BEFORE: Two down, 39 to go. It was going to be 40 romance films total, but I think the last one in my chain is not readily available any more, so we'll have to see. I could drop it, so once I get a little closer to the end I'll have to count the days out and see if I can fit it in, and then decide whether it's worth renting from iTunes. I could have dropped today's film, too, because the one before it also links to the one after it, but I think I'll give it a go, I hope it's worth a $3.99 iTunes rental, because it's not free on any of the streaming services.
Mark Webber carries over from "Laggies".
Meanwhile, over on Turner Classic Movies, Pat O'Brien links from "Here Comes the Navy" to tomorrow's first film, can you fill in the other links? Answers below.
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 5 on TCM (31 Days of Oscar, Day 5)
6:00 am "Flirtation Walk" (1934) with _____________ linking to:
7:45 am "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (1935) with _____________ linking to:
10:15 am "The Story of Louis Pasteur" (1936) with _____________ linking to:
11:45 am "North by Northwest" (1959) with _____________ linking to:
2:15 pm "The Greatest Story Ever Told" (1965) with _____________ linking to:
5:45 pm "The Caine Mutiny" (1954) with _____________ linking to:
8:00 pm "The Apartment" (1960) with _____________ linking to:
10:15 pm "The China syndrome" (1979) with _____________ linking to:
12:30 am "Cat Ballou" (1965) with _____________ linking to:
2:15 am "The Dirty Dozen" (1967) with _____________ linking to:
5:00 am "The Magnificent Seven" (1960)
I have not seen the first three films, but I've seen the rest - from "North by Northwest" all the way to "The Magnificent Seven", that's another 8 out of 11, bringing me up to 21 out of 57 overall, or 36.8%. However, any gains made today are going to disappear tomorrow.
THE PLOT: Sarah begins to confront her shortcomings after she rejects her boyfriend's hasty proposal and soon finds herself in a rebound romance. Meanwhile, her sister Beth is immersed in the details of her wedding.
AFTER: Writers are very cruel people, and screenwriters doubly so - they create these fictional worlds with characters that they may be very fond of, or may be based on people they know in real life, and then they go ahead and make the lives of those characters very difficult or complicated, because movies have to have conflict and tough situations, nobody wants to watch a movie where everything is easy for everybody and everything always works out for the best. Right? So you have to be cruel to be a screenwriter, put your characters through the emotional wringer, and tonight's film is like a textbook case.
For example, for the second film in a row, I've seen a live-in boyfriend propose to his girlfriend, and this forces her to first panic, and then totally re-examine her life plan. Is this natural? I guess there is always the possibility that this will be the reaction, so guys need to be REALLY REALLY sure when they propose that they're on the same page as their intended life partner, especially if that proposal is going to be made in a very public place. Look, I don't know why some guys do this, I guess they figure that their girlfriend will enjoy a little extra attention, but I don't see it. Some women are very private people, and this just isn't their style. Others may not believe in marriage at all, like our lead female character tonight. I guess what I'm saying, if you're going to propose, you've got to know your audience, and I mean your sweetheart, not the audience in the concert venue or ballpark.
I've proposed twice, once on the street and once in a restaurant, and both times I was like 99% sure that the answer was going to be yes. And no, at that restaurant I didn't have the waiters hide the ring in her mashed potatoes or in her dessert, that's stupid. That second time I did walk around with the ring on me for a few weeks, because January 1, 2000 didn't seem like the right time, what with everyone worrying about the Y2K bug, so I waited for Valentine's Day. I'm still married, but the restaurant is no longer there...
The proposer here, Kevin, is in a band, and he proposed the night before leaving on a month-long concert tour. Yeah, that's gonna be a downer of a trip now. His bandmate, Andrew, is getting married to Beth, who is the sister of Sarah, she's the girl who Kevin proposed to. Got it? They had a nice little foursome of friendship/sisters/bandmates going on, before Kevin ruined everything by proposing to Sarah, despite multiple warnings from Andrew to not do that. Sarah's also a bit at fault here, because if she was so anti-marriage she probably should have clued her boyfriend in on that.
Sarah moves out - geez, it feels like she just moved IN - and Kevin goes on tour with Andrew, while Beth keeps planning her wedding. Sarah, a book-store manager, starts a relationship with Jonathan, one of her regular bookstore shoppers, who happens to live near her new apartment, conveniently. Things go pretty well from there, except possibly not for Kevin, but you know what? He got to write a very meaningful song about his heartbreak, so maybe something good did come out of it for him.
Sarah also gets to have a gallery showing of her cartoons, which are based on details from both relationships, the one with Kevin and the new one with Jonathan, meanwhile all is not perfect in the sisters' parents' relationship either (they don't call this guy "Dad" so I'm left wondering if he's their stepfather or what...) and eventually even the relationship between the sisters suffers because whenever Sarah has a new problem, Beth can only see how this is going to affect HER and her wedding plans.
So this is really a film about a lot of things - how engaged people become Bridezillas when they're planning their wedding, how all modern music is terrible (I agree, I don't listen to anything released after 1990), what it's like to work in an aquarium, plus there's a missing cat, and we learn reasons why you shouldn't drop in on your ex when you're drunk. Be warned that you're going to have to sort of write your own ending, because some writer just couldn't be bothered.
Also starring Lizzy Caplan (last seen in "127 Hours"), Alison Brie (last seen in "The Little Hours"), Martin Starr (last seen in "Spider-Man: Far From Home"), Geoffrey Arend (last heard in "The Angry Birds Movie"), Timothy Busfield (last seen in "Striking Distance"), Gigi Bermingham, Melonie Diaz, Grant Harvey, Devin Barry, Jacob Womack, Ray Conchado, Kristin Slaysman (last seen in "Promised Land").
RATING: 5 out of 10 spilled drinks
ANSWERS: The missing TCM "360 Degrees of Oscar" links are Dick Powell, Anita Louise, Josephine Hutchinson, Martin Landau, Jose Ferrer, Fred MacMurray, Jack Lemmon, Jane Fonda, Lee Marvin and Charles Bronson.
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