BEFORE: It turns out I lied, I can't stop messing around with the romance chain. It seems like every night I move the remaining films around, looking for that magic combination that's going to put the "right" film on Valentine's Day. For a while it was today's film, but I started to feel like that wasn't the best choice somehow - I mean it's about a married couple, so definitely relationship stuff will be found tonight, but is that good enough? Then I flipped a piece of the chain around so that I'd get to this film sooner and that put "The Bounty Hunter" on V-Day - eh, I don't know if that's the way I want to go, either. But at least that order had the advantage of putting a film before its sequel, rather than after.
There are so many options, so many ways to organize the same films that it's maddening - I've got one other scenario to consider, it adds two new films that recently came into my possession (I just spotted a way to link to them), and takes away one that's available on Hulu, so it's one film LONGER in the end, but I think it's a bit more elegant and it puts more appropriate films on and around Valentine's Day - so maybe I'll go with that one, but then I really REALLY have to stop fine tuning this chain and just pick one order that gets me to the same end point and stick with it.
John Carroll Lynch carries over from "Love Happens".
Meanwhile, over on Turner Classic Movies, Louis Calhern links from "The Red Danube" to tomorrow's first film, can you fill in the other links? Answers below.
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 8 on TCM (31 Days of Oscar, Day 8)
7:15 am "Juarez" (1939) with _____________ linking to:
9:30 am "Now, Voyager" (1942) with _____________ linking to:
11:30 am "The Spanish Main" (1945) with _____________ linking to:
1:30 pm "This Land Is Mine" (1943) with _____________ linking to:
3:30 pm "The Picture of Dorian Gray" (1945) with _____________ linking to:
5:45 pm "From Here to Eternity" (1953) with _____________ linking to:
8:00 pm "Separate Tables" (1958) with _____________ linking to:
10:00 pm "Atlantic City" (1980) with _____________ linking to:
12:00 am "Bull Durham" (1988) with _____________ linking to:
2:00 am "The Player" (1992) with _____________ linking to:
4:30 am "The Valley of Decision" (1945)
I can tell you there's some first-class linking going on here - there's a 22-year jump forward between two films, and a 47-year jump backwards between two others. How many actors have careers with nearly 5 decades in between two of their roles? Since I've used that actor as a link, I happen to know he was a noted child actor who stuck with it, and worked pretty steadily in the 1980's and 1990's. If you need to link between the 1940's and the 1980's, that's the kind of actor you need to look for. And a film like "The Player" has such a large cast, that's a film you can put almost anywhere to help yourself out of a linking jam - I've been there, too. Anyway, I've seen four of tomorrow's films - "Now, Voyager", "From Here to Eternity", "Bull Durham" and "The Player". I probably should have seen "Atlantic City" at some point but it somehow never came up. But 4 out of 11 brings me to 31 seen out of 93, a perfect 33.33%.
THE PLOT: An author is undergoing multiple fertility therapies to get pregnant, putting her relationship with her husband on edge.
AFTER: This is the kind of film that feels like it was definitely based on one person's relationship experiences, as opposed to being based on a book or a New Yorker article, and the IMDB confirms that it's based on the director's (Tamara Jenkins') own experiences receiving fertility treatments. There are just too many details in the ups and downs this couple goes through for it to not be based on real life - someone who hadn't been through all this would most likely skip over a lot of the specifics. But still we might have cause to wonder what details here might be fictional - infertility is a very personal subject, as are many of the physical and emotional changes that two people might go through on the road to conception.
And as one might expect, the personal nature and the perceived failings (of both parties here) to be fertile eventually sets up a form of the blame game, during which the husband and wife, Richard and Rachel, both reflect on their life choices - they kept waiting to have a baby, did they wait too long? Whose fault is it if the husband's sperm isn't viable, or if the wife isn't producing enough eggs? When they both agree to adopt a baby from a pregnant teen in another part of the country, whose fault is it when that mother-to-be suddenly breaks off communications? Was she ever even pregnant at all, or did she catfish them? What's the proper etiquette for when you scroll through a list of potential egg donors and recognize the waitress from that café down the block? And can you imagine her carrying your child without your wife getting jealous?
Into this mix comes Sadie, the stepdaughter of Richard's brother, so not a blood relative, but she thinks of Richard as her "cool uncle" - she's crashing in their East Village apartment after clashing with her mother about not finishing her senior year of college, and after spending time with her not-really uncle and aunt, they start to ask her about her eggs. Confusion naturally occurs when you ask a woman about her eggs as she's sitting at the breakfast table. Umm, no, not those eggs. When they finally straighten things out and ask the proper question, Sadie is eager to go through the medical treatments and become an egg donor, in fact she's a little too eager to help, and screws up the delicate act of telling her mother about it over Thanksgiving.
An odd little threesome develops in this small apartment, three people who will all be parents to this future child in some way, two genetic donors and the third who will carry the child. It's not sexual, and thank god the egg donor's not a blood relative because that would be incestuous and wrong, but then nothing really feels 100% right or natural once you start mixing genetic materials and re-implanting embryos into another body. By the end of all these processes, IVF and failed adoptions and then egg donors and implantation, and sex isn't even part of the formula any more, the couple doesn't even know which end is up any more, or what sort of relationship they have any more. But at least they're still together at the end, ready to go down the next road together.
But that's TWO films this week with a genuine non-ending, cutting the story short before we learn whether their latest venture bears fruit. "Save the Date" cut to black before we could learn what Sarah said to Jonathan, and in both cases that just feels very lazy - like the directors didn't want to alienate the part of the audience that would have preferred a happy or a sad ending, and hedged their bets - by closing up shop early you might think you can satisfy everyone, but I'll suggest that the opposite is true, any resolution is really better than none.
This is not my world, I don't have kids, I've been married to two women who don't want kids, so it looks like they're not in my future - I can take comfort in the fact that I don't have to go through these fertility treatments with anyone, it seems like a horrible hassle, even harder than raising a kid, which is a nightmare of its own, if you ask me. The better way to win this game is to not play it at all. And now I'm also glad I changed up the schedule and didn't keep this as my Valentine's Day film.
Also starring Paul Giamatti (last seen in "The Catcher Was a Spy"), Kathryn Hahn (last heard in "Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation"), Molly Shannon (ditto), Kayli Carter, Denis O'Hare (last seen in "The Anniversary Party"), Emily Robinson, Desmin Borges (last seen in "Compliance"), Francesca Root-Dodson (last seen in "Rebel in the Rye"), Fenton Lawless, Samantha Buck, Maddie Corman (last seen in "Wonder Wheel") with archive footage of Phil Spector.
RATING: 5 out of 10 Halloween parade drummers
ANSWERS: The missing TCM "360 Degrees of Oscar" links are Claude Rains, Paul Henreid, Maureen O'Hara, George Sanders, Donna Reed, Deborah Kerr, Burt Lancaster, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Dean Stockwell.
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