BEFORE: It's day 1 of March but day 2 of the Reese Witherspoon programming, as she carries over from "How Do You Know". Two weeks left of romance films before I change gears, and I imagine that spring will be in the air when I watch my next non-relationship-based film. The Easter candy's in the stores already - why isn't there any good St. Patrick's Day candy? Why do the candy makers just sort of always skip that one? I mean, they skip Independence Day, too, but I assume that's because chocolate tends to melt in the summer. Where's the good Irish candy, like chocolate leprechaun coins or Irish minty chocolates or something? Guinness-flavored chocolate? No? Just me, then?
Tomorrow on Turner Classic Movies, it's the LAST DAY of Oscar-nominated films, so it's your last chance to tune in my last chance to get ahead. Valerie Hobson links from "Great Expectations" to the day's first film, can you fill in the other links? Answers below.
MONDAY, MARCH 2 on TCM (31 Days of Oscar, Day 31)
6:00 am "The Card" (1952) with _____________ linking to:
7:45 am "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" (1969) with _____________ linking to:
10:30 am "Lawrence of Arabia" (1962) with _____________ linking to:
2:30 pm "The Window" (1949) with _____________ linking to:
4:00 pm "Strangers on a Train" (1953) with _____________ linking to:
6:00 pm "I Want You" (1951) with _____________ linking to:
8:00 pm "Laura" (1944) with _____________ linking to:
9:45 pm "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir" (1947) with _____________ linking to:
11:45 pm "My Fair Lady" (1964) with _____________ linking to:
3:00 am "The Nun's Story" (1959) with _____________ linking to:
5:45 am "Tom Jones" (1963)
I'm scoring big tomorrow with 6 films seen: "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" (the 2nd version), "Lawrence of Arabia", "Strangers on a Train", "My Fair Lady", "The Nun's Story" (caught it last year) and "Tom Jones". That bumps me up to 120 seen out of 360, or 33.3%, exactly one-third seen, which is right where I predicted I would finish. How about that? I was hoping for more, but they had to pick some pretty obscure movies to make the chain work out - and that last film, "Tom Jones", links via Albert Finney back to the FIRST film in their chain, 30 days ago. So that means it's one big loop - so they could have started it anywhere, I don't know why they didn't make more love stories line up with Valentine's Day, then. And they never used the same link twice, which I do all the time. I love this format, but I think my score would have been higher if they just programmed the big, more well-known nominated films - I'll get 'em next year.
THE PLOT: A lonely landscape architect falls for the spirit of the beautiful woman who used to live in his new apartment.
AFTER: With such an eclectic cast, really the only place I could put this one was between two other films with Reese Witherspoon in them - OK, maybe Mark Ruffalo turns up on films pretty often, but not in romances - last year he was in the relationship-based film "Thank You for Sharing", but that was something of an anomaly. How many other romances have Donal Logue or Jon Heder in them? So this is where it had to go.
I wasn't looking forward to this one, because from what little I knew about it, it seemed like a film where a guy falls in a ghost that's haunting his apartment, and how is THAT story going to end? He's alive, she's dead, talk about a long-distance relationship, and they can't be with each other until he dies or she gets reincarnated? Fortunately that's not what this film is about, he falls for her spirit, not her ghost, and there's a big clue to her condition in the lyrics of "Just Like Heaven", the Cure song which this is apparently based on, and which opens and closes the movie.
Thankfully, she's only MOSTLY dead, even though this doesn't explain how Elizabeth's spirit can be back in her apartment, or why the new tenant David can see her, and nobody else can. Eventually there's something akin to an explanation, only not really, but this is a movie where anything can happen and usually does. But naturally if he's going to help her get back into her body and live again, then maybe in the process she'll come to appreciate his help - and as we've seen, it's always the guy who helps the woman out that she'll eventually regard as a suitable mate. Right?
We the audience get to see a day in the life of Dr. Elizabeth Masterson before her accident, but as a spirit she seems to have little memory of her life, so she and David have to do some detective work to find out who she is and what happened to her - even though he's subletting her old apartment, completely furnished, month by month, the renting party won't tell him anything about the previous tenant, so they have to kind of go the long way around. But eventually they stumble on her medical knowledge and her familiarity with a particular hospital and they manage to put the pieces together.
Of course, there are issues here about re-writing how comas work, and trying to define the abilities of a spirit that somehow got separated from its physical body - not to mention the suggestion that there's some larger force at work that must be causing these events to happen, be that fate, karma or some divine intervention. Which therefore implies there must be certain things destined to happen, and destiny is therefore stronger than accidents or chance, and then logically free will is the next casualty if you follow the thread a little further. Another problem is that this film could give false hope to relatives of people in comas in real-life. But I think this film ended up being charming enough to allow me to forgive a great deal of all that. At least it was an original idea for a romance that I haven't seen in a film before.
Also starring Mark Ruffalo (last seen in "Avengers: Endgame"), Donal Logue (last seen in "The Cloverfield Paradox"), Dina Waters (last seen in "The Haunted Mansion"), Jon Heder (last seen in "School for Scoundrels"), Ben Shenkman (last seen in "Must Love Dogs"), Ivana Milicevic (last seen in "What's Your Number?"), Rosalind Chao (last seen in "I Am Sam"), Caroline Aaron (last seen in "Hello, My Name Is Doris"), Ron Canada (last seen in "The Human Stain"), Kerris Dorsey (last seen in "Moneyball"), Alyssa Shafer, Willie Garson (last seen in "The Polka King"), Joel McKinnon Miller (last heard in "The Swan Princess"), Catherine Taber, Raymond O'Connor.
RATING: 6 out of 10 books on the occult
ANSWERS: The missing TCM "360 Degrees of Oscar" links are Petula Clark, Peter O'Toole, Arthur Kennedy, Ruth Roman, Farley Granger, Dana Andrews, Gene Tierney, Rex Harrison, Audrey Hepburn, Edith Evans.
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