BEFORE: Oprah Winfrey carries over from "Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond", and I'd keep an eye on Oprah this year - if she keeps turning up in documentary footage and I keep using her as a link, she could easily win the year with the most appearances, or at least tie with Barack Obama. I think she's also going to be my outro link from the next documentary chain, too, if I do another one in July. Which means that both documentary chains COULD have been connected into one longer one, if not for the need to acknowledge Mother's Day and July 4. I'm putting together the June schedule now, just looking for the link between two last random films, and then if I can find that I've got a chain from here to about July 24, which is something. I've got a rough plan for October now, too, so then I'll just have to close that gap and that should bring me close to the end of the year - it's not even May but yeah, I'm thinking about how to get within spittin' distance of Christmas. What's important right now is that I've got one possible way to start the horror chain in October, but THREE ways to end it - right now it looks like New York Comic Con is a go for early October, so that means maybe I can't do a full month, so I need a chain with a variable length and a few potential starting points for November.
July's tricky, perhaps, because will "Black Widow" finally get released? I can get to it by late July, but to do that I need to use a few films I had deemed as useful links for October, then that would cut my options for a horror chain down from three to two. Which is fine, two is still much better than zero.
But first I've got to finish out April - here's tomorrow's line-up for TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming:
6:00 am "Two Girls and a Sailor" (1944)
8:15 am "2001" (1968) - SEEN IT
11:00 am "2010" (1984) - SEEN IT
1:00 pm "Two Women" (1960)
3:00 pm "Umberto D" (1952)
4:30 pm "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" (1964)
6:45 pm "Under Western Stars" (1938)
8:00 pm "The Uninvited" (1944)
10:00 pm "Union Pacific" (1939)
12:30 am "Vertigo" (1958) - SEEN IT
2:45 am "Victor/Victoria" (1982) - SEEN IT
5:15 am "Wait Until Dark" (1967) - SEEN IT
5 out of 12, I'm bringing it on home, up to 140 out of 349 and that's still over 40%. Just barely. I should finish on May 1 right where I predicted, I think.
THE PLOT: A former slave is visited by the spirit of a mysterious woman.
AFTER: The July schedule is vexing me right now, because I really want to see "Black Widow", so I've definitely got a path to it, but what if it doesn't get released - AGAIN? What if it's not the BEST path? Should I have saved "Beloved" to go after the next documentary chain, which will be the big Summer Concert Series? That would give me more linking options, I see how that could connect with "The Best of Enemies", as a back-up in case "Black Widow" doesn't happen again. Screw it, I've got "multiple outs", as they say in magic tricks, so my path to late July is clear, it hits all the major holidays between now and then, and I've got to learn to be satisfied with that. I'll deal with late July and August and closing the gap to October 1 later. You never know, my whole line-up could be different by then, I'll have added dozens of new films, and there could be many more options that I'm just not aware of right now.
I'm back on Black History, sort of, anyway - this film is about a former slave living in Ohio in the years after the Civil War, and it's based on a book by Toni Morrison, but MAN, this is a strange movie. Like, I know right now on movie screens somewhere Godzilla is battling King Kong, and that's probably super ridiculous in many ways, but I think maybe somehow this one's even weirder than that, if such a thing is possible. Look, I know that terrible, terrible things were done to slaves in the American South, there's no getting around that, but even starting from that point, there's some weird, weird stuff here. This film was a box office bomb, and I have to wonder if it was a smart idea to go THERE and make audiences very uncomfortable. I'm not going to second-guess Toni Morrison when it comes to history and racial inequality, but still, there may be questionable plot content here.
When ex-slave Sethe flashes back to her experiences at "Sweet Home", of course they're going to be terrible. She barely got out with her life, and her back is so scarred from whippings that there are permanent marks in the shape of a tree, and she'll just never recover, physically or emotionally. Her husband Halle never made it off the plantation, and eventually we'll find out that his sacrifice enable the release of not only Sethe, but also the matriarch Baby Suggs. That's all well and good, but for some reason the audience is forced to watch in graphic detail as white men violate Sethe, even drinking the milk from her body while she was pregnant. I'm just not sure that anybody ever DID that in the South, like if white slave-owners were so racist, would they drink the milk from a black woman? It seems like the sort of thing they'd be against, but again, I'm not an expert, and another negative is that I have to watch a scene where Oprah, America's talk-show queen, gets milked. OK, I know it's probably a stand-in, but even so...
Then there's itinerant wanderer and former slave Paul D., who's been roaming the country ever since the war ended, and somehow ends up on Sethe's doorstep. That can't be random, he must have had that destination in mind, but it's all so unclear. He says he came back for Sethe, but then if that's true, what took him so damn long? Or was she like tenth on his list of possible hook-ups? Sethe invites him in to her home and there's an evil red light, so he knows right away the house is haunted - then WHY does he stay, if he knows this? Any person either believes in ghosts or they don't, and if he does, then the sensible thing would be to turn around and find another ex-slave to shack up with, but he believes there's a ghost, and he stays anyway. That makes no sense, and also gets no explanation.
The initial scene of the film shows Sethe with three children, and a poltergeist making trouble in the home. Two of Sethe's children run away, because they can't deal with the ghost any more, but her daughter, Denver stays. This is where things started to get confusing for me, because the plot on Wikipedia says that Sethe has FOUR children, not three. The two boys run away, one daughter stays, where's the fourth one? Anyway, when Paul D. shows up, a loose family is formed, with Sethe and Paul living as a couple with a young adult daughter.
Then into this situation comes Beloved, who seems to grow out of a tree in their yard, and is covered with ants or bees or something. The family takes in Beloved, who doesn't seem able to speak or know how to eat, basically communcating in growls and other noises. Part of the puzzle here seems to be figuring out who or what Beloved is, and Denver figures it out before the others. No spoilers here, but it's obviously got something to do with Sethe's past, which is slowly revealed as the film doesn't really care for linear storytelling. Sethe's escape from Kentucky is revealed via a lengthy flashback, and I'm still not feeling like the story adds up right, why is that? It's clear that the characters only get certain pieces of information when the audience is ready to hear them, and that's part of the problem. If the story had just started at the beginning and had the middle in the middle and so on, there wouldn't be this need to dole out little factoids here and there, some of which turn out to be very important.
This is essentially a ghost story told via the framework of the racist Reconstruction Period, with Ohio representing the progressive North and Kentucky the regressive South - if a slave makes it across the river then maybe it's a whole new world, but then there are always the memories and the "ghosts" from the past that can still drag them down. It's a big challenge for an actor to play a resurrected spirit trying to live in a human body, essentially a feral girl, unfortunately it's too easy to let that performance slip into parody or just a bunch of nonsense, which I think is what happened here. Plus I've still got some difficulty understanding the methodology here, like was Beloved a real person, or a spirit, or just someone's imagination? It's all so very unclear, perhaps open to interpretation, but come on, they've got to give me something to hang my hat on here. Right now the only thing I'm certain of is that I'll never get back the nearly three hours I spent watching this.
I agree that the horrific things that were done to slaves in America need to be addressed, discussed and even analyzed, but I'm not sure that they make for an appropriate framework for a ghost story, that all sort of cheapens things somehow, I guess? Like maybe there were better ways to get there than this way? I just don't know, I'm scratching my head. Since this doesn't link up with any of the other horror films on my list, so I think maybe I'm glad I slotted it in here, but, generally speaking, I think I would have preferred to have not programmed it anywhere at all.
Also starring Danny Glover (last seen in "Jumanji: The Next Level"), Thandie Newton (last seen in "RocknRolla"), Kimberly Elise (last seen in "Death Wish"), Hill Harper (last seen in "Concussion"), Beah Richards (last seen in "Drugstore Cowboy"), Lisa Gay Hamilton (last seen in "Beautiful Boy"), Albert Hall (last seen in "The Great White Hype"), Anthony Chisholm (last seen in "Going in Style"), Jason Robards (last seen in "Melvin and Howard"), Harry Northup (last seen in "Fathers' Day"), Tracey Walter (last seen in "Wakefield"), Jude Ciccolella (last seen in "Sin City: A Dame to Kill For"), Wes Bentley (last seen in "Welcome to Me"), Irma P. Hall (last seen in "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil"), Dorothy Love Coates, Kessia Embry, Dashiell Eaves. Brian Hooks (last seen in "Fool's Gold"), Vertamae Grosvenor, Angie Utt, Frederick Strother, Paul Lazar (last seen in "Snowpiercer"), Robert W. Castle, Jane White (last seen in "Klute"), with cameos from Charles Napier (last seen in "The Grifters"), Thelma Houston.
RATING: 3 out of 10 slaughtered hogs
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