BEFORE: Well, I survived the A-pork-alypse Now festival, came home and slept for 5 hours, so this works out pretty well. I can't usually sleep once the beer wears off, so it's a fine time to stay up watching a nearly 3-hour movie. I can cross off the Best Picture winner from 1996, which I mark as the 50th Best Picture winner I've seen, leaving 33 unseen - though after tonight, I guess that will be 34. By way of comparison, I've seen 73 of the AFI's top 100 American films, and 270 of the "1000 Films to See Before You Die". Which suggests the question - how many films should I see AFTER I die?
I can imagine TCM is staying away from this film, because - well, when would they screen it? Half of the film takes place in Italy and half in Northern Africa. It just doesn't work with their schedule this year. Anyway, they're still in California, and for Oscar night the films seem to have a definite Hollywood vibe - like "Singin' in the Rain", "The Bad and the Beautiful", and "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" Plus "The Graduate" and "L.A. Confidential", which I've seen. I'm going to pick up "Inside Daisy Clover" and the 1954 "A Star Is Born". After that, I think I'm done with the 31 Days of Oscar. I'll still keep track of the line-up, but the month is winding down and nothing else on the list really interests me. Anyway, I can't wait to get back to watching the number of films on my list go down.
THE PLOT: At the close of WWII, a young nurse tends to a badly-burned plane crash victim. His past is shown in flashbacks, revealing an involvement in a fateful love affair.
AFTER: Ralph ("RAFE") Fiennes carries over from last night's film, of course, as does the theme of a love affair set during World War 2, so good programming (or good luck) again on my part. Last night's affair took place during the bombing of London, and this one plays out during the early days of the war as it sweeps through Cairo.
The whole flashback structure carries over, too - and this film is slightly guilty of some of the same sins, jumping around a bit in time, showing us little flash-forwards of incidents to come. But here it's done with better intentions - as bits and pieces of the past are revealed, we learn exactly who this "English Patient" is, and how he came to be disfigured. And I think the past story pretty much plays out in order, so it's less jarring that way - but it still feels like someone couldn't completely decide which storyline was more important, the present or the past.
I'm treading lightly here, in case I'm not actually the last person who hadn't seen this film. And this is a mystery of sorts, since we're not sure at first who the patient is, if he's a spy, if he truly has amnesia, what connection he has to the mysterious stranger who shows up, and is also oddly disfigured. Seems everyone in the film is damaged somehow, even if you can't see it - well, I suppose that's wartime for you.
It's a big, grand, sweeping epic, with love and betrayal and war and death - if it's guilty of anything, it's of trying to be everywhere at once and cover so much territory that at the end I was left slightly wondering what it actually was about. I guess different people will take it in different ways, as a war story or a romance or an action film or a mystery, and I suppose that's fine.
I do feel it telegraphed a lot of its moves, and there was some notably corny dialogue and imagery - for example, "He spends his days looking for bombs - but at night he just wants to be found..." Seriously? Why not just have someone say, "You've wandered into a minefield...in my heart!"
NITPICK POINT: A woman notices that everyone she's close to tends to die - but not the one man with a serious medical condition. No, he sticks around for weeks (months?) - just long enough to tell his story. (What a coincidence!)
NITPICK POINT #2: I get that the Nazis planted a lot of bombs - so it's not safe to play a piano, which might be rigged. But it's OK to dig a vegetable garden?
Also starring Juliette Binoche (last seen in "Dan in Real Life"), Kristin Scott Thomas (last seen way back in "Mission: Impossible"), Willem Dafoe (last seen in "Cirque du Freak"), Colin Firth, Jurgen Prochnow (last seen in "Air Force One") and Naveen Andrews.
RATING: 7 out of 10 canteens
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