BEFORE: Getting a little closer to Valentine's day, so I tried to program things so the films would have more of a romantic bent, building up to the holiday - but that's tougher when you haven't seen the films, and have to rely only on the IMDB synopses!
Maggie Gyllenhaal carries over from "Happy Endings" -
Over on Turner Classic Movies, John Garfield links from "Pride of the Marines" to tomorrow's first film, can you fill in the other links? Answers below.
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 14 on TCM (31 Days of Oscar, Day 14)
7:30 am "Air Force" (1943) with _____________ linking to:
9:45 am "Sergeant York" (1941) with _____________ linking to:
12:15 pm "Fury" (1936) with _____________ linking to:
2:00 pm "Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams" (1973) with _____________ linking to:
4:00 pm "Rachel, Rachel" (1968) with _____________ linking to:
6:00 pm "Bonnie and Clyde" (1967) with _____________ linking to:
8:00 pm "The Firm" (1993) with _____________ linking to:
10:45 pm "A Few Good Men" (1992) with _____________ linking to:
1:15 am "Easy Rider" (1969) with _____________ linking to:
3:00 am "Cool Hand Luke" (1967) with _____________ linking to:
5:15 am "Papillon" (1973)
Hurray, I've seen the majority of these films, 7 out of 11. But where are all the romantic films for Valentine's Day, what gives? OK, "Rachel, Rachel", but they usually do a whole day of romances - are they counting "Bonnie and Clyde" as a romance? Seems a bit odd, because then there are a lot of manly films after that, military trials and motorcycles and two prison flicks. Anyway, with 49 out of 161 seen, I'm back up to 30.4%.
THE PLOT: Through the neighborhoods of Paris, love is veiled, revealed, imitated, sucked dry, reinvented and awakened.
AFTER: Wow, and I thought "Happy Endings" was hard to follow - this film has 20 different stories told anthology-style, it's certainly another way to go. This style of filmmaking by committee was popular for a short time, and looked like it might be catching on, but then something killed it - it was probably the alleged comedy that was called "Movie 43". I watched that last year and I still haven't recovered.
But also, I'm up against a language problem and a cultural barrier here - sure, I took four years of French class in high school, but that's not the same as being fluent. I can speak some very basic French phrases, but when talking to a real French person I need them to speak very slowly, and I'm limited in the ways I can respond. It's a form of verbal gymnastics to be able to say the thing I need to say with the French words that I have. Like the Eddie Izzard comedy routine where he knows how to say "The cat is in the chair, and the monkey is on the branch" in French, but how often does the need to say that phrase come up? I've been practicing conversation a bit with my boss's wife, she's from Bordeaux, but I don't do it consistently enough to get any better at it. Thankfully, I'm watching on Tubi tonight, and there are subtitles.
So, yeah, about that - this film is on some of the streaming services for rental, but it's on Tubi and YouTube and IMDB.com for FREE, and that's not usually a good sign. Either nobody's renting it on iTunes, or people are renting it and demanding refunds or something. But why would anyone pay $2.99 to watch this on AmazonPrime or $3.99 on iTunes when it's FREE on another service. OK, so I had to watch a couple ads during the movie, that's a small sacrifice if it means I don't have to pay - I guess maybe some people aren't willing to compromise on this point?
But back to the cultural barrier - some of the 20 segments here are directed by Americans, Hollywood types like Joel and Ethan Coen, plus a couple indie directors like Gus Van Sant - and those pieces feel just like you think they should. The Coen Brothers' piece has Steve Buscemi getting into trouble with a local couple in a paris Metro station, and the Van Sant piece has a 20-something French man talking to another man that he believes may be his soulmate, only he doesn't know that the soulmate is American and doesn't speak much French, so the opportunity may have passed by, despite the attempt to run through the streets and find the man again.
But other segments were directed by French directors, and those were harder for me to understand - again, not because of the language, because subtitles were fine, but I think because they have a different way of telling a story, there's less need for the happy ending, for things to resolve, and often things are left very open-ended and enigmatic. In the first segment, a man in a parked car is down on how hard it is to meet single women, only to have one collapse near his car. The crowd on the street assumes she is his wife, and puts her in his back seat so she can rest. From there, he offers to drive her wherever she needs to go next, and so it seems a relationship has formed, just like that. Is this just some male fantasy, or is this how dating works in some parts of France? Don't they want to find out if they're compatible or not, or is the fact that he has a car and she needs to be driven places good enough?
Some French directors also seem to have a sick sense of ironic humor - like the man who falls over in a plaza (apparently French people fall down a lot) and the woman who attends to him is a woman that he's seen out in public time and again, when he was sweeping a parking garage she was parking there, when he was homeless she gave him some food, and so on. I'm not sure this is technically "love", but he's sort of in love with her, only due to the circumstances revealed at the end of the segment, they've found each other just a bit too late. Another segment shows a woman dropping off her baby at a daycare center and singing him a song, then taking a long train ride to her job as a nanny, where she sings the same song to employer's baby. OK, not ironic maybe, that's just a sucky situation, but that's the way of the world. In a perfect world she could bring her baby to her employer's house and care for them both at the same time, but you know what? It's not a perfect world.
Another segment tells the story of a man who's prepared to break up with his wife so he can marry his mistress, only before he can end their relationship, she tells him that she has a terminal disease, and then somehow this re-ignites his love for his wife, and he cares lovingly for her for the next few months - I honestly can't tell if that's a positive story or a negative one, I mean I guess it's a good result but it's also a bad one at the same time?
And then there are the segments that just come out of left field, that aren't logical in any way, and just sort of left me scratching my head. There's the grieving mother of a dead child who encounters a magical cowboy in the street, and he takes her to a place where she can spend time with her son again, for a short while. In another segment, an American actress seems to have a crush on a drug dealer, and she buys some strong hashish from him to smoke while on the set of a film - it sort of goes absolutely nowhere. And a young boy tells the story of how his parents, both mimes, met in prison and fell in love - at least, I think that's what happened. By contrast, another segment shows an aging couple getting together for one last drink before they divorce - of course, by now they each have other partners and they bring each other up to date on their current relationships, it's all very civil and (I'm guessing) very French.
And in another segment, the ghost of Oscar Wilde helps a man get back together with his fiancée after she realizes that he's incapable of having a good time or making her laugh. And then a female vampire chooses to spare the life of a potential victim, only to have him make himself bleed in order to offer himself up to her, then when she turns away and he falls down bleeding, she agrees to turn him into a fellow vampire so they can have a relationship - this is probably somebody's metaphor for something that they went through, I'll bet.
But the film sort of saves the best for last - there's some more irony in one segment where a blind man gets a break-up call from his girlfriend, who's an American actress, and this forces him to reflect back on their whole romance to figure out what went wrong - because he can't see it, right? If you ever thought it might be fun to date an (Oscar-winning, famous-for-Star-Wars) actress, if she's anything like this woman you may want to re-think that. We see all her ups and downs, her mood swings, her screaming in public, sometimes for no reason. This guy's probably better off without her, but he just can't bring himself to realize that - she's so high-maintenance, plus he forgot that actresses are occasionally, you know, acting. But then the film ends on a bittersweet note, with another American actress, you've seen her in a ton of supporting roles, but here she's a central figure, a mail-carrier from Denver who narrates her whole trip to Paris in Americanized French, she feels alone in the city but also loved by the city - she reflects on her ex-boyfriend from 11 years ago, but also misses her dogs at home in the U.S.
So there's a lot here, there are stories that might make you happy, there are stories that could make you sad, and there are stories that may leave you scratching your head, wondering what just happened. But overall, that's a bit like love, n'est ce pas?
Also starring Fanny Ardant, Julie Bataille, Leika Bekhti, Melchior Besion, Juliette Binoche (last seen in "Ghost in the Shell"), Seydou Boro, Steve Buscemi (last heard in "Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation"), Javier Camara, Sergio Castellitto, Willem Dafoe (last seen in "Aquaman"), Gerard Depardieu (last seen in "102 Dalmatians"), Cyril Descours, Lionel Dray, Marianne Faithfull, Ben Gazzara (last seen in "Dogville"), Hippolyte Girardot, Bob Hoskins (last seen in "Snow White and th Huntsman"), Axel Kiener, Olga Kurylenko (last seen in "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote"), Li Xin, Aissa Maiga, Margo Martindale (last seen in "The Boss"), Elias McConnell (last seen in "Elephant"), Yolande Moreau, Emily Mortimer (last seen in "The Sense of an Ending"), Florence Muller, Nick Nolte (last heard in "The Spiderwick Chronicles'), Bruno Podalydes, Natalie Portman (last seen in "Avengers: Endgame"), Paul Putner, Miranda Richardson (last seen in "The Young Victoria"), Gena Rowlands (last seen in "Something to Talk About"), Catalina Sandino Moreno (last seen in "A Most Violent Year'), Ludivine Sagnier (last seen in "Peter Pan"), Barbet Schroeder, Rufus Sewell (last seen in "Tristan & Isolde"), Gaspard Ulliel, Leonor Watling, Elijah Wood (last seen in "Bobby"), Julien Béramis, Salah Teskouk, Frankie Pain, Sarah Martins, with cameos from Wes Craven (last seen in "Trespassing Bergman"), Alexander Payne (ditto).
RATING: 5 out of 10 Mona Lisa postcards.
ANSWERS: The missing TCM "360 Degrees of Oscar" links are George Tobias, Walter Brennan, Sylvia Sidney, Joanne Woodward, Estelle Parsons, Gene Hackman, Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Anthony Zerbe.
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