BEFORE: This completes the Keanu Reeves portion of the February chain, and sets me up for the final stretch - just one week to go in February, 7 films to go (I did say there would be 29 romance films, not 28).
About those Oscar predictions - it's hard to fault Entertainment Weekly's statistics, they did a bunch of percentage ratings based on how many times the Best Picture winner has won a Golden Globe, or the DGA award, or how many times the Best Actress winner has also won the SAG Award, and I tend to agree with their results, however there still could be upsets. In the end, you have to go with your gut, and I arrived at the same result they did for Best Picture, just by a different method. I only saw 2 of the 8 nominees, but that was enough to help me discern that although I enjoyed them, "Birdman" is too confusing to win, and "Grand Budapest Hotel" is way too quirky. Based on what I've read, "American Sniper" is too controversial, and I think that "The Imitation Game" and "The Theory of Everything" will split the genius biopic vote, and once you discount "Selma" and "Whiplash" (and I'm betting the voters did too) that leaves "Boyhood". If it wins, I'm OK with that because it used such a simple, elegant yet difficult method of making a film that surprisingly, no one tried to do before. It's not about taking 12 years to make a film, because the film was really shot in 12 weeks (one week per year), it's about rewarding patience in a world that often seems to have forgotten the meaning of that word.
The first time I saw a film before it won the Best Picture Oscar, I think it was "Amadeus" in 1984. The most recent time I saw a film before it won, I think it was "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" in 2003. Ever since then, I've been playing catch-up, content to watch films after they won - and after watching "Gandhi" last month, I've managed to see 70 of the winners, with 2 still on the watchlist, leaving 14 unseen. If "Birdman" were to win, it would help out my numbers, but if I'm right and "Boyhood" wins, I'll just catch up with it somewhere down the road. I'm more excited about TCM running "The Artist" next week so I can finally cross that one off.
The common wisdom also says that Michael Keaton, Julianne Moore, J.K. Simmons and Patricia Arquette will win their categories, but if there's an upset, perhaps Eddie Redmayne can edge out Keaton. Never count out the portrayal of a character with a disease or a brilliant mind, and Hawking represents both.
THE PLOT: After returning from the war, Paul and a young woman meet on a bus as she's headed home from college to help with the grape harvest and Paul proposes to pose as her husband to help her face her father.
AFTER: Well, it's a lot easier to take Keanu Reeves as a chocolate salesman than it is to believe him as a cardiologist, that's for sure. Plus his character is still suffering flashbacks from the war, and he was raised as an orphan, so that all helps him play his character in that sort of disconnected way. He's also sort of disconnected from his wife, who he married just before shipping out to World War II, and who also managed to save all his letters from the war and not read them. I suppose the implication here is that she doesn't really care for him, or perhaps married him just to get his benefits if he died while overseas.
Back out on his sales route, he encounters a woman of Mexican descent, who's pregnant and afraid to face her father (so then, why is she returning home?) and he agrees to pose as her husband for 24 hours, somehow assuming that it will be easier for her to be pregnant around her family if they had met the baby's father, who wasn't really the father. Yeah, this isn't the most logical of plans.
It's funny how many romance films involve deception - in "The Big Wedding" a divorced couple had to pretend to be married, "About a Boy" had a childless man pretending to be a father, and I think tomorrow's film will cover a similar sort of situation. It's as if Hollywood feels that a plot where two people love each other, tell the truth to each other, and never cheat on each other is the most boring thing in the world. But as you might expect, people who live out a deception run the risk of the fake situation becoming real, and that's what happens here.
There are a few oddities, like an Italian actor playing the head of a Mexican-American family. And I had no idea that grape trees were so flammable, but I think this was an exaggeration to advance the plot. Still, this was at least an average romance film, perhaps slightly above average, and with the run I've had lately, that's good enough.
Also starring Aitana Sanchez-Gijon, Giancarlo Giannini (last seen in "Quantum of Solace"), Anthony Quinn (last seen in "Requiem for a Heavyweight"), Debra Messing (last seen in "Hollywood Ending"), Angelica Aragon, Freddy Rodriguez (last seen in "Payback"), with a cameo from Mary Pat Gleason.
RATING: 5 out of 10 mariachi bands
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