BEFORE: I'm just back from Atlantic City, where we did one of our patented Sunday-to-Tuesday two-day trips, as it turns out the hotel rates are cheaper if you book off-peak. We do this a couple of times a year, take a Monday off here and there so we don't get too burnt out between holidays and longer vacations, though we also tend to do this in March or April, before the summer crowds show up, or late in the season like September. This time we stayed at the Ocean Casino Resort, or I think maybe it's the Ocean Resort Casino, which has only been open for about a year, it used to be called Revel but became one of those casinos that folded back in 2014 before we got a chance to visit that end of the boardwalk.
It's a beautiful hotel, we had a corner suite on the 43rd floor with a phenomenal view of the casino strip and beach on one side, and the rest of Atlantic City and the three "waterfront" casinos on the other side. Then on Monday a fog rolled in over the whole city, and we couldn't see a thing from our room - that seems about right. But we also went to a Pentatonix concert, had a giant order of BBQ from a place in the casino called "Pit Boss" (get it?) and then had the breakfast buffet at the Borgata on Monday morning. I had a couple minor wins on the slots but lost money overall, which always puts me in a funk. I shouldn't bet with any money that I'm not prepared to lose, I know. And my betting systems work fine, right up until the point that they don't work at all. Still, we had fun for two days and would probably be more relaxed if we didn't try to go everywhere and do everything.
We always find fun, like we found this store called Rocket Fizz, hidden within the shops at Ocean, and they sell classic and foreign candies, gag gifts, and a bunch of weird sodas with flavors like buffalo wing, bubble gum and ranch dressing. There's even grass and dirt-flavored sodas, but I don't know who the heck would buy those. I bought some of my favorite candies, along with sodas that taste like apple pie, key lime pie, coffee cake, and grape (OK, that last one's a little boring, but it's made with cane sugar, so it could taste fantastic...).
I took a day off from movies, which I shouldn't do at this point if I want to hit my July 4 movie on time, but I can double up on documentaries next week. Annette Bening carries over again from "The Grifters".
THE PLOT: A romance sparks between a young actor and a Hollywood leading lady.
AFTER: There's a stylistic connection to "The Grifters" here, since in her early career appearance as Myra in that film, Annette Bening was essentially playing her character as a tribute to Gloria Grahame's performance in "The Big Heat". I thought for a bit she was doing a Marilyn Monroe impression, with that "boop boop-be-doop" lilt to her voice, but most film fans seem to agree that she was doing Grahame, not Marilyn. (Of course, I know Grahame better from her role in "It's a Wonderful Life", but that's neither here nor there...) And there's another thematic connection to one of last week's films, "Life", which showed James Dean landing his role in "Rebel Without a Cause". The director of "Rebel" was Nicholas Ray, and he was married to Gloria Grahame from 1948 to 1952.
Ray was Grahame's 2nd husband, and she had a total of four husbands and four children. Her fourth husband happened to be the son of her 2nd husband, so that means that she married her own step-son, Anthony Ray, and had two kids with him. They were married from 1960 to 1974, and this was well before Woody Allen made it fashionable (or at least acceptable) to marry one's step-child, if you were a celebrity. I thought perhaps this movie would center on that period where she was married to that younger man, but no, this film is set in 1981, when she's dating a different younger man.
This is another one of those narratives that jumps around in time - and just when I was thinking that I hadn't seen a film be annoying like that in a good, long while. After feeling ill after performing in England, Graham contacts her former lover, Peter Turner, and asks to stay in his parents' home while she recuperates. Then the film flashes back to show us how the lovers met, and their travels together to Los Angeles and New York before breaking up when he takes an acting job back closer to home. There's just no reason for this, I mean, there is the slow release of back story as each of them remembers the times together in the past, but there's no reason why the film couldn't have started with them meeting, traveling together, breaking up, and then re-connecting in the proper sequence of events, except to do those "arty" types of transitions from the present back to the past. Also, some dates on the screen to let us know that we've jumped back in time to the start of their relationship would have gone a long way towards clarifying everything here.
Grahame lived a lot later than I thought she did - she's seen here doing "The Hustle" (or some other disco dance) with Peter Turner some time after they first met, and they bond over "Saturday Night Fever" and go see "Alien" on the big screen. I forgot that Grahame appeared in the film "Melvin and Howard", which was released in 1980, that's 34 years after the release of "It's a Wonderful Life" (she was only 22 at the time.) Though she was only 58 when she died, she was in classic movies with Jimmy Stewart, Glenn Ford and Humphrey Bogart, and she still made a film or two in the 1980's.
I wanted to like Gloria Grahame as a character, but the film kept giving me reasons to not do so - like how she was in her late 50's when she wanted to play Juliet on stage with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Was she serious about that? Was she in some form of denial about her age, or delusional, or just trying to make a larger point? Did she still see herself as a young person, or did she just like younger men because they were more vital and energetic? And then to be in such obvious denial about her failing health, that pushes me more toward the delusional theory. I mean, none of us want to think about getting sick and dying, but not dealing with your failing health might feel better in the short term, but that isn't going to help things in the long run.
To make matters worse, there were characters in the film that didn't seem to be explained very well, like this character of "Eileen" - I can't tell you who she was or how she was important to either Gloria or Peter. They went and visited her together, but who was she? I'm left scratching my head, maybe I fell asleep for a bit during this part of the movie, but regardless of whether the film didn't explain this or I missed it, either way, that's not a good sign.
Also starring Jamie Bell (last seen in "Snowpiercer"), Julie Walters (last seen in "Paddington 2"), Kenneth Cranham (last seen in "A Good Year"), Vanessa Redgrave (last seen in "Atonement"), Stephen Graham (last seen in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales"), Frances Barber (last seen in "Mr. Holmes"), Leanne Best (last seen in "Star Wars: The Force Awakens"), Suzanne Bertish, Ben Cura, Tom Brittney, with a cameo from the real Peter Turner, and archive footage of Gloria Grahame (last seen in "Song of the Thin Man"), Edmund Gwenn, Bob Hope (last seen in "I Am Big Bird: The Carroll Spinney Story")
RATING: 4 out of 10 vocal exercises
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