BEFORE: OK, I've got a lot of notes to get out of the way, since it's now March 1, and the new month is here sooner than expected. Here are the format stats for February, and even though there were 28 days, I still watched 29 movies - so much for slowing things down and allowing skip days at the start of the year...
15 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Walking and Talking, A Walk on the Moon, She's All That, Head Over Heels, Down to You, Legally Blonde, Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde, You Again, Catch and Release, Iris, Mansfield Park, Wuthering Heights (1992), Love Weddings & Other Disasters, Berlin I Love You, The Aftermath
7 Movies watched on cable (not saved): Feast of Love, For a Good Time Call..., Romance & Cigarettes, An Ideal Husband, An Education, Happy-Go-Lucky, Their Finest
2 watched on Netflix: Effie Gray, Passing
1 watched on Amazon Prime: A Rainy Day in New York
2 watched on Hulu: How Stella Got Her Groove Back, Ammonite
1 watched on Tubi: Carrington
2 watched on Hulu: How Stella Got Her Groove Back, Ammonite
1 watched on Tubi: Carrington
1 watched in theaters: House of Gucci
29 TOTAL
29 TOTAL
I got back into a pattern where the vast majority of my movies came from cable, which helped me free up some space on my DVR (which I promptly filled with new movies) and also some spaces on my list, which is holding fast to a specific number that's probably much higher than you might think. 3 digits, though. But 22 out of 29 from cable is about 75%, still, what I do would NOT be possible if I didn't have access to Netflix and Hulu, too.
No actor or actress really dominated February, the most appearances anybody put in was three, which guarantees those lucky people a slot in my year-end round-up, but Bruce Willis is still safely on top of the leader board - thanks to all those movies in January. Liev Schreiber made it to four appearances after being in three romances at the start of February, added to "The French Dispatch" the previous month. But we'll find out this month if Nicolas Cage can challenge Bruce for that top spot, it all hinges on the availability of a couple of his films.
Alexander Skarsgard carries over again from "Passing" - and tomorrow I'll post the links for March, since I found a path to my Easter movie, so there's a confirmed plan for the rest of the month after the romance chain ends - BUT, I'd like to try a new method of organizing my links, just to see if that the BEST way to get to Easter. If that system works, then I can also use it to figure out the best way to get from Easter to Mother's Day, with a method that doesn't involve a bunch of scrap paper and arrows connecting movie titles like some conspiracy theorist's vision board of who's really in charge of the government, with pushpins and string all over the wall.
Here's the line-up for tomorrow, Day 2 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming:
5:00 am "The Red Balloon" (1956)
8:00 am "Room at the Top" (1959)
10:00 am "Picnic" (1956)
12:00 pm "Written on the Wind" (1957)
1:45 pm "The Barefoot Contessa" (1954)
4:00 pm "The Bad and the Beautiful" (1952)
6:00 pm "La Strada" (1954)
8:00 pm "Gigi" (1958)
10:15 pm "The King and I" (1956)
12:45 am "Love Me or Leave Me" (1955)
3:00 am "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers" (1954)
5:45 am "Limelight" (1952)
I have "Picnic" on my list, but haven't been able to link that far back. So I've only seen "Gigi" (winner of 9 Oscars, including Best Picture), "The King and I" (winner of 5 Oscars, including Best Actor), and "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers" (winner of 1 Oscar, Best Scoring of a Musical). Somehow I missed "Limelight" when I watched Chaplin's films, so another 3 seen out of 12 leaves me at 6 seen out of 25, or 24%. I'm up slightly, but it's a trick of math, because that's still a terrible score for me, I guess I haven't seen as many Oscar winners as I thought.
THE PLOT: A teen artist living in 1970s San Francisco enters into an affair with her mother's boyfriend.
AFTER: With two more weeks left in the romance chain, things are about to get quite complicated, it seems. I was going to say that we got all those "easy" romance films out of the way in February, but looking back, none of them were really "easy", were they? There were always complications, either an age difference or a high-school rivalry, or somebody cheated on somebody else, and for a while there it felt like an "Oops! All Love Triangles!" month. Well, I might as well roll with it and kick things into high gear, with 16 more days of love, weddings and other disasters to go. (Damn, it, where are the action movies when you NEED them?)
For tonight's film, a classic love triangle in the era of classic rock, between a mother, her boyfriend and her daughter. Well, at least it's set during the era of hippies and "free love", though I suppose that was an ideal, and ultimately people might find out that love isn't as "free" as they thought, suddenly jealousy gets involved when it's YOUR boyfriend sleeping with somebody else, and that somebody else is your daughter. Je-SUS, weren't there like 2.5 million people in San Francisco in the 1970's? If you assume half of those were men, and half of THAT half was married or gay, that still leaves like 625,000 men to choose from, even if half of THOSE were too old for Minnie, that still leaves a lot of eligible men, why does she have to sleep with the same man as her mother?
Clearly, there's more going on here than statistics. One could surmise that the absence of her father (who does show up, about halfway through the movie) is partially at cause for her attraction to older men, especially one who's the stand-in for her father. Is that what's going on here? Some kind of Elektra complex manifesting in a child of divorce? She proceeds to take things JUST a bit too far, one might say. And as careful as they are to only get together when Minnie's mother is not around, the cat's bound to come out of the bag sooner or later, right? I mean, especially since this is a movie, you can't just put this in a movie and expect there to be no consequences in the next-to-last act, that's how six-act structure works.
I know, I know, we're supposed to celebrate a young woman's journey of sexual discovery, and later we see Minnie also get involved with other boys, plus a couple girls, but can we just focus on her choice for her first sexual partner, and how BAD that choice is? I think the issue is somehow tied to her own self-image, as she reveals that she considers herself unattractive, so therefore she doesn't believe that she deserves better, and I'm thinking that a psychology student could probably have a field day with this film, parsing out all the whys and wherefores of the complicated love triangle here. You just know this can't end well, right? But after all is said and done, all the possible solutions for how to resolve this thorny little problem, I suppose it ends as best as it could, Minnie learns that she's never going to have a working adult relationship until she learns to love herself first. Also, that working on her comic books is much more important than having a lot of sexual partners, I think we all get there eventually, it just takes some people longer to figure that out.
I don't really like the device of watching a character record audio tapes to herself, or to whoever's listening in the future to cassettes, because it feels like a cheap method of breaking the fourth wall, since the character is essentially talking to the audience. But this turns quickly into "Show, don't tell" and I think it would be better to SEE the events in question taking place, rather than having the character describe them to us. But I also award points for a film with the nerve to really go there and create a very tough, uncomfortable situation that doesn't look like it could possibly get resolved in a positive way.
Also starring Bel Powley (last seen in "Equals"), Kristen Wiig (last seen in "Wonder Woman 1984"), Christopher Meloni (last seen in "Marauders"), Abigail Wait, Miranda Bailey (last seen in "Time Out of Mind"), Carson Mell, John Parsons, Madeleine Waters, Austin Lyon (last seen in "Mortdecai"), Quinn Nagle, Davy Clements, David Fine, Anthony Williams, Margarita Levieva (last seen in "The Lincoln Lawyer"), and the voice of Susannah Schulman.
RATING: 6 out of 10 costumed people in line to see "The Rocky Horror Picture Show"
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