Year 14, Day 2 - 1/2/22 - Movie #4,002
BEFORE: Well, now I've got a bit of a problem, I charted this course from "Nomadland" to the start of my romance chain, and I went straight through all the Bruce Willis films I found on Netflix, and also all the Nicolas Cage films I found on Hulu. But there are just too many of both, because now I've made a schedule that involves me watching 34 films in January, and that means a film every day, plus some doubling up. If my second job starts scheduling me again, that's going to be a tough schedule to keep up with. I mean, I watched 33 films last January, but I was also homebound a lot more because of the pandemic, we weren't vaxxed yet. Maybe I need to find a couple films to drop, of course I need to keep certain ones in to make the transitions, but some could be jettisoned - the question then becomes, which ones? Maybe a few of them are no longer available on streaming, and I'd have to rent them, maybe those need to go, because I'm pretty sure not all of those Nic Cage action films are diamonds in the rough, a few could maybe be tabled for later.
I also kind of missed out on "Dune", I took too long to watch it on HBO Max, and now it's gone - but that's an important part of my plan, plus I'm very curious to see it - only now it would cost me $26 to rent it online or PPV, and that's way too much. It's gone from theaters, too, and I'm not sure that it will re-appear on HBO or HBO Max before the end of the month - so I've got a back-up plan to see it, only I'm not sure if it will work. I'll test my plan tomorrow at the office, and then I'll know - in past years I'd just maybe borrow the Academy member screening DVD from one of my bosses, but that's no longer an option, they don't mail out the DVDs any more.
Tonight's film is a little period piece, something of a forgotten art-house type of film, it seems a bit weird that it's going to lead me to films like "Spider-Man: No Way Home" and "Dune", but that's my crazy system for you. After a couple "arty" films, January will be all action films until the romance chain starts - that's the plan, anyway, but maybe I need to have a back-up plan, just in case.
Frances McDormand carries over from "Nomadland".
THE PLOT: Guinevere Pettigrew, a middle-aged London governess, finds herself unfairly dismissed from her job. An attempt to gain new employment catapults her into the glamorous world and dizzying social whirl of an American actress and singer, Delysia Lafosse.
AFTER: I sort of ran out of TV to watch, new episodes of my shows start up again this week, but after catching up on "Star Wars: The Bad Batch" and finishing "Hawkeye", I came up a little short. So I had some time to binge something new, a little Adult Swim show called "Joe Pera Talks to You", I watched the whole first season on demand in the background while I was looking up movies I've seen by title to see if any of them are also suddenly available on demand at the start of a new year. (Yep, a bunch of them are, so I can dub them to DVD and add them to the collection...). Joe Pera is a comedian of sorts that I've seen on some late-night talk shows, and I've been trying to figure out if he really talks the way he talks, or if he's playing a character. On his show he discusses all kinds of topics, from the mineral history of Michigan's Upper Peninsula to the Canadian Rat Patrol in Alberta that all but eliminated the rodent population in that part of the world. It's dry material, presented in a dry fashion by a very geeky guy who works as a music teacher and has no idea how dull and odd he really is. Or, is he a normal guy playing a character? It's very hard to tell, like with Pee-Wee Herman, just the antithesis of that.
After a couple episodes, it became obvious that the whole show is a goof (it's part of "Adult Swim" on Cartoon Network, after all...) and nobody could possibly be THAT boring and unassuming, it's some kind of social commentary on Midwestern folksy behavior, I guess. Reading the church bulletin, choosing what to eat for breakfast, what goes through your mind while watching fireworks - it's all very introspective and stream-of-consciousness, but when you realize that the show is scripted, and everyone's an actor, well then of course you can appreciate the comedy. But still, it's dry and dull by intent, often out of left field and could easily lull you to sleep, so it raises questions about how if you could tell any kind of story at all, why would you choose to do it in that way? How much of Joe Pera the man is in Joe Pera the character, and vice versa? And if the two are different, why would one choose to play the other?
A similar question was raised by "Nomadland", which featured a bunch of non-actors who really do live that nomadic van life, and the cast and crew who didn't already live that way CHOSE to live out of vans during the shoot, which I guess is method acting (or just budget filmmaking), but also lent some air of authenticity to the performance. What is reality, anyway, and by LIVING this way instead of just ACTING this way, can the film depict a false reality that is somehow more real-ish than the real reality? Or at least equally real? It's a way to go - but now I'm back on a fiction film, where it's just actors pretending, and obviously the lines aren't as blurry, they're just people who put on costumes and wigs and walk around saying things that other people wrote. That's all movies, all the time, I know, but now it almost feels like something's missing, if everything's fake.
I'm probably just overthinking things again - I've just had too much time alone with my own thoughts, perhaps, over the last week. And "Nomadland" got me thinking about how everything goes away over time, nothing is permanent but change - and then, if nothing lasts, what have we all got? You could have a nice little life set up in Nevada with a house and spouse and a job at the sheetrock factory, but that clock is ticking - everything in your life is bound to go away at some point, and you'll be left trying to rebuild a life out of whatever pieces you have. Tonight's fiction film is no help, it shows people in the U.K. just before World War II, and the younger ones who have never been through a war don't realize everything fun's about to be shut down for the duration. It didn't matter if you were a young ingenue actress, a successful lingerie designer or the shady owner of a jazz club, that clock is ticking, and it's all going away. If you're lucky maybe you can pivot and make socks for soldiers instead of undergarments for women, but you'd better have a back-up plan in the works.
Frances McDormand plays Miss Pettigrew, who's just been sacked from a job as a governess, and the employment agency will no longer recommend her, so she steals the name of an actress who looking for a domestic or nanny (or so Miss Pettigrew thinks) and heads over to land the job, only to find out that it's a young, clueless actress/singer looking for a social secretary. Miss Pettigrew turns out to be quite helpful to Delysia Lafosse (not her real name) in terms of straightening out her life, helping her to choose the best of her suitors and figure out what she really wants. Kind of like the way Mary Poppins or Nanny McPhee would, only helping out an adult, not children. Miss Pettigrew seems to have a knack for dealing with people, dispensing life advice to people who are either lonely, lost or just unable to make good decisions.
Yeah, young women don't really come off well here, but remember that this story was written during a different time. This is based on a 1938 novel that someone first tried to turn into a musical starring Billie Burke in 1939, only then World War II broke out, Pearl Harbor got bombed, and the project was shelved for almost 70 years. Then someone revived the idea to make this 2008 film, but defiantly chose not to update the depiction of young women as flighty, promiscuous and completely unreliable when it came to running their own lives. That's a bit of a problem, from a modern point of view. A beautiful woman here is pursued by three men, and is leading all of them on at once, and can't seem to decide between them, or even realize that not deciding has a bunch of implications that she's eventually going to have to deal with. So much for feminism, I guess - it's one step forward and three steps back.
Maybe it's a sign of the times, because women hadn't even been voting for that long in the U.S., and after a long period of not being able to live the lives they wanted to, for the most part, some maybe didn't get the memo about that even being an option? Delysia here seems to be the girl who can't say "No" to anything or anyone, and doesn't think things through - like, what's going to happen when she rejects the man whose apartment she's living in? She's going to have to move out, but she's got no back-up plan at that point. Surely that must have been obvious to her, when she started relationships with two other men? No? Another man has two tickets to America on a boat, and wants her to work with him on the boat as a singer, then start a new life with him in America. Jeez, girl, there's your ticket out, why can't you just grab that ring and go? Some people just need practical advice, I guess.
Maybe it's easier to straighten out somebody else's life than your own - a running gag here is that Miss Pettigrew keeps missing opportunities to eat, because she's so busy, she just can't find the time. And all of this crazy, mixed-up interaction takes place over the course of just ONE day. She loses her job, she worms her way into this new one, Delysia goes to the fashion show, the jazz club, there's a party and another party, and through it all, Miss Pettigrew keeps trying, and failing, to put food in her mouth. Whoops, she dropped the piece of cake! Whoops, that guy swept up the apple on the floor! Yes, maybe it was hard to find a bit of free food in pre-war London, but this seems a bit ridiculous, when she was at two parties and a fashion show with a buffet over the course of this day. She finally gets to enjoy a meal, but only after straightening out Delysia's romantic situation and then her own - but then, at the end of the day, is she any better for accepting a meal from her new beau than Delysia was for staying rent-free in someone else's apartment? It's an odd message to send out to a modern audience, that's all.
Also starring Amy Adams (last seen in "The Woman in the Window"), Lee Pace (last seen in "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2"), Tom Payne (last seen in "The People vs. George Lucas"), Mark Strong (last seen in "RocknRolla"), Shirley Henderson (last seen in "In Secret"), Ciaran Hinds (last seen in "The Woman in Black"), Christina Cole (last seen in "Casino Royale"), Stephanie Cole, Clare Clifford (last seen in "Miss Potter"), Beatie Edney, Sarah Kants, Katy Murphy, Matt Ryan, Mo Zinal.
RATING: 5 out of 10 air-raid sirens
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