BEFORE: Just 10 more romance/relationship films to go - nine after tonight. Yes, it's been wearing me down but I've found ways to break up my viewing, I watched the first episode of Season 3 of "The Mandalorian", also I skipped through the first four episodes of "Andor" again - I started to watch it but dropped it at some point, now I want to finish it so I took an hour to just remind myself of the major plot points so I can continue on from here.
Tomorrow's the start of a busy week, I'm working every day for seven days straight, just alternating days between the two jobs. Some shifts will be 12 hours or longer, so I'm going to be worn out by this time next weekend. I think I should still have time to watch a movie each night, but it might be tough to stay on schedule.
Andie MacDowell carries over again from "Green Card".
EDIT: The TCM "31 Days of Oscar" line-up for March 4, added here after the fact, is:
6:00 am "The Front Page" (1931)
8:00 am "Ninotchka" (1939)
10:00 am "Adam's Rib" (1949)
11:45 am "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town" (1936)
2:00 pm "Harvey" (1950)
4:00 pm "Born Yesterday" (1950)
5:45 pm "Some Like It Hot" (1959)
8:00 pm "Tom Jones" (1963)
10:15 pm "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" (1963)
1:15 am "You Can't Take it With You" (1938)
3:30 am "To Be or Not to Be" (1938)
5:15 am "Block-Heads" (1938)
Today's theme is "Comedy", and maybe this is where I hit my stride - I've seen everything here EXCEPT for "The Front Page" (I watched the 1974 remake), "Ninotchka" (though I have seen "Silk Stockings"), "Born Yesterday" (still on my list) and whatever "Block-Heads" is. But I have seen 8 out of 12, which brings me up to 27 out of 46, or almost 59%.
THE PLOT: Two married couples have their twelve-year bond of friendship put to the test when one couple reveals they are splitting up.
AFTER: This movie also got cut from my list last February when I learned that "Green Card" had been pulled from streaming services before I could watch it - and it's a good thing too, because without this one I couldn't pull off the Andie MacDowell three-peat, and "Love After Love" simply did not link to anything else on my list, so I'd be in the soup without this one. Fortunately since HBO made this, they've kept it up on HBO Max much longer than usual - if it were a film they didn't have a stake in, they'd probably drop it after a year. I was afraid they were about to drop it because the cable listings said it was available until 2/28 - and I needed to watch it AFTER February 28 - so I dumped it to VHS just to be on the safe side. But now it's March, and the film is still running on HBO on Demand, so they must have meant February 28 of some other year. It's a flawed system that I have no control over, I just have to be glad when a film stays available long enough for me to, you know, watch it.
But the five words in the opening credits of a film that I do NOT want to see? That would be "Based on the play by..." because I just know that if a movie was based on a play, it's likely to be all talky-talky, and take place in no more than two locations, most likely the houses or apartments of the main characters, and ultimately it may go nowhere. Plays turned into movies don't have a great track record with me, except some of the movies based on Neil Simon plays. The 1999 play "Dinner With Friends" by Donald Margulies won the freakin' 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and based on only seeing the movie, I'm hard-pressed to understand why. There are two couples, one of them splits up. Who freakin' cares? There's not really any new ground broken here, couples (real and fictional) split up all the time. I don't know, maybe the play was absolutely brilliant and it just didn't translate properly to a movie for some reason.
Really, it's not good for me to watch so many movies about break-ups and failed relationships, it's taking its toll on me. It's (I would imagine) a bit like living next to a cemetery, every day you'd leave your house and walk past the cemetery and BOOM, you're thinking about death, there's no way around that, and yet you're still expected to continue down the street and go to work or school and carry on like nothing's wrong, but still, deep down, you were reminded that someday you will die, it's inevitable. Movies with break-ups are the same kind of reminder that everything is transitory, one day despite your best efforts your relationship will be over, one way or the other. Yeah, thanks for that. Next movie, please.
Gabe and Karen are the married couple who work for Gourmet magazine and talk too much about their gourmet-cations in Italy. They also have a second house on Martha's Vineyard, so how the hell am I supposed to like them? (OK, so I'm a hypocrite because I've taken 3 BBQ-based road trips across the southern U.S. with my wife, but come on, that's a far cry from a pasta-based food trip in Italy.). Tom and Beth are the foil characters, the other couple that splits up due to Tom's affair with a travel agent - but come on, haven't we all seen something like this before? I was half expecting the double-switch, as in by the end of the movie Tom and Beth have gotten back together and Gabe and Karen are actually the ones separating, but that's not what happened. So, without that it's extremely predictable, the couple that's in trouble is the one that splits up. Yawn.
Also, a Pulitzer? Really? This counted as a TV movie because it aired on HBO, not a movie movie, and it did get 2 Emmy nominations but no wins. Clearly something got lost in the translation. Even flashing back to that summer on the Vineyard when Tom and Beth were introduced to each other, come on, that sort of time-jumping is certainly old hat by now. This movie either needed more glorious footage of gourmet food, or some couple swapping, something new and innovative, I just don't know what.
Also starring Dennis Quaid (last seen in "Midway"), Greg Kinnear (last seen in "Feast of Love"), Toni Collette (last seen in "Lucky Them"), Taylor Emerson, Jake Fritz (last seen in "Lucky Numbers"), Hollliston Coleman, Angus T. Jones (last seen in "The Rookie"), Beau Holden (last seen in "Something to Talk About"), Ruth Riechl, Caroline Neville.
RATING: 4 out of 10 shucked ears of corn
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