BEFORE: A big loss today, I accidentally overwrote a saved file on my Blogger account, which is very easy to do. Sometimes if you click on a post to open it, but accidentally drag it a little, it's too easy to overwrite one draft with another - and the problem is that the file that I overwrote, essentially deleting it, was the long record of cameos and multiple appearances for the entire year. It was a rough list, sure, but I relied on that almost every day for quick checks of what each actor's previous appearance was, and at the end of the year, I was going to turn that file into the list of who's been in the most films this year, with at least three appearances and up.
I can't "un-erase" it, so I've got to build it all back up again, and that's a LOT of typing. A lot of searches with IMDB's advanced search page, and then I have to double-check each one, because the IMDB stupidly doesn't make a distinction between someone appearing in a film as an actor, and appearing in the credits of a film with a "thanks to" credit, or a credit for doing stunts or even writing a song. Here's where the IMDB and I don't see eye to eye, if an Elton John song is used in a film, that database counts that as an "appearance", and I don't. Meanwhile, if they use footage of Carl Weathers from a previous "Rocky" movie in "Creed II", I count that as an "appearance", and the IMDB doesn't. So now I have to back through my notes on EVERY film I watched in 2019 - 294 so far, and count every appearance of people in archive footage that I noted, even when the IMDB didn't list them, and cross-reference the hell out of each actor's filmography. It's an enormous amount of work, thankfully I've got some down time coming after this week so maybe I can pull a couple of late nights and knock the whole thing out, rebuild the list before the end of the year.
I suppose it's a blessing in disguise, I was going to have to double-check the list I had anyway for any errors or omissions, now I can just work my way from January to November, 10 or 20 films at a time, and just do one solid pass. I remember quite a bit of it, but still, it's going to be a few days worth of typing before I have anything like the file I just accidentally erased. I should probably keep a back-up of it in the future, because this has happened before, just not with such a large file. All my other lists are backed up on a flash drive and three computers, but there was only one copy of this file, and I should know better than that.
John Malkovich carries over again from "Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile", and that's it for the Malkovich films for this year - I've got two more films with him, but I've got no room, so I'm saving them for next year, it looks like.
THE PLOT: An American girl inherits a fortune and falls into a misguided relationship with a gentleman confidence artist whose true nature, including a barbed and covetous disposition, turns her life into a nightmare.
AFTER: I watched this film before over-writing that file, so I know it's not my own clumsiness that put me in a bad mood. I can safely say I didn't like this film because I didn't like the film, not because of any outside influences. It's based on a classic novel by Henry James, and it really made me not want to read any novels by Henry James. God, the story was so boring, it's from the 1880's and I really don't give a rat's ass about the relationship politics of Victorian England, even though the story then spilled over to Florence and Rome, following the adventures of ex-pat Brits is almost as boring as following the adventures of homebound ones.
Now I almost understand why somebody tried to spice up "Pride and Prejudice" by adding zombies to it, I know that a zombie attack could maybe have done this storyline a world of good. Just the sight of a bunch of finely-dressed people at a ball, filling out each other's dance cards (God, was that ever a real thing?) and the men fretting over whether they had enough money to marry the right woman, or the women worrying over if they were attractive enough to marry the right man. Jeez, was that ALL that people thought about back then, just marrying well to improve their social status? Didn't they have anything better to do? Oh, right, they didn't have movies yet or the internet, so it was either attend dances and mingle or go out and shoot themselves, I guess. I doubt I would have lasted a week in British society in the 1880's.
The lead character, Isabel Archer, is an American, but her aunt is married to a rich Brit, so she's got a rich uncle, a sick cousin and the rich uncle has a rich neighbor, Lord Warburton. Warburton proposes to Isabel, but she turns him down for some reason, and also turns down the heir to a Boston mill fortune shortly after that. It seems like she might be holding out for her own cousin - this was back in the days when it was somewhat acceptable to marry a cousin, but it's not really mentioned if her cousin Ralph is a blood relative, or just perhaps the son of her uncle. I guess the latter scenario would be more OK, right? Like if you get it on with someone you share grandparents with, that's a little nasty, and you'd think that would be improper in high society, too - but hasn't royalty been getting away with that for centuries?
Anyway, Isabel's sick cousin, Ralph, convinces his dying father to leave Isabel a large inheritance, because he wants to see what she'll do with it. What she does is travel to Florence, where she meets another American, Gilbert Osmond, and marries him. Osmond has a daughter, Pansy, and Pansy has a boyfriend, Edward Rosier, who's another one of those men who's worrying that he's not rich enough to marry a good woman. Turns out he's right, because Mr. Osmond doesn't think Edward's wealthy enough, and he wants his daughter Pansy to marry someone more like Lord Warburton. What a coincidence, Warburton shows up, and shows interest in Pansy, only Mr. Osmond suspects that he's only pretending to be interested in Pansy in order to get closer to Isabel. This drives a wedge between Mr. Osmond and his wife, Isabel, but really, at this point, who cares? And Pansy gets sent to a convent because she would prefer to marry Edward, who loves her, instead of Warbucks - I mean, Warburton.
Isabel gets called away to visit her dying cousin (as one character points out, he's been dying for the last ten years at this point) and this puts her back in touch with that heir to the mill fortune when she returns to the U.K. She brushes him off and returns to Rome, but it's unclear whether Isabel goes back to Rome to save her marriage, or to rescue Pansy from the convent and end the marriage. This is not a fault of the film, James ended his novel ambiguously, apparently, and my guess is that he couldn't decide on an ending, or else he felt that either possible ending would alienate half of the audience, so he did the old narrative cop-out. (aka "Choose Your Own Ending"). What a dick move.
I don't know, I've sort of had it with the corseted dramas, even though I didn't watch that many of them this year, I did do a whole British-set chain, including "Mary Queen of Scots" and "W.E.", both of which dealt with royalty debating whom to marry, so I've sort of had my fill of this topic. Then I watched "Bright Star", which dealt with John Keats never having enough money (as a struggling poet) to marry the woman he loved, and just as he was getting close, he died from consumption. So this is all old hat to me, I've seen this all before and this story just didn't appeal to me. Why are some people so enamored of this period of human history? Sure, the fashions were elaborate, but all that upper-crust nonsense over who's good enough to marry whom, PLUS the complete inequality that was built into the whole infrastructure of that society. Even when Isabel was the one who inherited a fortune, and was therefore the provider for her family, she still didn't have the power in the relationship, which naturally belonged to her husband. Now, how is that fair? It's not, so instead of glorifying the patriarchy in films, we should be working on tearing it down, pointing out how unjust the Victorian age really was.
Ah, I just realized that this film has the same director, Jane Campion, as "Bright Star" - so naturally that could explain some of the similarities in subject matter and tone. But this film was made right after she directed "The Piano", which worked on the same theme of arranged marriage - only that film won three Oscars, and this one didn't. (Got two nominations, though - only one was for Best Costume Design.).
Anyway, I'm taking a pass on this one. Didn't get it, it didn't win me over. Now I'm off to start rebuilding that list so I'll know at the end of the year how many films each actor and actress appeared in. Nicole Kidman's making the list for sure, only there's just no way she can match some of the politicians who appeared in so many documentaries over the summer.
Also starring Nicole Kidman (last seen in "Dogville"), Barbara Hershey (last seen in "The Stunt Man"), Mary-Louise Parker (last seen in "Red Sparrow"), Martin Donovan (last seen in "Fahrenheit 451"), Shelley Winters (last seen in "Filmworker"), John Gielgud (last seen in "The Elephant Man"), Shelley Duvall (last seen in "Filmworker"), Richard E. Grant (last seen in "The Hitman's Bodyguard"), Viggo Mortensen (last seen in "Green Book"), Christian Bale (last heard in "Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle"), Valentina Cervi (last seen in "Jane Eyre"), Roger Ashton-Griffiths (last seen in "Bright Star'), Catherine Zago.
RATING: 3 out of 10 Channel crossings
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