BEFORE: Sharon Stone carries over from "Beauty" and this year's Oscars ceremony airs tonight, but I won't be able to watch since I'm in Atlantic City, and on vacation - if we watch any TV tonight it will be the new episodes of "Tournament of Champions" on Food Network, that takes priority because it's a show we watch together - so I'll have to watch the Oscars telecast when I get back home.
I'm late posting, but here's the final line-up for TCM's "31 Days of Oscar", Day 31:
Best Picture Nominees:
8:30 am "A Farewell to Arms" (1932)
10:00 am "Dark Victory" (1939)
12:00 pm "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (1958)
2:00 pm "Bonnie and Clyde" (1967)
4:00 pm "Gone with the Wind" (1939)
Best Picture Winners:
8:00 pm "Around the World in 80 Days" (1956)
11:15 pm "Wings" (1927)
1:45 am "You Can't Take It with You" (1938)
4:00 am "The Broadway Melody" (1929)
It's the final 9 films, and I think I've seen another 6 of them today - all of the films except for "A Farewell to Arms" (though I watched the 1957 remake), "Wings" and "The Broadway Melody". This brings me to 147 seen out of 350, which is 42%, my final score. I suppose I've done better in previous years but I'm just happy that I finished over 40%.
This year's Oscars airs tonight, but I won't be able to watch since I'm in Atlantic City, and on vacation - if we watch any TV tonight it will be the new episodes of "Tournament of Champions" on Food Network, that takes priority because it's a show we watch together - so I'll have to watch the Oscars telecast when I get back home.
(EDIT: March 10 is also Sharon Stone's birthday, which I failed to realize, maybe because I was traveling and I was in a rush. Anyway, a special belated Birthday SHOUT-out to her.)
THE PLOT: An aspiring fashion designer struggles to find success and love. The story cuts into her life once a year, on the same date: her birthday.
AFTER: I'm going to go a little easy on this one today, I think, because well, I don't have as much time as usual to get into what might be wrong with it. Also, I'm happy to see that Sharon Stone is still working - although I think I saw something on "60 Minutes" about her focusing on painting in the last couple of years - and I think I can say I've never seen a story told in this format, where the story keeps jumping ahead in one-year increments. There's some cleverness there, the idea's got some merit if you wanted to check in on, say, a family on successive Christmases, or a couple on New Year's Eve, again and again. Something tells me those stories would tend to get tedious, but here we're charting a woman's personal growth and relationship status and wouldn't you know it, all the big important moments we need to see to track that end up happening on her birthday.
We first meet Senna on her 45th (?) birthday, and she's a serial dater of mostly younger men, though the relationships don't seem to last long, and she's working for a fashion house as some kind of buyer, but she longs to be a clothing designer with her own line or her own store. It seems that maybe she knows where she wants to be, but doesn't know how to get there, or perhaps she lacks the drive or the motivation, it's a bit tough to day. After all, we only have one day each year to learn about her and where she is in life. There are some consistencies, of course, like her mother always calls her very early on her birthday, and then they usually also have lunch together that day.
I think on the second year we see, perhaps, her friend Darla sets her up by inviting Adam, a visiting lawyer she knows from Boston, to Senna's birthday party, It does not go well, because he doesn't like being set-up either, so he arrives late and meets Senna at the bar without knowing who she is - so he accidentally says some terrible things that he assumes to be true about Senna. But he is very apologetic, and on the following birthday he tries to make it up to her, even though he's with another woman, there are party mishaps that occur which maybe start to indicate that these two people belong together. However, they have very different attitudes about relationships at first, Senna believes in the concept of soulmates, while Adam beleves that with six billion people in the world, surely he's a good match for at least five of them, so that's a case for serial monogamy, I guess. Adam also believes in marriage as a concept, but Senna is determined to never get married and continue playing the field, but remember, doing this has also left her unfulfilled to some degree.
Yeah, so they end up in a situationship by the next birthday, since Adam's no longer seeing that other woman, and Senna learns that he's not as predictable as he seems to be, he did kiss her spontaneously on the previous birthday, and sure, he's easy on the eyes. Fast-forward another year and they're in a full-fledged relationship, for once she doesn't wake up in bed alone on her special day. However, there are more twists and turns to come, as she spots a ring case in his gym bag, and makes an assumption that he's going to propose, however bear in mind that she did not OPEN the ring case, and it possibly contains something else. Unfortunately, the damage is done and by this point the woman who swore she'd never get marriage had already wrapped her brain around a proposal, so now Adam's got to go in to damage control mode, and either find a way out of the situation, or just lean into it and move ahead with a proposal.
Across the board, there are communication errors that maybe should never have happened, and therefore as a result they tend to feel like contrivances, but really, the whole film is rather contrived because remember, everything that drives the plot forward or represents where the characters stand RIGHT NOW has to squeezed into the events of only one day per year. So there's a fair amount of manipulation here, and coming up with justifications for why certain characters see fit to change their opinions on things, making it seem at times that people change their attitudes very quickly, on a whim, to bring about these changes.
And it's an on-again, off-again relationship for Senna and Adam over the course of these five (or is it six?) years, and her career rises and falls, too, she opens her own boutique, but doesn't manage her money very well, borrows money from her mother, but then, well you'll just have to watch it and ride out all the changes in Senna's life and Adam's comings and goings. Will these crazy kids realize that they need to be together, or will their petty differences and imagined conflicts keep them apart?
There are a lot of rom-coms made about women trying to balance relationships and careers when they're in their twenties or thirties, but I don't think I've seen one that focused on a woman in her late forties or early fifties, not in this way at least. Probably not the best decision to make for a successful box office, as this film earned less than $200,000 - but it took some cojones to make it, for sure. You're bound to get sick of hearing the "Happy Birthday" song, don't say I didn't warn you. I know my goal now is to always get through my birthday without hearing the song, I've bribed my co-workers with doughnuts if they agree to not sing - sure, we can still have cake and candles, just please don't sing the damn song. The song is something of a reminder on how dangerous birthdays really are - I've heard that having too many of them is bad for your health, after all.
Also starring Tony Goldwyn (last seen in "The People We Hate at the Wedding"), Ellen Burstyn (last seen in "The Calling"), Famke Janssen (last seen in "Eulogy"), Liza Lapira (last seen in "Domino"), Erica Ash, Caitlin FitzGerald (last seen in "The Man Who Killed Hitler and then the Bigfoot"), Gilles Marini, Jason Gibson, Leonor Varela (last seen in "Alpha"), Yvonne Jung, D.G. Guyer, Ryan Lochte, Matthew Broussard (last seen in "Here Today"), Jose Navarro, Parvesh Cheena (last seen in "Just Before I Go"), David Atkinson (last seen in "Hillbilly Elegy"), Selah Victor (last seen in "Bad Santa 2"), Zach Lutsky, Tom Paolino (last seen in "The Purge: Election Year"), Kailen Jude, Harry Zinn.
RATING: 6 out of 10 items from the gumball machine
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