become men in the majesty of the Montana wilderness". The father played by Tom Skeritt has high expectations for his sons, but "stern" is not at all the right word to describe him, given the freedom he allows them to explore the outside world on their own. And what rebellion? The Brad Pitt character slips into a dark, secret life, but there are no scenes of defiance or rebellion against the father. Well, except for the refusal to eat oatmeal scene, and the father caves on that one, so maybe he's not so stern, after all. It appears the Amazon Prime people don't actually watch any of the movies they write plot summaries for any more than the people who write the intros/outros for TCM do!
BUT ... lets' talk about the movie itself. It looked for a moment in time there like Robert Redford was going to have really important, lasting career as a director, maybe to the point where it would rival or exceed his legacy as an actor. For a time, I was mentally comparing him to Clint Eastwood, whom I'm unsure if we're going to remember better as an actor or a director. He won an Oscar right out of the gate for Ordinary People, then The Milagro Beanfield War was interesting if a little meandering, but he was very strong again with Quiz Show and this film. After that, his output as a director just hasn't seemed all that special, in my opinion, and he didn't really stay in the public eye as a director. While he's declared his retirement from acting, he's never said anything about directing, so we'll see if he does any more of that.
It's hard to look at this film in any context without fear of being stampeded by the elephant in the room - the blinding, white-hot ascendancy of Brad Pitt. This movie came one year after his breakout role in Thelma & Louise and was followed by an onslaught of high-profile roles that quickly turned him into one of the most-pursued leading men in Hollywood. He's only the second male lead in this movie behind Craig Sheffer, who's quite good - a solid, earnest leading man who has a bit of comic timing and a bit of romantic longing - but this was the pinnacle of Sheffer's career, and who younger than me has ever even heard of him? I can't even tell you what he did after this movie, while I can probably name at least 15 movies Pitt was in after this one without even having to look them up.
Along those lines, boy, it feels like Emily Lloyd should have been a major star. She is so beautiful in this movie and so emotionally in command of every scene, she's breathtaking.
So, this is an adaptation of the memoirs of Norman Maclean. I always thought maybe that was him playing himself in the movie's final shot, but I see on Wikipedia that he died two years before the movie came out, so probably not. He's played in the movie's first half hour by newcomer Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the older of two brothers of a Missoula Presbyterian minister and his homemaker wife (Brenda Belthyn) in the 1910s and 20s, where the Lord's teachings, the skills of fly fishing and the ability to express oneself in a concise manner are the three most important elements in their instruction. After this introductory sequence, the rest of the movie is set in the spring and summer of 1926, when Norman, just graduated from Dartmouth, returns home and tries to figure what to do with the rest of his life, while his younger brother Paul (Pitt), has become a newspaper reporter in Helena as well as a transcendent fly fisherman and a troubled gambler whose debts are on the verge of bringing him serious trouble.
I really like the performance of Nicole Burdette as Pitt's troubled Native American girlfriend Mabel. Taking a quick look at her imdb resume, I see she had small parts in a couple of really big films, Goodfellas and Angel Heart prior to this movie and then was Tony Soprano's "other" sister, Barbara (not Janice, who was featured way more prominently), who appeared in five episodes of The Sopranos. But she's done almost nothing besides that. We get a sad glimpse of what it was probably like to be a Native American in Montana in 1926 living off the reservation; probably not being too much different than being black in the South at the same time. In a pretty short amount of screen time, she adequately expresses her pain and anger, but also girlish joy when Lloyd compliments her hair.
And the actors playing the parents are both tremendous. Skeritt has the showier role, but my gosh, Brenda Blethyn is so great in this movie as a woman with nothing but boundless love for her family who wears her heart on her sleeve. The pain on her face when Pitt excuses himself immediately after dinner to go gamble breaks my heart.
Curious note: having seen this on TCM at least three or four times, I always thought they'd gotten an edited print, because there are two different moments in the film where Pitt can clearly be seen mouthing the F-word, but there are terribly bad and obvious dub-outs where everything goes silent, not just the words coming out of Pitt's mouth but every other sound in the scene as well, so we never hear the dreaded F-bombs. I always thought this was only on the print TCM used, but the F-words aren't there on the Amazon Prime print, either. The movie was rated PG, not PG-13 even, but straight up PG, despite the appearance of a tattooed but otherwise bare female rear end in one scene. I'm thinking now the studio just clumsily edited out those F-bombs altogether to secure the PG rating. This is not a film I saw in the theater, but a film that used the F-word twice and still got a PG rating would be extremely rare, so maybe those words have always been missing in any public release.
Oh, yeah, also one anachronism, when Pitt and Lloyd engage in some Cagney-Robinson gangster movie patois complete with "yeah, see"s. This is 1926, one year before sound movies and several years before those actors became famous for their gangster roles, so there's no way their characters would have known how to talk like that. I do like the Louis Armstrong/Paul Whiteman discussion in another scene, though.
But overall, a very moving and enjoyable movie. This was probably something like my eighth time to watch it, and if I space out my viewings enough, I never tire of it.
Total Movies Watched This Year: 6
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Jan. 5
Mary, Queen of Scots (Focus Features, 2018)
Source: TheaterMild Spoilers Alert!
Queens of England are way more hip in the entertainment world than kings these days, what with The Favourite and The Crown and I think there's a show about Queen Victoria, the name of which I'm not remembering at the moment. Now we have this movie, in which Elizabeth I figures prominently, though she's not the central character.
So, a brief bit of history. I'll try not to turn this into English Monarchial History 101, but there's a LOT of story setup in this movie. Mary Stuart (Saoirse Ronan) was the daughter of James V of Scotland, and his mother was the sister of Henry VIII, who was Elizabeth I's father. So, Mary and Elizabeth (Margot Robbie) were second cousins or something (that stuff makes my head spin). James V died when Mary was six days old, and being the only legitimate heir, she was named queen of Scotland. However, she was soon sent off to be raised in France, while a succession of regents ruled Scotland in her stead, the last before her return being her illegitimate half-brother, the Earl of Moray (James McArdle). At the age of 16, she married the Dauphin of France, one year younger than herself, who became King Francis II the following year, then died the year after that. And then one year after THAT, Mary returned to Scotland and claimed her throne. This is where the movie begins, after a brief opening scene at the end of her life, where she's about to be beheaded.
Mary faces double jeopardy as both a Catholic ruler in a nation with a strong Protestant opposition, not to mention a powerhouse neighboring country with a Protestant queen, and as a woman, where men in shadowy halls are constantly plotting to either marry her off to a man who will supersede her as the true ruler or depose her altogether. She confides to the handmaidens she's brought with her from France that she only had sex once, on her wedding night with her late husband, and "he was a trembling boy ... it was over before it started".
Being from the Stuart line, Mary believes she has a legitimate claim to the English throne, as well. Henry VIII, in his will, excluded the Stuart line from inheriting the throne, but there was a faction who believed Elizabeth was an illegitimate daughter and that as the senior living descendant of Henry VII, Mary should rightly be queen. Mary seems to know this is not a likely scenario, however; she has enough on her hands just keeping the throne of Scotland. However, wanting to prevent Mary from advancing this claim, Elizabeth, following the advice of her near-lifelong advisor William Cecil, the Baron of Burghley (Guy Pearce), offers Robert Dudley (Joe Alwen), the Earl of Leicester and Elizabeth's secret lover, as a husband for Mary. As Dudley is a Protestant, the hope is this would mute Mary's power and the power of Catholics in general. Mary won't accept Dudley, however, unless Elizabeth names Mary her heir.
While this standoff is going on, Henry Darnley, the Duke of Albany (Jack Lowden), a Catholic, a Stuart and Mary's first cousin, arrives in Scotland with his father, the Earl of Lennox (Brendan Coyle), and woos her. He initially agrees to become only her consort upon marriage and not seek the title of king (similar to Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth II), though his father has grander ambitions for him. Back in England, the news that Mary will marry a Catholic and presumably one day have Catholic children doesn't go over so well. Mary is eager to produce an heir and also to know what it's like to really be with a man, but she has heartache ahead of her - discovering on her wedding night that Darnley is actually gay, more interested in her male personal secretary than her. Now stuck in this marriage, she has to engage in some serious bedroom psychodynamics to properly motivate Darnley to attempt to impregnate her.
Believe it or not, I've only described about the first third of the movie, and I'll stop giving away plot specifics now. Saiorse Ronan, only 24, is already an Academy darling, having received a Best Supporting Actress nomination at age 13 for Atonement and has now been nominated for Best Actress twice for Brooklyn and Ladybird, and a third nomination certainly seems possible for this film. There is a remarkable resemblance between her face and the face of Mary as it appears in portraits of her time. Though born in the Bronx, she's lived primarily in Ireland since age three, and this movie gives her a chance to speak in something close to her natural accent, although it did occur to me that a young woman who'd been raised in France practically since infancy probably wouldn't speak in a Scottish brogue, but, oh well ...
Margot Robbie is a model-turned actress. Her nude appearance in The Wolf of Wall Street got a lot of attention. If I was writing a Mr. Skin-type book, I would rate it up there with Uma Thurman in Dangerous Liaisons and Mathilda May in Lifeforce as one of the greatest examples of female movie nudity in the last 35 years. She's acknowledged it was something she agreed to do in order to get a foothold in the industry, but she's tried to be taken more seriously as an actress since then, having even gotten an Oscar nomination for I, Tonya, and now playing Elizabeth, who's lovely at the beginning of the movie, but is struck down with smallpox not long after Mary assumes her throne and by the end of the film is appearing in the more familiar red wig and powdered face to hide her pockmarks, akin to Bette Davis playing the role. One of the interesting things about historical movies is they can offer completely different interpretations of the same figures, and Robbie's Elizabeth stands in stark contrast to the one Cate Blanchett played, less activist and more of a nervous wreck (and definitely different from Judi Dench's portrayal in Shakespeare in Love). This is Mary's movie, after all, and she comes across as the stronger, more self-confident queen (though the movie has the same ending as real life). A meeting between the two queens did not happen in real life, though the movie merely posits it MIGHT have happened, as Elizabeth swears Mary to secrecy and assures her she will disavow it ever happened if Mary reveals it. The filmmakers clearly wanted to get the two leading actresses together for a single scene, and I suppose I don't mind this inaccuaracy all that much.
There is a serious amount of what I suspect is revisionism in an attempt to make the cast more multicultural. Almost no scene goes by where there isn't a black, Latino or Asian actor or actress appearing as a character in a position of prominence, a noble or a servant of high position. A black actor named Adrian Derrick-Palmer has a significant role as George Dalgleish, England's ambassador to Scotland. The director of the film defends this casting in the article listed below, saying she comes from the world of theater, where multiracial casting in spite of historical inaccuracies is more common than in movies:
https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2018/12/219005/mary-queen-of-scots-cast-diversity-people-of-color
Total Movies Watched This Year: 5
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January 4
Black Narcissus (General Film Distributors, 1947/Dist. in US by Universal, 1947)
Source: Amazon PrimeSpoiler Alerts!
I did a review of this movie once before, possibly on this thread. This was my second time to watch it, and if it's supposed to have some deep meaning, I don't think I'm grasping it. It is extraordinarily beautiful to look at, winning Oscars for both color cinematography and color art direction. I will say its subject matter for the time of its release was pretty extraordinary. I'm not immediately thinking of any other classic movies about Christian missionaries to show them failing so spectacularly! Certainly not any American film, and indeed, I'm reading on imdb that the scenes of Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron) in her moments of most extreme madness were excised from the original American release to avoid condemnation from the Legion of Decency. Early in the film, Dean predicts they won't make it to the start of the rains, and look what's happening just after they begin to depart! The only thing I can think of remotely close is Katharine Hepburn having to abandon her missionary post in The African Queen, but that's only because the untimely death of her brother and the encroachment of the war. The missionary siblings actually seem to be doing all right before that in the opening scenes.
The historical context of this movie is unknown to me. If anyone knows more than I do about it, I'd be happy for them to enlighten me. I'm uncertain if it's supposed to set in present day. There aren't a lot of context clues. We see ceiling fans in the opening scenes in Calcutta, so we're in the age of electricity, at least in the big cities. I also don't even know the national origin of the convent. All the nuns seem English, but Catholicism hasn't exactly been much of a force in England after Henry VIII. We do learn that Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr) is Irish, so maybe the whole order is Irish. I don't know. I'm not even entirely sure about the nationality of the location, which after a very cursory Internet search, I can't decide if it's Indian or Nepalese. This type of background information isn't necessary to understand or enjoy the story, so I tried not to worry about it.
One of the themes I'm pretty sure I understood is the power an exotic locale can have over the Western mind, as we watch the Himalayan location work its voodoo on all the nuns who've traveled there: Sister Philippa (Flora Robson) foolishly plants pretty flowers instead of food; Sister Honey (Jenny Laird) is overly sensitive and prone to hysterics; and Sister Ruth, well she just seems to have been bat-sh*t crazy even before she left Calcutta. That pale skin and creepy red lower eyelids and twisted smile, she sort of resembles a victim of Joker poison. Sister Clodagh becomes consumed with self-doubt while reminiscing on her past life, which we see a bit of in flashback, to the point of unburdening herself on Dean (David Farrar), the agent to the native general, with candidness probably unbecoming to a nun. Possibly Sister Briony (Judith Furse) is the only one really holding it together, but she possibly lacks the compassion that Sister Honey has in overabundance.
I don't know what to make of the presentation of the natives, which we don't see a ton of. There's some patronizing display of naive simplicity common in movies of the era. Jean Simmons, about 18, I think in her second movie ever after Great Expectations, just exudes sex in a virtually dialogue-free role (with makeup to alter her skin color in a manner that would be frowned upon today - even her casting would raise eyebrows). I must say, as beautiful as she is in this film, I probably wouldn't exhibit the same restraint as Dean if she kept showing up at my door every night! Speaking of exuding sex, to be fair to both genders, I must also note Farrar in his shorty-shorts and shirt usually unbuttoned down to his navel. Was that his uniform? Even around nuns? The only time in the movie he wears a tie and long pants is when he shows up at the Christmas services drunk. And that scene when he responds to Clodagh's distress signal shirtless? I mean, I know it was an emergency, but you couldn't take 15 seconds to throw on a shirt before getting on your little squat pony? It's just an odd look, though it may have been accurate. With that jaunty hat, he strikes me as an extra from Tom Thumb or something. Anyway, after having my little fun with all that, I have to say he gives a very good performance. For most of the movie, he and Clodagh can barely be civil to each other, but we, and they, know there was a potentially inappropriate bond forming between them, given their positions. I like very much the scene at the end where she offers her hand to shake, and instead he holds it tenderly, and for a few seconds she allows it before pulling it away.
Anyway, it all comes down to a nuns-and-death bell tower finale that's every bit as great as the one in Vertigo. Surely, Hitchcock must have seen and remembered this film!
This movie is tied for the highest imdb rating of the movies I've watched so far in 2019 with Fiddler on the Roof: both have an 8.0 rating. I was a bit cheeky in this review, but I do think it's a really great movie.
Total Movies Watched This Year: 4
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Anyone else get the feeling that Oscars 2019 in particular is headed for a spectacular train wreck?
in General Discussions
Posted
I would add Mississippi Burning to your list. I think most black viewers (if there were any) weren't exactly thrilled a pair of white FBI agents were the heroes in this thing.