Professor Marston & the Wonder Women

Year 12, Day 46 - 2/15/20 - Movie #3,448

BEFORE: I hope everyone had a great Valentine's Day, and if you didn't have someone loving you, I hope that at least you took the time to love yourself.  You can interpret that statement any way you want.  We're halfway through February now, but my romance chain still has a long way to go, nearly another month before I switch thematic gears.  But I've got to get there first - and with my new criteria for programming as films that I've been very curious about, let's just say that effect is extremely high for tonight's selection.

Tom Kemp carries over from "Mermaids" - why do I get the feeling he's another local Boston actor, like Rex Trailer was?  Kemp's been in "Gone Baby Gone", "Mystic River", "Shutter Island", "Black Mass", "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past", all films that shot in Massachusetts.  He even had a part in the recent remake of "Little Women", which also was filmed up there. (I can't link to "Little Women" now, but it's part of my plan for April.)

Over on Turner Classic Movies, Spencer Tracy links from "Bad Day at Black Rock" to tomorrow's first film, can you fill in the other links?  Answers below.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 15 on TCM (31 Days of Oscar, Day 15)
6:15 am "A Guy Named Joe" (1943) with _____________ linking to:
8:30 am "The Facts of Life" (1960) with _____________ linking to:
10:15 am "Top Hat" (1935) with _____________ linking to:
12:15 pm "The Gay Divorcee" (1934) with _____________ linking to:
2:15 pm "Three Smart Girls" (1937) with _____________ linking to:
4:00 pm "The Uninvited" (1944) with _____________ linking to:
6:00 pm "The Philadelphia Story" (1940) with _____________ linking to:
8:00 pm "A Lion in Winter" (1968) with _____________ linking to:
10:30 pm "The Silence of the Lambs" (1991) with _____________ linking to:
12:45 am "Taxi Driver" (1976) with _____________ linking to:
3:00 am "Young Frankenstein" (1974) with _____________ linking to:
5:00 am "The Merry Widow" (1952)

For once, I've seen the majority of tomorrow's films, 7 out of 12.  Now I'm grateful I watched all those films a few years ago with a certain famous dancer from the 1930's, that came in handy here - I've seen "Top Hat", "The Gay Divorcee", "The Philadelphia Story", "A Lion in Winter", "The Silence of the Lambs", "Taxi Driver" and "Young Frankenstein".  Programming more movies made after 1970 also helped me out a great deal, I'm up to 61 seen out of 183, another perfect third, or 33.33%.

THE PLOT: The story of psychologist William Moulton Marston and his polyamorous relationship with his wife and their mistress, which would inspire the creation of the super heroine Wonder Woman.

AFTER: This gentleman's name comes up in trivia questions all the time, because he was responsible for three famous things: 1) creating the character of Wonder Woman, 2) inventing the polygraph test and 3) being part of the first couple to consider their relationship status as "It's complicated".  And this was decades before Facebook was even a thing.  The first two things kind of go hand-in-hand, if you think about it, because Wonder Woman has a golden lasso that forces criminals and super-villains to tell her the truth, which is essentially a polygraph test in comic-book form.  But there's so much more to Wonder Woman than just the rope, there's the whole bondage thing, the being raised in a society of women with no men (umm, we're still trying to figure out the logistics of that one) and the fact that she then became a powerful woman in a male-dominated world, who often masqueraded as an army secretary, in a more submissive role.

Now, when Superman puts on a suit and lives part of the day as Clark Kent, or Bruce Wayne puts on a cape and cowl and calls himself Batman, we don't think that much about it - but then when Wonder Woman lives a double life, the whole concept of gender politics comes into play, and it's a very different ball game.  Why would the very strong Princess Diana of the Amazons dress down and put on some glasses and pretend to be average, humdrum Diana Prince?  But wait, because we haven't even scratched the surface here - the early Wonder Woman comic books were filled with bondage, erotic subtext, homo-erotic subtext, and what are superhero costumes but fetish gear?  It turns out that the earliest "Wonder Woman" comics were just one step removed from "Tijuana Bibles", which were kind of like the 1930's version of porn movie parodies.  People back then didn't have x-rated movies just a few clicks away on the internet, so they had to pass the time with print cartoons of Popeye getting it on with Olive Oil, or Clark Gable doing Greta Garbo or whatever.

Wonder Woman was essentially fighting crime in a bustier and skirt for many years, then in the 1970's the TV show with Lynda Carter changed that to a corset and hot pants. (The comics gave her long pants for a couple of years in the early late 2000's and sales naturally tanked...) Somewhere between Wonder Woman, Batgirl and Charlie's Angels in the 1970's I became sexually aware - I probably developed a superheroine fetish before I even knew what a fetish was.  Can you blame me?  Wonder Woman was practically falling out of her very tight costume, I was smitten in the age of "jiggle TV" (there was also "Three's Company" and "The Dukes of Hazzard", but really, no show was more blatant about it than "Wonder Woman".)

But to understand the character, you really have to go back to the early comic books, of 1941.  (Many of the comic books from the 1930's and 1940's are rare and very valuable, not just because they feature the first appearances of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, etc. but because so many comic books got recycled during the paper drives of World War II.). And to understand the reasons behind the character, you have to look at the personal life of the character's creator, and now it's an established fact that William Marston lived for several years with two women in what we now call a polyamorous relationship.  Back in the 1940's this situation was regarded as either an abomination or "getting extremely lucky", depending on your politics or religious affiliations.  And if you didn't know the French term "menage a trois", then in the 1930's slang I believe it was either called a "devil's threesome" or a "lucky Joe".

Before he was a comic-book writer, William Marston was a psychologist and college professor, but the scandal of his relationship eventually cost him his teaching position at Radcliffe, and he had neglected to patent his innovation of testing changes in someone's systolic blood pressure to determine if they were nervous under questioning, which became an important component of the polygraph test.  The tradition holds true to this day, that one can only become a comic-book writer by failing miserably in at least two other careers.  Nobody ever sets out to become a comic-book writer, this is true, it's always the "Hail Mary" desperation pass in someone's life.  Artists, sure, they go to art school and many famous artists have drawn comics but writers?  Please.  If they were real writers they'd be writing books without pictures in them.

Marston succeeded with his "Wonder Woman" character because he had great inspiration, and insight into the minds of two women - I don't think many other comic-book writers have slept with one woman, let alone two.  And never two at a time - you prove to me that another comic-book writer had a threesome and I'll give you my Justice League trade paperbacks.  It's safe to say that Marston was the only one, ever. And then the damn fool got lung cancer and didn't even hang around on Earth to enjoy the relationship situation he created for very long.  Seriously, everybody smoked back in the 1940's, they gave cigarettes to soldiers and even cartoon characters promoted them on TV - and somehow that was all OK, but sleeping with two women wasn't?

Despite the elaborate lie that Marston, his wife and his mistress told the neighbors, that Olive's husband had died, and the Marstons gave her a place to live out of pity, eventually people figured out that more was going on than met the eye.  After all, Olive's kids probably looked a lot like Mr. Moulton, and any visitors to the house might notice that there was only one adult bedroom, with a bed big enough for three (their mattress size was called "King plus Double-Queen").  The movie takes a few shortcuts here, by having one neighbor walk into the house unannounced to bring them some chili or something, only to catch them involved in an afternoon costumed role-play situation. NITPICK POINT: Who just walks into someone's house if nobody answers the door, back in the 1940's, no less?  And who has a little "afternoon delight" with the wife and mistress without making sure that the front door is locked?

Another N.P. concerns the fact that this polyamorous situation is portrayed as something of an open secret, like everyone in the neighborhood seems to be interested in figuring it out - but I think in reality they did a better job of hiding this 3-way relationship, because it only was revealed in print many years later, and you'd think that if everyone knew about it at the time, it wouldn't have been such a shock later on when it was revealed in the 1980's. Plus the details of their bedroom situation are probably mostly speculative.

So according to this film, public shame broke up their happy little family, but after Marston's cancer diagnosis, he tried to bring Olive back into the fold - and after his death, Elizabeth and Olive stayed together as a couple for many years, until Olive died in 1985. And Elizabeth Marston lived until age 100, so I guess the takeaway here is do whatever (or whoever) makes you happy, and if anybody's got a problem with that, they can go take a flight in an invisible plane.  Even if you live to be 100, life's too short to deal with any haters telling you who you can and can't sleep with.

Also starring Luke Evans (last seen in "The Girl on the Train"), Rebecca Hall (last seen in "Holmes & Watson), Bella Heathcote (last seen in "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies"), Connie Britton (last seen in "Beatriz at Dinner"), Monica Giordano, JJ Feild (last seen in "K-19: The Widowmaker"), Chris Conroy, Oliver Platt (last seen in "Kill the Messenger"), Maggie Castle (last seen in "Super Troopers 2"), Alexa Havins, Sharon Kubo, Allie Gallerani (last seen in "I Am Michael"), Christopher Jon Gombos, Christopher Paul Richards,  with archive footage of Adolf Hitler (last seen in "Darkest Hour").

RATING: 7 out of 10 sorority pledges

ANSWERS: The missing TCM "360 Degrees of Oscar" links are Don DeFore, Lucille Ball, Eric Blore, Alice Brady, Ray Milland, Ruth Hussey, Katharine Hepburn, Anthony Hopkins, Jodie Foster, Peter Boyle, Richard Haydn.

Mermaids

Year 12, Day 45 - 2/14/20 - Movie #3,447

BEFORE: It's finally here, Valentine's Day, the highlight of February and the focal point of the romance chain, ideally.  Have I picked the right film for the holiday?  I wavered back and forth between so many possible chains, and each one put a different film on February 14 - for a long while it was "Private Life", then it was "The Bounty Hunter", then I re-worked everything again, and now we're here, with Bob Hoskins carrying over from "Paris, Je t'Aime" -

Over on Turner Classic Movies, Victor Jory links from "Papillon" to tomorrow's first film, can you fill in the other links?  Answers below.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 15 on TCM (31 Days of Oscar, Day 15)
7:45 am "Cheyenne Autumn" (1964) with _____________ linking to:
10:20 am "Giant" (1956) with _____________ linking to:
1:45 pm "The V.I.P.s" (1963) with _____________ linking to:
4:00 pm "The Third Man" (1949) with _____________ linking to:
6:00 pm "Gaslight" (1944) with _____________ linking to:
8:00 pm "Casablanca" (1942) with _____________ linking to:
10:00 pm "Key Largo" (1948) with _____________ linking to:
12:00 am "Written on the Wind" (1957) with _____________ linking to:
2:00 am "Ice Station Zebra" (1968) with _____________ linking to:
4:45 am "Bad Day at Black Rock" (1955)

I'm 50-50 tomorrow, 5 seen out of 10, but that's still a form of progress, because it brings my percentage up to 31.5%, 54 out of 171.  Of course I've seen "Giant", "The V.I.P.s", "The Third Man", "Gaslight" and "Casablanca" - I somehow missed "Key Largo" over the years, though I'm sure TCM runs it all the time.

THE PLOT: An unconventional single mother relocates with her two daughters to a small Massachusetts town in 1963, where a number of events and relationships both challenge and strengthen their familial bonds.

AFTER: Well, I guess this is the best tie-in I could hope for, given the circumstances.  Winona Ryder's character is a Jewish girl who wants to convert to Catholicism and become a nun, so she's always reading from a book on the Catholic saints.  And who's the holiday named after?  Saint Valentine!  That's going to have to do.  I mean, it's also a film about relationships and a teenage girl's first love, so there's a tie-in no matter what, but the Saint thing really drives it home and make me think I made a really good choice.  Another win for the Accidental Scheduling Genius.

The story of the real Saint Valentine is rather sketchy, to say the least.  There are at least three origin stories for him, or perhaps there were three people with that name whose stories got woven together somehow.  Was he a priest of Rome or the Bishop of Terni, was he from Umbria or Interamna?  Either way, he was arrested for evangelizing and brought before the emperor Claudius II, who commanded him to renounce his faith or be clubbed to death and beheaded. Supposedly before his execution he wrote a note to a judge's daughter, and thus inspired the custom of writing romantic notes, but of course this could all be a bunch of B.S. that never happened.  Other stories have him getting in trouble for performing illegal Christian weddings in the Roman Empire.

Anyway, back to tonight's film, which is set back in 1963, a few months before the JFK assassination, which is a plot point midway through the film, though I'm not sure that it's a proper depiction to show people celebrating on Christmas and New Year's in late 1963, I mean, did anyone that year really feel in a holiday mood, so soon after their well-loved President was killed?  Everyone here seems to get over it very quickly, that's all I'm saying, and we tend to think that all Americans were in a funk for several months and nobody cheered up until the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show.  Now I don't know what to believe.

Anyway, this family (mother and two daughters) keeps moving around because the mother tends to gets involved in failing relationships, and her quick fix each time is to pack up her daughters and drive them to another state.  After breaking up with her married employer, we watch this nomadic woman bring her tribe to settle in Massachusetts, in a home next to a convent.  She's attracted to the local school bus driver, but so is her teen daughter, and she instead forms a relationship with a shoe salesman.  Meanwhile her daughter goes fishing with the school-bus driver and makes out with him in the convent's bell tower - but she's either ignorant about sex or fearful of an immaculate conception (which is it? I guess the screenwriter couldn't just pick one?) so somehow she thinks she's pregnant after just kissing Joe.

Her solution is to get in the car and drive away, which would seem to be the answer to NONE of her problems, real or perceived.  Yet another case where a film character acts in ways that don't make any sense, so therefore feel very unrealistic to me.  I can understand being unwilling to talk to her mother about sex, but to just sit there, time and time again, and NOT SAY the things she needs to say that would just solve everything quite easily, that becomes very hard to swallow.  Instead she ends up at some random family's house in Connecticut weaving some impossible tale about being from Brazil and owning a diamond mine?  Give me a break.  I also didn't quite understand how Lou, her mother's boyfriend, knew exactly where to find her.  Even if the car was reported stolen, and the police tracked it down in New Haven, that still doesn't explain how he got there so quickly - so sorry, major NITPICK POINT here.

I don't know if I approve of the film's message, either, as displayed by Lou's relationship with Mrs. Flax - he claims that every relationship needs to be constantly growing and changing, or else it's dying.  Not necessarily true, though this may represent his particular view of life, it's not that way for everyone.  Some people settle in to a relationship and are very comfortable with it, and then what would be the point of disrupting that?  Some people are married for 40 or 50 years, and while every relationship may have its ups and downs, that doesn't mean that they all have to be in a state of constant flux. This way of thinking leads some people to believe that they have to break up or get a divorce, just because things aren't always moving forward - which again, is not necessarily so.  Some relationships have setbacks, and sometimes they have to move backwards to then go forwards further, do you know what I mean?  Meanwhile Mrs. Flax believes something similar, that she's always got to be on the move, to the next town or the next job, while her daughters are just looking for a little stability in their lives, is that too much to hope for?

Overall it seems like divorce was such a stigma back in 1963 that people were always leaving each other when they felt the need, and then dealing with the legal ramifications later - so everybody was married to someone in name only, when the reality was that they'd physically checked out long ago.  It must have been a very confusing time, with nearly everyone married to one person and sleeping with another, right?  And how is that better than dealing with divorce?  If it's over, it's over, and you might as well acknowledge that.

I don't know, I'm not really sold on this film, but it fit the criteria that I'm using now to select my films, which is that I've been curious about it.  It's been in the cable listings for a long, long time, and now at least I can pass it by and ignore it, and I never have to watch it again.

There's an actor that appears here in the role of a town doctor, I won't say what kind of doctor because that would give away a plot point - but the actor is Rex Trailer, who was a TV star back in the Golden Age, he was a bit like Buffalo Bob Smith from the "Howdy Doody Show", only his show came first, and he worked with a puppet named Oky Doky - I swear, I'm not making this up.  (Also, he had real cowboy + rodeo experience, I think Buffalo Bob was just an actor...) But at some point the show's production company went under, his puppeteer left to operate Howdy Doody, and Trailer moved to Philadelphia to host TV western shows there.  In 1956 the Philadelphia TV station was bought by NBC, and he was offered a replacement gig in either Cleveland or Boston - he chose Boston, and hosted a weekend-morning Western show for kids, called "Boomtown", for several years.  Even after that show ceased production, he stayed in Boston, did a lot of charity work and became a local celebrity.  By the time I was a kid, he would appear on local affiliate stations to promote vacation trips to Knott's Berry Farm out west - I didn't even know what took place at Knott's Berry Farm, but man, Rex Trailer made we want to go there.  He had that unique personality mix of Fred Rogers, Roy Rogers, and P.T. Barnum, if that makes any sense.  In the later years he was inducted into both the Massachusetts Broadcasters Hall of Fame, and the Massachusetts Country Music Hall of Fame - for all I know, he's the only member of that second one.

Also starring Cher (last seen in "Burlesque"), Winona Ryder (last seen in "Mr. Deeds"), Michael Schoeffling (last seen in "Vision Quest"), Christina Ricci (last heard in "The Smurfs 2"), Caroline McWilliams, Jan Miner, Betsy Townsend, Richard McElvain (last seen in "Joy"), Paula Plum, Dossy Peabody, Rex Trailer, Tom Kemp (last seen in "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past"), Jerry Quinn, with archive footage of Hugh Downs and Barbara Walters.

RATING: 4 out of 10 polished rocks

ANSWERS: The missing TCM "360 Degrees of Oscar" links are Sal Mineo, Rod Taylor, Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Rock Hudson, Ernest Borgnine.

Paris, Je t'Aime

Year 12, Day 44 - 2/13/20 - Movie #3,446

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.

Happy Endings

Year 12, Day 43 - 2/12/20 - Movie #3,445

BEFORE: This is another one of those films that's slipped by me over the years, I probably had several opportunities to watch it, but have passed them up over and over.  Finally I think last year I was feeling like I was running out of material, or perhaps I was thinking ahead in July or August about needing more material for February, so I recorded this one and several others.  Now I have to clear several films off of my DVR, just in case it dies again, forcing me to rent all those films separately, which could get expensive.  Clearing my Netflix queue is important, but making space on the DVR is even more important.

Lisa Kudrow carries over from "Long Shot" -

Over on Turner Classic Movies, Edna May Oliver links from "Pride and Prejudice" to tomorrow's first film, can you fill in the other links?  Answers below.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 13 on TCM (31 Days of Oscar, Day 13)
7:45 am "David Copperfield" (1935) with _____________ linking to:
10:15 am "A Tale of Two Cities" (1935) with _____________ linking to:
12:30 pm "Five Star Final" (1931) with _____________ linking to:
2:15 pm "Little Caesar" (1930) with _____________ linking to:
4:00 pm "I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang" (1932) with _____________ linking to:
6:00 pm "The Commandos Strike at Dawn" (1942) with _____________ linking to:
8:00 pm "When Worlds Collide" (1951) with _____________ linking to:
9:45 pm "The Young Philadelphians" (1959) with _____________ linking to:
12:15 am "Night and Day" (1946) with _____________ linking to:
2:45 am "Destination Tokyo" (1943) with _____________ linking to:
5:15 am "Pride of the Marines" (1945)

I thought I was looking at another goose-egg today, but then I remembered that I watched just about every Cary Grant movie ever made - so I'm 1 for 11 today, having seen only "Destination Tokyo", bringing me up to 42 seen out of 150, just 28%.  I may enjoy the linking format better than others, but it's wreaking havoc on my stats this year.

THE PLOT: Multiple stories woven together creates a witty look at love, family and the sheer unpredictability of life itself.

AFTER: I've been aware of this film for some time - it played at Sundance back in 2005, only I stopped going to that festival in 2004 (I think I was also there in 1998, the year of "Montana" and "Next Stop Wonderland" and 2001, the year of "Memento", "Donnie Darko", "Double Whammy" and "Super Troopers", if memory serves...)  This just FEELS like a Sundance film, because everything's so complicated, much more so than it has to be - that's the kind of stuff a festival programmer goes for, especially if they have a mandate to challenge the audience or push the narrative boundaries.

With these intersective narratives, sometimes it's very easy to get lost - the IMDB synopsis says that there are 10 stories here that share characters, but I think if you break it down another way to look at it is that there are three main stories, but each one has several characters.  Because it's really difficult for me to think of this as 10 individual stories, for some reason I feel more comfortable grouping them together - and anyway, I think even if it is 10 not every character gets a fully fleshed-out story, that just wouldn't be possible, so I think counting them that way does the film some kind of disservice.

SPOILER ALERT, because it's really impossible to talk about this film without breaking down the complicated plot.

One story/group of stories is about Mamie, a grown-up woman who had sex with her step-brother when they were teenagers, and though she was sent to get an abortion she secretly gave up the baby for adoption instead, and then 20 years later, she's contacted by a young man who claims to know the identity of her son (though the son has never contacted her, despite the fact that he could have) and in exchange for giving her his information, he wants to make a film about the anticipated reunion, which would be guaranteed to get him into some filmmaking class at the AFI.

The second story/group of stories concerns that woman's step-brother, Charley, now a restaurant owner who's in a relationship with another man, and his boyfriend is best friends with a lesbian who tried to use his sperm to conceive a child, only it didn't work and they adopted.  However Charley now notices that the child looks a lot like his boyfriend, so he suspects that the lesbian couple lied about the conception not working because they don't want to share any parental rights.

The third story/group of stories is about a young man, Otis, who works in Charley's restaurant and is also in a band, he meets Jude on Karaoke Night at the restaurant and asks her to replace the lead singer in his band, and Otis and Jude fool around, though most people believe that Otis is gay.  Complications set in when Jude decides she'd rather date Otis' rich father, Frank, instead.

And all that is just the SET-UP for the film, I've really only given away the first 10 or 15 minutes, because each segmented third gets more complicated still - and the film jumps rather liberally between all three stories, but thankfully the time is mostly linear, except for the opening scene, which then snaps back to tell the back story of how the opening shocking event came to be.  The film then jumps back 20 years to detail how the step-siblings came together, then back to the (near-)present.  If this film were made today, however, probably all of the scenes would be in random order, and we wouldn't know how any of the characters in the different stories were connected to each other until the very end, thus forcing you to watch the movie a second time with those relationships in mind.  The revelation of the child being alive, therefore, would occur in Act 5 of the script, rather than in Act 2, for maximum shock value.

The film is only 15 years old, but that's a world of difference in filmmaking, also in political correctness.  Speaking of Sundance, when I was there in 1998 one of the most controversial films was "High Art", which was about lesbian relationships.  By 2006 it seems like it was more "OK" to have multiple gay characters, as this film does, but yet there are still instances where gay characters here are seen as somehow imperfect, Otis for example is afraid to tell his father that he's gay, and Jude calls him a "faggot" once or twice and makes fun of him.  Really?  We were still back there then?  I'd like to think you couldn't put that sort of thing in a movie now, it feels more dated than those giant 80's haircuts in "Some Kind of Wonderful".

There's also a technique used here of an omniscient narrator of sorts, at certain times half of the screen gets filled with white lettering on a black background, informing us of certain details of a characters past, or even future.  It's a little creepy to read something like, "Frank would only sleep with two women after her..." - why, is he sick?  Is he going to die in a car crash or something?  Who's telling me this, and how do they know what they know?  It leads me to feel like all of these characters are sort of circling the drain, and it's just a matter of time - everybody's got a limited amount of time on this planet, sure, but if we think of everyone as already doomed but just not aware of it, we're all going to be too depressed to get through our day.  Plus, I thought this was supposed to be a comedy, and now I'm not laughing.

But the biggest problem seems to be characters acting in inconsistent or unlikely ways.  If somebody wants to become a filmmaker, for example, I'll support that dream.  But how many filmmakers do you know who got their start by blackmailing someone into being the subject of a documentary?  None, right, because it just doesn't happen.  The young filmmaker then gets convinced that Mamie's lover, a massage therapist, would make a better subject for his film because he claims to be a "sex worker".  But, is he?  Sometimes he says he gives many clients the titular "happy ending", but at other times he admits that Mamie is his only client that gets this special treatment.  So, umm, which is true, and why would he lie about it, just to be in a short film?

Similarly, the gay couple that's friends with the lesbian couple - I can see this friendship occuring in real life, sure, but the way that Charley handles the confrontation over their son's parentage - who the HELL would choose to do it that way?  And then the lesbian couple's reaction is simultaneously too big AND too small of a reaction.  It's something like, "We're having dinner with you tonight, to tell you that we don't want to hang out with you any more."  Umm, she realizes that they're hanging out RIGHT at that moment, right?  Something tells me that if a friendship went south that quickly, there wouldn't be that one last hangout - you don't ask friends out to break up with them, you just stop doing things with them.  Then there's another revelation that seems particularly cruel, even for ex-friends.

Every relationship is doomed here, everybody's clock is ticking, even if they don't realize it.  Oh, so the title of the film is meant to be ironic?  Great, thanks for the heads-up.  And if everybody really knew their partners, truly knew them and all their little secrets, nobody would be together any more and everybody would just realize the futility of relationships and be single for the rest of their lives.  Do I need to hear this, just two days before Valentine's Day?  No, I do not.  I stand on my viewing record, though, and break-ups are part of relationships, so the film stands, but my dissatisfaction will be noted in the rating.

Also starring Steve Coogan (last seen in "Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story"), Tom Arnold (last seen in "The Great Buck Howard"), Jason Ritter (last seen in "The Meddler"), Maggie Gyllenhaal (last seen in "Mona Lisa Smile"), Bobby Cannavale (last seen in "The Irishman"), Jesse Bradford (last seen in "W."), David Sutcliffe (last seen in "Under the Tuscan Sun"), Laura Dern (last seen in "October Sky"), Sarah Clarke, Hallee Hirsh (last seen in "You've Got Mail"), Eric Jungmann, Amanda Foreman (last seen in "Super 8"), with cameos from Johnny Galecki (last seen in "Bounce"), Peter Horton.

RATING: 4 out of 10 moving boxes

ANSWERS: The missing TCM "360 Degrees of Oscar" links are Basil Rathbone, H.B. Warner, Edward G. Robinson, Glenda Farrell, Paul Muni, Richard Derr, Barbara Rush, Alexis Smith, Alan Hale, Dane Clark.

Long Shot

Year 12, Day 42 - 2/11/20 - Movie #3,444

BEFORE: Seth Rogen carries over from "You, Me and Dupree" - I'll circle back to Owen Wilson in a couple of weeks, I promise.

Over on Turner Classic Movies, Steve McQueen links from "The Great Escape" to tomorrow's first film, can you fill in the other links?  Answers below.

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 12 on TCM (31 Days of Oscar, Day 12)
6:30 am "Somebody Up There Likes Me" (1956) with _____________ linking to:
8:30 am "Teresa" (1951) with _____________ linking to:
10:15 am "The Harder They Fall" (1956) with _____________ linking to:
12:15 pm "The Subject Was Roses" (1968) with _____________ linking to:
2:15 pm "The Hasty Heart" (1950) with _____________ linking to:
4:00 pm "Kings Row" (1942) with _____________ linking to:
6:15 pm "George Washington Slept Here" (1942) with _____________ linking to:
8:00 pm "To Be or Not to Be" (1942) with _____________ linking to:
10:00 pm "My Man Godfrey" (1936) with _____________ linking to:
12:00 am "One Way Passage" (1932) with _____________ linking to:
1:30 am "Always in My Heart" (1942) with _____________ linking to:
3:30 am "Of Human Hearts" (1938) with _____________ linking to:
5:30 am "Pride and Prejudice" (1940)

Hmm, I think TCM and I are in the same boat, it looks like we both thought Presidents' Day would be a week earlier than it is - with "George Washington Slept Here" and considering the identity of one of their links.  I feel you, TCM programmer.  But I've only seen 2 out of these 13 films (Wow, they're really packing them in the early morning hours...), namely "Somebody Up There Likes Me" and "To Be or Not to Be", bringing my score up to 41 out of 139, or 29.4%.  Sure, I could get my percentage up by WATCHING some of these movies, but who has that kind of time?

THE PLOT: Journalist Fred Flarsky reunites with his childhood crush, Charlotte Field, now one of the most influential women in the world.  As she prepares to make a run for the Presidency, Charlotte hires Fred as her speechwriter and sparks fly.

AFTER: I hate the fact that I'm six days too early for President's Day - and I'd be lying if I said that I mistakenly thought the holiday was THIS week and not NEXT Monday.  The worse truth is that I didn't even think about how this film would be a superior choice for a tie-in, with the lead female character running for President.  In my defense, I rearranged my February line-up so many times in the last week that I barely even knew which end was which, or when to STOP messing with it.  Could I have landed this film right on the holiday?  Perhaps, but I think not without putting that sequel film back before its own prequel, which was my motivation to move things around in the first place.  Anyway, back in Plan A this film was near the end of the chain, which would have placed it in early March, and it wasn't until Plan C and the addition of "You, Me and Dupree" that it got bumped up to February. Tearing apart the whole schedule NOW and re-building it just to see what MIGHT have been possible is a pointless venture.

But wait, today was the New Hampshire primary, there's your freakin' tie-in.  See, these things do have a funny way of working out, don't they?  Anyway, President's Day celebrates the founding fathers, the heads of state that came before, but a primary?  That's for people running for office, as the Charlotte Field character does in "Long Shot" - so I'm an accidental scheduling genius, it turns out.  There are worse ways to be regarded, I can assure you.

Anyway, that's about where the similarities between this film and real-life end, because the person serving as President in this film, with Field as his secretary of state, is a former TV star who has no idea how to be a real President, who is also nasty and vindictive and is deep in the pockets of big business, willing to cancel legislation on the instructions of his favorite conservative news network.  See?  Nothing like real life, only, wait a minute....   Look, it's a given that movies made after 2016 are going to portray any fictional President a certain way, only they usually haven't been TOO obvious about it - but now we're in Stage 3, with filmmakers saying, "Screw it, crazy is the new normal, and we'd be stupid not to work that into the fabric of our film."  Now, President "Chambers" here is not a former reality TV star, he's the former star of a "West Wing"-like drama, but that seems just as bad.  Such a man might be expecting all situations to resolve themselves in 47 minutes plus commercials, and have all the answers come to them in script form, as opposed to our current leader, who needs everything shown to him with pictures, like a small child would.

But, to be fair, all politicians have speech writers, not screenwriters, but they're the unseen forces that make politicians seem more eloquent than they really are, it's kind of a dirty little secret for all Presidents.  But if you told me that Trump prefers to usually "wing it" rather than read a prepared speech, I'd be inclined to believe it.  His rant about showers, sinks and toilets just makes no sense - look, I hate low-flow toilets as much as the next person, but two flushes usually does the trick, by exaggerating and saying that people are flushing 10, 15 time is just lunacy - which people? Where?  And if you're not currently enjoying a brisk flow of water in your shower, I believe you can just buy a new showerhead that will focus the water better, and also turn the water flow UP, that's what the little dials in your shower are for...

But's let's get back to the fictional politics, because that's where the romance comes into play.  Shortly after his Brooklyn newspaper gets bought out by conservative conglomerate Wembley Media, reporter Fred Flarsky quits and then gets consoled by his best friend, who takes him to a fancy party that just happens to be attended by the Secretary of State.  And she just happens to have been Flarsky's babysitter from his youth, she was three years older and running for class president in high school.  He had a crush on her back in the day, back when three years made a world of difference, only that gap seems much smaller when you're an adult.  She remembers him, checks out his writing, and before long he's touring the world with her, helping write speeches for a multi-national environmental program.

To write speeches in her "voice", he's got to get to know her all over again, figure out her likes and dislikes, and by this point, you can probably see where this is all going.  Traveling together, working closely together, avoiding gunfire together, making sure the candidate is up-to-date on pop culture like "Game of Thrones" and superhero movies.  Charlotte may flirt with the Prime Minister of Canada, but she'll ultimately be charmed by the funny guy who really knows her.  Pro tip, clever humor beats empty-headed hotness, most of the time anyway.

But naturally there has to be some conflict - after all that work on the environmental bill, the President's puppeteers want him to kill it, or at least the parts that interfere with their chairman's business plans.  And when Charlotte starts campaigning for herself, to replace the President who wants to go back into entertainment (wishful thinking, right?) her handlers all point out how bad the optics are for the beautiful, intelligent candidate to be seen dating a scruffy guy who dresses poorly and looks like he probably smells like weed and stale beer.  Hey, at least Seth Rogen owns up to it.

Thankfully, this is a comedy that remembered to be funny, unlike other recently-watched films I could name.  Ten films in to the romance chain, and this is the highlight so far.  It might have done better at the box office if it hadn't opened one week after "Avengers: Endgame", I'm not sure what bonehead scheduled that.  If I've got a NITPICK POINT it's the overuse of the same gag, having Seth Rogen's character falling down, notably twice.  He jumps out of a second-floor window in the opening sequence and lands hard on a car, but still manages to limp away, which is not believable. Contrary to popular belief, fatter people don't bounce, they get just as hurt by landing on hard surfaces as skinny people do.  Though I did have a bad slip on the ice last year, missed the curb and fell flat on the sidewalk, landed hard on my chest.  Based on the number of people who rushed to help me, it must have looked terrible, but I got up and walked it off.  Still, you won't catch me jumping through any second-floor windows.

I don't know if this got covered, back when Hillary Clinton was running - if she had been elected, what would her husband's title have been?  Would he have become "First Gentleman" or "First Mister", or something else?  I'm surprised the PC police haven't already been calling for us to change "First Lady" to "First Spouse" or something equally gender-neutral - we're going to have to figure this out sooner or later, might as well do it in advance.  We'll hit the same language problem if a gay man were to be elected, right?

Also starring Charlize Theron (last seen in "Dark Places"), O'Shea Jackson Jr. (last seen in "Godzilla: King of the Monsters"), Andy Serkis (last heard in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), June Diane Raphael (last seen in "Girlfriend's Day"), Bob Odenkirk (last seen in "Movie 43"), Alexander Skarsgard (last seen in "Mute"), Ravi Patel, Randall Park (last seen in "Snatched"), Tristan D. Lalla, James Saito (last seen in "The Sea of Trees"), Lisa Kudrow (last seen in "P.S. I Love You"), Kurt Braunohler (last seen in "The Big Sick"), Paul Scheer (last seen in "A Futile and Stupid Gesture"), Claudia O'Doherty, Daniel Rindress-Kay, Aviva Mongillo, Braxton Herda, Aladeen Tawfeek, with cameos from Lil Yachty (last heard in "teen Titans GO! to the Movies"), Boyz II Men.

RATING: 7 out of 10 alt-right skinheads

ANSWERS: The missing TCM "360 Degrees of Oscar" links are Pier Angeli, Rod Steiger, Jack Albertson, Patricia Neal, Ronald Reagan, Ann Sheridan, Jack Benny, Carole Lombard, William Powell, Kay Francis, Walter Huston, Ann Rutherford, Edna May Oliver.

You, Me and Dupree

Year 12, Day 41 - 2/10/20 - Movie #3,443

BEFORE: Well, I've got good news and bad news where my project is concerned.  The good news is that my movie DVR has been behaving, no more endless random reboots, not in the last two days, anyway.  I got a robo-call from the cable company (the one that rhymes with "Rectum", not a coincidence) telling me there was some kind of network problem in my neighborhood, and fixing that would most likely resolve my problem.  I kept the appointment for today anyway, and the technician confirmed that the signal coming in to my house is now fine, and since it's not repeatedly rebooting itself, I probably wouldn't need to get a new DVR, and therefore lose the 60 movies currently stored on it, at least 25 of which are not currently running on any channels.  So I can proceed with the chain without interruption, and without renting those movies from iTunes or anything.

The bad news is that I just speed-watched the Oscars, got through the whole thing in about 90 minutes, which is easy if you just watch the nominees, the winner being announced and the "In Memoriam" segment and fast forward through the acceptance speeches, the musical numbers and the incessant montages and explanations of basic things like how songs are used in movies, or what production designers do.  But giving the Best Picture award to THAT film presents me with a difficult task, I don't know how I'm going to link to "Parasite" except maybe through "Okja", and that's a film I've been avoiding.  But then there's no way to link out of it, so I might have to watch it as my last film of this year, or the first film next year - so giving Best Picture to a "one-linkable" film doesn't make viewing it impossible, just very difficult.  I've seen every Best Picture winner from 1953 on forward, and many of the winners before that, and I haven't seen just 10 (OK, now it's 11) overall.  Maybe one day when I run out of other movies I'll watch those 10 films, just to be done with them.  But I'm not looking forward to it - those films are "Wings", "The Broadway Melody", "Cimarron" (1931), "Cavalcade", "The Great Ziegfeld", "The Life of Emile Zola", "How Green Was My Valley", "Going My Way", "Gentleman's Agreement" and "The Greatest Show on Earth".

Speaking of classic films, over on Turner Classic Movies, Darryl Hickman links from "The Strange Love of Martha Ivers" to tomorrow's first film, can you fill in the other links?  Answers below.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 11 on TCM (31 Days of Oscar, Day 11)
6:15 am "The Grapes of Wrath" (1940) with _____________ linking to:
8:30 am "It's a Great Feeling" (1949) with _____________ linking to:
10:00 am "Romance on the High Seas" (1948) with _____________ linking to:
12:00 pm "Julie" (1956) with _____________ linking to:
1:45 pm "Madame Bovary" (1949) with _____________ linking to:
3:45 pm "Indiscretion of an American Wife" (1954) with _____________ linking to:
5:00 pm "The Young Lions" (1958) with _____________ linking to:
8:00 pm "Peyton Place" (1957) with _____________ linking to:
11:00 pm "The Bad and the Beautiful" (1952) with _____________ linking to:
1:15 am "Lust for Life" (1956) with _____________ linking to:
3:30 am "The Great Escape" (1963)

Hint: two of the linking actors were in last night's "In Memoriam" segment of the Academy Awards.  Those should be easy to name.   Another two films tonight that I've seen, "Lust for Life" and "The Great Escape".  39 seen out of 126 puts me just below 31%. Here's hoping there are better days ahead.

Matt Dillon carries over from "Grace of My Heart" - Illeana Douglas will be back later in the romance chain, so will Owen Wilson, but I'm not following either of them as a link, not just yet.

THE PLOT: A best man stays on as a houseguest with the newlyweds, much to the couple's annoyance.

AFTER: I found myself with so many Owen Wilson films that I decided I had to break them up - what can be crippling when you're doing linking-based movie-watching is thinking, "Oh, he's in a couple romances, but also some Father's Day-like material, how the hell am I going to connect the dots here?"  That's my version of "stinking thinking", believing that there needs to be some kind of straight line between all of an actor's films, when I shouldn't even think in terms of straight lines, every path I end up taking has more twists and turns than anything else - so first I'll deal with the Owen Wilson romances, then the films with him themed for Father's Day, and then worry about the rest later.  Same goes for Chris Evans, Scarlett Johannsson and others - only romance films now, then deal with the leftovers later.  You never know, "The Perfect Score" could end up solving a thorny linking issue down the road, just because it has a couple big names in it.  Or, I can just stick it between "Black Widow" and "Jojo Rabbit" just to get rid of it.

But this is not the worst romantic film I've seen, it's not even the worst one I've seen THIS year.  Sure, there's too much slapstick - Wilson's character is always falling off a skateboard, or setting something on fire, or running his bike right into an oncoming car - his stunt double actually won the "Hardest Hit" prize at the World Stunt Awards for that.  (I'm not making this up, there is something like an Oscars for movie stunts...)  Good thing Dupree was wearing his helmet...

The comedy here is all motivated by the situation of having the husband's best friend (and best man at his wedding) move in to a couple's house temporarily after losing his job.  Supposedly Dupree always lands on his feet and gets a new job, but he's also the kind of guy who's been sort of coasting through life, not always putting in the effort, focusing on partying and chasing girls instead of buckling down and doing the work.  Eventually this sort of behavior catches up with someone, or so we'd all like to believe, but at first down-on-his-luck Dupree is a bad houseguest - sleeping nude on the couch, clogging the toilet, changing the outgoing message on the answering machine without asking first.

All of this couldn't have come at a worse time - that period right after the honeymoon where the husband and wife are first living together, the ground rules are all being established or negotiated, and Carl makes the offer for Dupree to come home and crash without checking with his wife, Molly, first. Ooooh, that's a rookie mistake.  Plus Carl's boss is Molly's father, and so he's got to deal with a father-in-law who's cruel to him at times, but other times is nice, but possibly he's only nice because he's setting him up to fail, it's a bit tough to tell.  Carl's father wants Carl to hyphenate his last name, and also suggests that Carl get a vasectomy for some reason.  This is also a bit unclear, like what father with an adult daughter doesn't want her to have children?  Unless he just hates Carl, or thinks that they won't be married for long, and doesn't want grandchildren who are going to end up with divorced parents...  But everything between Carl and his father-in-law is very muddled here, maybe sometimes a man doesn't know where he stands with his in-laws, but I think for a film plot, things have to be somewhat clearer than this.

Carl's a bit of a question-mark, too - he seems to be industrious, but he also tricks Dupree into writing his wedding gift "Thank you" notes for him.  He's in love with Molly, but he often goes to hang out at the bar with friends before going home, or works late and doesn't call to say he'll be late, plus he's easily tempted by Dupree to invite people over to watch football and let things get out of hand.  So, is he a good husband or not?  Is he into marriage as a concept, or does he just want to do his own thing?  Maybe he just hasn't figured out that balance of being committed but also being able to hang out with his friends - this can be tricky, sure, especially so early on in the marriage.  But there's a big difference between being a well-rounded balanced character and just being inconsistent and all over the place.

The pressures finally get to him - the dominating father-in-law, the other friend who only wants his porn collection, and the thought that Dupree (after redeeming himself, getting a new lease on life, and spending time cooking with Molly) might have his sights set on stealing Molly from him.  God, Carl, the idea that a woman is her husband's property, or that married women can't have male friends, is just SO outdated.  Feel free to join us in this century, OK?  Carl snaps during dinner, tries to strangle Dupree, and storms out.  Dupree and Molly then decide to get to the bottom of the situation, learning that Molly's father really does hate Carl for some reason, and then Dupree goes on a quest to find Carl and bring him back home.

This leads to a chase scene at Carl's office that is the most confusing of all - Dupree allows a security guard to chase him around the building, so that Carl can disrupt his father-in-law's meeting with foreign investors, just to confront him over his recent actions.  Why is this necessary?  Carl hasn't been fired, so why does he need help sneaking in to his own office?  Why did the security guard grant access to Dupree, only to chase him down a minute later?  And if this was the only security guard on duty, which doesn't make any sense, why would he leave the office entry unguarded, just to chase after Dupree, and leave the rest of the building vulnerable?  This whole part of the film just didn't work, it needed to be scrapped and completely re-written.  Carl says he doesn't even care about his real-estate project being taken away and re-worked (oh, but I think he does...) and I think we even need to take a step back here and think about how and why he was dating the boss' daughter in the first place.  He said this wasn't to get an "in" with the company president, but so what, it's all just some giant coincidence, then?  I think Carl had some upwardly mobile plan from the beginning, he just isn't being honest about it, maybe not even with himself.

But Dupree uses the "lessons" (?) he learns while evading the security guard to gain the confidence he needs to write a self-help book (?) and become a motivational speaker.  I know, there a few leaps in movie logic there, and I'm not sure being a self-help guru is much better than being a slacker, but at least there's more money in it.  That's Dupree for you, landing on his feet again...

Also starring Owen Wilson (last seen in "Masterminds"), Kate Hudson (last seen in "Marshall"), Michael Douglas (last seen in "Avengers: Endgame"), Seth Rogen (last seen in "The Disaster Artist"), Amanda Detmer (last seen in "Saving Silverman"), Ralph Ting, Todd Stashwick (last seen in "The Rundown"), Bill Hader (last heard in "Ralph Breaks the Internet"), Billy Gardell (last seen in "Jersey Boys"), Pat Crawford Brown (last seen in "Stuck on You"), Sidney Liufau, with cameos from Lance Armstrong (last seen in "Icarus"), Harry Dean Stanton (last seen in "Alpha Dog"), Joe Russo (also last seen in "Avengers: Endgame") and archive footage of Audrey Hepburn (last seen in "The Children's Hour"), Gregory Peck (last seen in "Roman Holiday").

RATING: 5 out of 10 fishing trips

ANSWERS: The missing TCM "360 Degrees of Oscar" links are Irving Bacon, Jack Carson, Doris Day, Louis Jourdan, Jennifer Jones, Montgomery Clift, Hope Lange, Lana Turner, Kirk Douglas and James Donald.

Grace of My Heart

Year 12, Day 40 - 2/9/20 - Movie #3,442

BEFORE: It's finally here, Oscar night - by the time this day is over, we'll know who the winners are in some very tight races.  I've read up on the Oscar odds, but unfortunately when it comes to the Best Picture award, there are 9 contenders, and the last article I read made a case for all of them, along with a reason why each one should NOT win.  So that's pretty confusing - they really only ruled out "Little Women" because it's been remade so often, that's supposedly why "A Star Is Born" didn't win last year.

For once, I've got more than a fair shot of having seen the Best Picture winner before it wins, I managed to see three of the (let's say) top four contenders in January: "Joker", "The Irishman" and "1917".  The war film has all the momentum, but Joker has the most nominations, however when was the last time a comic-book movie won the top prize?  "The Irishman" got a lot of praise, and being on Netflix already guarantees it maximum awareness, but some people say it's too long and they're thrown by the de-aging effects.  I haven't seen "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" so even though I'm Team Joker AND Team Irishman, I figure there's a fair chance the Tarantino film will win, just to keep my losing streak alive.  I've scheduled "Marriage Story" for March and "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood" for April, and I will get to the others, too, it's just that "Ford v. Ferrari" isn't a priority topic for me, and with Hitler material coming up in April, I'd love to program "Jojo Rabbit", but so far I can't work it into the chain, so I may have to wait for something like "Black Widow" to connect to it.  I have co-workers who would love to see "Parasite" win, but that's going to be a bitch for me to link to - I still haven't seen "Roma" from last year for the same reason.  Look, I finally finished watching the Best Picture nominated films from 2016 when I saw "Moonlight", but I haven't seen "Phantom Thread" or "Call Me By Your Name" from the year after that, so I'm still always behind it seems.

I'll also be paying close attention to the award for Best Animated Feature, rooting for the three films I've seen there - "Toy Story 4", "Missing Link" and "How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World", and supporting "Avengers: Endgame" and "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker" for any technical awards.  Every other award is sort of a non-starter for me, I just want a good, clean race with no mis-reading of the envelopes and let's keep that show moving, OK?

Eric Stoltz carries over from "Some Kind of Wonderful", the second last-minute addition to the romance chain, and I'm back on the plan tomorrow.  OK, maybe the day after.

Meanwhile, over on Turner Classic Movies, Tom Drake links from "The Sandpiper" to tomorrow's first film, can you fill in the other links?  Answers below.

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 10 on TCM (31 Days of Oscar, Day 10)
7:45 am "Raintree County" (1957) with _____________ linking to:
10:45 am "Magnificent Obsession" (1954) with _____________ linking to:
12:45 pm "The Front Page" (1931) with _____________ linking to:
2:30 pm "A Star Is Born" (1937) with _____________ linking to:
4:30 pm "One Foot in Heaven" (1947) with _____________ linking to:
6:30 pm "Our Town" (1940) with _____________ linking to:
8:00 pm "Stagecoach" (1939) with _____________ linking to:
9:45 pm "True Grit" (1969) with _____________ linking to:
12:00 am "Network" (1976) with _____________ linking to:
2:15 am "Executive Suite" (1954) with _____________ linking to:
4:15 am "The Strange Love of Martha Ivers" (1946)

I've seen only 2 of these: "Network", of course, and I think they made us watch "Stagecoach" in film school, I'm going to count that, even though it was a long time ago.  It's a good day for films, it's just that some of these are the original films, and I've only seen the remakes of "The Front Page", "A Star Is Born" and "True Grit", so I can't count that.  That brings me up to 37 seen out of 115, and I'm down to 32.1%

THE PLOT: An aspiring singer sacrifices her own singing career to write hit songs that launch the careers of other singers.  The film follows her life from her first break, through the pain of rejection from the industry and a bad marriage, to her final triumph.

AFTER: We'll also find out shortly if Martin Scorcese wins his second Oscar for Best Director, so it might be very appropriate that I'm watching "Grace of My Heart" today.  Scorcese didn't direct this one, but he's listed as the executive producer.  If he doesn't win, will the award could go to Tarantino or Sam Mendes?  We'll just all have to wait and see.

This film is not a biopic of a real person, but does play out a lot like a roman à clef, which is a type of fiction where they just change the names of everyone so the storyteller can't get sued, but everyone tries to figure out who each fictional character is supposed to represent.  The best candidate for the Edna Buxton/Denise Waverly character is probably Carole King, who wanted to be a singer but got similarly sidetracked into songwriting at the Brill Building, where she wrote songs like "One Fine Day", "Up on the Roof", "I'm Into Something Good" and "(You Make Me Feel Like a) Natural Woman", all songs recorded and made famous by other singers and groups.  Her songwriting and marital partner was Gerry Goffin, just as Denise works with and marries Howard Cazsatt, and they worked well together but found they couldn't maintain the combination of working and personal relationship, which is tough in any industry, from filmmaking to running a restaurant.

The record producer she works with could easily be a thinly-veiled Phil Spector - someone who produced girl groups once he had the right material for them, despite claiming a year or so before that girl groups were on their way out, and no longer viable.  It's funny how record executives also said that guitar groups were passé in 1964, only to have the Beatles prove them very wrong - and I just read an article about what's going on in country music right now, where radio stations seem to have an unwritten rule that they can't play two songs by female artists in a row, which is a de facto form of sexual discrimination.  It shouldn't be a radio station's job to determine what songs they should play, in a perfect world they should just play everything new and let the fans decide what they like and buy, but as we all know, it's not a perfect world and a cadre of radio program directors can collectively block whatever songs or groups they want.  Record sales are also a factor, of course - or I guess now it's "download sales" - but how can people find out what new songs they'd like to buy if they don't hear them on the radio?  Ideally, record sales and airplay should work hand-in-hand, that's why both are important to determining chart positions.

Anyway, after Denise leaves NYC and heads out to the West Coast, that's when the fiction starts to divert from the real 1960's music history - Carole King did move to L.A., but she then started hanging out with James Taylor and Joni Mitchell, and the fictional Denise forms a working and personal relationship with Jay Phillips, the lead creative force behind a surf-rock group called the Riptides, and this could only be a stand-in for Brian Wilson, given this particular level of obsessive creative control and drug-related psychosis bordering on mental illness.  Again, this character is ultimately a pastiche, because his story diverges from Wilson's in many ways, but come on.  Brian never married someone with their own music career, but isolating himself from society by never leaving the house, falling under the influence of several lifestyle "gurus", who else could this possibly represent?  Having previously seem movies like "Love & Mercy", "The Wrecking Crew" and "The Beach Boys: Making Pet Sounds" came in very handy here.

Similarly, the female pop singer Denise writes for who's got a secret relationship with a woman could easily be Dusty Springfield, or a mash-up of Springfield and Lesley Gore.  The music credits also read like a who's who of great songwriters, from Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach to Carole Bayer Sager and even Gerry Goffin himself.  The songs are collectively almost good enough to make up for the obvious vocal dubbing (and/or lip synching) done for the lead actress.  I wish I could have seen more of the Williams Brothers, who sang with tight harmonies, akin to the Everly Brothers - apparently they're the nephews of Andy Williams, I personally thought that one of the songs they performed, "Love Doesn't Ever Fail Us", was a stand-out but most people seem to prefer "God Give Me Strength", which was just all right to me.  To each his own, I guess.

Anyway, I'm glad I re-worked my whole chain to find a slot for this one on short notice - I think it really fit the February brief in the end, following one woman through her many relationships during her songwriting career, and I enjoyed it better than some of the more obvious choices for the romance chain.  Plus with TCM running "A Star Is Born" twice this weekend, I feel like we're (sort of) on the same page again - this one bears some small resemblance to the other two versions of the film, the Streisand/Kristofferson remake and also the Lady Gaga/Bradley Cooper one.  That's one week down, and just five more to go....I'm gradually building up to more romantic fare, which is exactly where I think I should be in early February.

Just one NITPICK POINT, when Denise borrows the headphones of a woman in the coffee shop to hear her song playing on the radio for the first time - how did she KNOW in advance what song the woman is listening to, and why do the headphones look like current ear-buds, with a very thin white cord?  I thought that headphones back in the late 1950's were very large, with thick cords, and looked like earmuffs, and that the very small ones didn't come along until the 1990's.  Just sayin'.

Also starring Illeana Douglas (last seen in "Factory Girl"), Matt Dillon (last seen in "Going in Style"), John Turturro (last seen in "Hands of Stone"), Patsy Kensit (last seen in "The Great Gatsby"), Bruce Davison (last seen in "Breach"), Jennifer Leigh Warren, Bridget Fonda (last seen in "It Could Happen to You"), David Clennon (last seen in "Vacation"), Lucinda Jenney (last seen in "Practical Magic"), Christina Pickles (last seen in "Legends of the Fall"), Richard Schiff (last seen in "Kill the Messenger"), Drena De Niro (also last seen in "Hands of Stone"), with cameos from Chris Isaak (last seen in "That Thing You Do!"), Jill Sobule, J. Mascis, Shawn Colvin, China Kantner and the voice of Peter Fonda (last seen in "The Most Hated Woman in America").

RATING: 6 out of 10 temporary receptionists

ANSWERS: The missing TCM "360 Degrees of Oscar" links are Agnes Moorehead, Mae Clarke, Adolphe Menjou, Fredric March, Martha Scott, Thomas Mitchell, John Wayne, Robert Duvall, William Holden, Barbara Stanwyck.