Blithe Spirit (2020)

Year 15, Day 75 - 3/16/23 - Movie #4,376

BEFORE: Leslie Mann carries over from "The Bling Ring", and I hope this film is good, because it turns out to be a bit unnecessary - I messed up, because it turns out that even though I've done some exemplary linking work this week, I didn't have to do it.  Because I misspelled an actor's name on my cast lists, I didn't realize that I could have gone STRAIGHT from my final romance film to my St. Patrick's Day film.  I rely mainly on the search function of OpenOffice to find the links, but if I got somebody's name wrong, then the search function doesn't really work well, does it?  I didn't NEED to watch "The Bling Ring" after all, I could have saved myself the trouble - oh well, what's done is done, I try not to look back at my mistakes because otherwise I might realize that I needed "Villains" or today's film to make a valuable connection later down the road, and then finding out I wasted them would be too depressing. 

It's Day 16 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, and today's themes are "Stage to Screen" (before 8 pm) and "Epics" (8 pm and after). Here's the line-up: 

5:45 am "Our Town" (1940)

7:15 am "Pygmalion" (1939)

9:00 am "Hamlet" (1948)

11:45 am "Cyrano de Bergerac" (1950)

1:45 pm "Separate Tables" (1958)

3:30 pm "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1951)

5:45 pm "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" (1966)

8:00 pm "Spartacus" (1960)

11:30 pm "Ben-Hur" (1959)

3:30 am "Quo Vadis" (1951)

Five out of 10 today, which I think counts as a "push". "Hamlet", "A Streetcar Named Desire", "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf", "Spartacus" and "Ben-Hur". This brings me to 85 seen out of 180, so still at 47%.

THE PLOT: A spiritualist medium holds a seance for a writer suffering from writer's block but accidentally summons the spirit of his deceased first wife, which leads to an increasingly complex love triangle with his current wife of five years. 

AFTER: I kept a promise today - to a band named Pomplamoose, that really saved my butt in December.  I usually make a mix CD of seasonal holiday songs - well, it used to be a CD that I mailed out with my Christmas cards to more and more friends and family members each year, but it got to be too expensive, buying the CDs and the labels and the postage - so last year I went all digital and put a CD's worth of songs on to my Dropbox account, now I just mail out the link each year with my cards, and it's much cheaper.  

Anyway, I was clueless what to put into the mix last year, I had a bunch of stray songs in the "alternative" category left over from previous years, but it just wasn't coming together, I had the mixmaster's version of "writer's block", but sometimes it just takes one or two great songs to inspire a mix, and while searching Amazon I remembered this crazy band from YouTube that did mash-ups and covers, and I wondered if they had any Christmas songs.  Well, in fact that's how the band started, they covered some Christmas carols that got used in car commercials a few years back, and they took off from there.  I put three of their four Christmas songs into the mix and kind of built it all up around them, a couple of Sia songs, something from Sister Hazel, Guster, two songs from Train's killer album "Christmas in Tahoe", 1 from Weezer, 1 from Indigo Girls, 1 from Los Straightjackets, a rare track from the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, and BOOM, I had a mix I could listen to again and again.  

So I told myself when I got a little spare money, I'd go back and buy some of Pomplamoose's albums on Amazon - all their weird covers and mash-ups, like they mix "Sweet Dreams" by Eurhythmics with "Seven Nation Army" by White Stripes, and that really works - I probably dropped $40 today on digital music, which I almost never do these days, because most modern music just plain sucks. (Come on, you know it does.). Sure, their stuff is available on YouTube any time, and if I looked hard enough I could probably find some MP3s somebody posted on the net for free, but I wanted this band to see a little spike in their digital music sales and wonder where it came from (you're welcome...).  There's probably another $15 or $20 I could send their way when my credit card bill month restarts in a couple weeks. 

"Blithe Spirit" is a film that starts kind of in that same place - with a writer who can't write.  And yes, I tend to find this very annoying in a movie, because it's just used so many times as a jumping-off point.  There's nothing less exciting, cinematically, than watching a writer staring at a blank page in a typewriter, no matter how angst-ridden he's acting.  And Dan Stevens as the writer REALLY overdoes it here, he gets all curled up in a fetal position and at one point even throws the typewriter out the window.  Sure, that'll help.  But since this is based on a play that was written by Noel Coward, it leads me to wonder if the playwright himself suffered from writer's block.  Now I have to look up the 1941 play to see if this is a key plot point. 

Hmm, it's not really clear.  But in the play the medium is a guest at the author's dinner party, and that makes a bit more sense than the movie, in which the author hires the medium to help with his writer's block.  Umm, how is a seance going to help with THAT problem?  Unless it's a play about ghosts that he's writing, but honestly that's a bit unclear, too.  And of course we know now that mediums are, across the board, a group of charlatans and fraudsters - yes, even that one that lives on Long Island - but back then, in the 1930's, people did NOT know that, it seems.  Noel Coward sure didn't know that, because he wrote this medium character who knows herself to be a fakey fakester, but she accidentally has the power to contact Charles' dead first wife, Elvira.  NOTE: "Elvira" here has the British pronunciation, with a long "E" sound, not the same as the famous horror movie hostess, Mistress of the Dark, who pronounces her name El-VIGH-ra, with the long "I" sound.

Anyway, Elvira shows up and only Charles can see her, and her presence is both beneficial - she gives him help with the plot points of the screenplay, she's a better writer than her husband, just like "Colette" - and also harmful, because she wants to disrupt Charles' marriage to Ruth, and if she can't do that, then she'll kill Charles so she can have him to herself in the afterlife.  Yes, because as we all know, life is a game and you only win it if you're not lonely in the world beyond.  Well, who's to say that the residents of heaven and hell aren't just as petty and greedy as they were when they were alive?  

Look, I'd love to say we're all more enlightened now as a society than we were back in the 1930's, you'd think we might have all collectively grown up since then, and we now longer believe in the all-powerful sky-father who loves us and wants us to live forever, unless we made mistakes and didn't beg appropriately enough for forgiveness, in which case we'll spend eternity in pain and suffering - but so many of us still haven't, and it's really become bothersome that the people in power still suffer from this delusion, and it affects legislation and the quality of our daily lives.  Seriously, can we just all grow up and stop believing in angels and ghosts and Bigfoots?  You live while you're alive and then you die one day, and that's it, no more, nothing after.  But no, fifty years later there were still romance movies being made like "Ghost" and "Just Like Heaven" and countless films about ghosts and demons, and even though I watch them all, I wonder why so many people don't have the same power to separate fact from fiction. 

There's inconsistency across the board here, vis-a-vis the spirit world and what happens when someone crosses back over as a ghost.  How come Elvira can't slap Charles in the face - her hand passes right through - but she CAN play the piano or pick up a lipstick or a straight razor?  Is she tangible or not?  Elvira is also somehow able to sabotage the brakes on Charles' car, which is bad news for the next person who drives the car, and no spoilers here, but it's not Charles. It kind of feels like the scriptwriter just kept using death as a convenient wrap-up for some of the characters - I guess when you no longer know what to do with them, you can just kill them off.  It doesn't seem like Noel Coward knew how to wrap up the storyline either - in the original play, after all the ghosts are properly exorcised, the medium recommends that he move away, as soon as possible. So the play ends when the central character tiptoes off and the curtain falls, and apparently Coward used this as an ending in more than one play.

The original play also did something with the maid character, in a twist she was revealed to be the one with actual psychic powers, and the medium remained a charlatan.  This plot point did not carry over to this film adaptation, so that's now another character that the screenwriter just didn't know what to do with - how ironic when that's the same situation that the writer within the story encounters. 

I was also confused by whether the setting shifted from London to Los Angeles near the end, once Charles finishes the screenplay and the movie is being filmed, he's confronted by gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, who I believe was based in London.  OK, NITPICK POINT: maybe they're shooting the film at Pinewood Studios in the U.K., but it seems unlikely that in the 1930's a newspaper columnist would fly to London just to do one on-set interview.  Just saying. 

Also starring Dan Stevens (last seen in "Colossal"), Isla Fisher (last seen in "Scooby-Doo"), Judi Dench (last seen in "Six Minutes to Midnight"), Emilia Fox (last seen in "Cashback"), Julian Rhind-Tutt (last seen in "Bridget Jones's Baby"), Adil Ray, Michele Dotrice, Aimee-Ffion Edwards, Dave Johns, Simon Kunz (last seen in "City of Ember"), Peter A. Rogers, Colin Stinton (last seen in "The Current War: Director's Cut"), Stella Stocker (last seen in "The Batman"), Jaymes Sygrove (last seen in "Dumbo" (2019), Georgina Rich, Callie Cooke, Delroy Atkinson (last seen in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales"), James Fleet (last seen in "Operation Mincemeat"), Issy van Randwyck (last seen in "The Danish Girl"), Tam Williams (last seen in "Spectre"), Alan MacLean, Kateryna Globa. 

RATING: 4 out of 10 gramophone records