BEFORE: Jane Fonda carries over from "Book Club: The Next Chapter" and I've got a day off today, they're getting a little bit rarer and further apart, which is OK because that means I'm working more, and I've got a chance to catch up on some record-keeping, go through the lists of what's new on the streaming platforms, maybe add a few films to my watchlist and look for some new connections. I've scheduled some time off starting on Saturday, when I go to my first beer festival in a while and then the next day we're driving to Atlantic City for 48 hours at the casinos, and we haven't done that in over a year and a half. Time for some fun if the weather holds out - and I just jinxed it, didn't I?
Here's todays' line-up for TCM's "31 Days of Oscar", Day 28:
Best Picture Nominees:
5:45 am "Madame Curie" (1943)
8:00 am "Captains Courageous" (1937)
10:00 am "42nd Street" (1933)
11:45 am "Foreign Correspondent" (1940)
2:00 pm "The Letter" (1940)
4:00 pm "Libeled Lady" (1936)
6:00 pm "Ninotchka" (1939)
Best Picture Winners:
8:00 pm "Casablanca" (1942)
10:00 pm "Out of Africa" (1985)
1:00 am "My Fair Lady" (1964)
4:00 am "Tom Jones" (1963)
Another 5 seen out of 12 today - just "Foreign Correspondent" and the last four after 8 pm. This brings me to 127 seen out of 320, which is still 39.6%. I'm stuck in the standings, but tomorrow looks like a better day, I think I can still make it over 40%.
THE PLOT: A struggling widow falls in love with an illiterate short-order cook whom she teaches to read and write in her kitchen each night.
AFTER: Haven't seen anything with De Niro in a while - last year I started with him and it was all De Niro all the time, or so it seemed. This year I haven't seen him at all yet, but that could be just because I've seen nearly every film he's been in, except for "1900" and "The Last Tycoon", but he may turn up here again around Father's Day, we'll have to see, I've only blocked out the path to Easter.
Yesterday I talked about book clubs and baking during the pandemic, and this fillm is more about illiteracy and baking in a high-yield commercial setting in Connecticut, a bread and cake factory, in other words. The place looks terrible, so industrial and it's a shame to see delicious baked goods on an assembly line, when we prefer to think of bakeries as clean, spotless kitchens where master bakers lovingly frost cakes and make decorative flowers on them by hand, which surely must increase the price ten-fold. I've seen shows like "Unwrapped" and "How It's Made" so of course I knew what a big baking factory looks like, but then we also watch shows like "Spring Baking Championship" which showcase the more artisanal side of things.
My father trained as a baker, and he's got stories that i've heard a thousand times about baking in the 1960's for Boston-area department stores like Jordan Marsh, but then he got sidetracked into the army and then the family trucking business, so baking commercially was never his career, until later in his 50's the trucking business went under so he tried to work for Continental Baking (aka Hostess) but found he was allergic to their flour. Oh, well, back to trucking for him. And my wife's been baking at home since before everybody else tried it during the pandemic, she's made cakes and cookies and cinnamon rolls but has found baking a solid loaf of bread to be very elusive, it's never turned out quite right until last night, when she definitely produced something that had risen, baked into a round shape, had a decent crust and could be sliced, so that fit the definition of bread all around. I kept telling her to give up on bread, because we can just buy loaves of it at the store, but she persisted. I think there's some secret to the recipe that Big Baking doesn't tell anyone, they want home bakers to fail so they can keep selling them flour and yeast to create near-bread that gets thrown away before consumption. It's a big conspiracy that simply nobody is talking about.
In much the same way, "Stanley & Iris" qualifies as a romance, but really only technically. Iris is a mess because her husband died eight months ago, and she's still grieving, her sister and brother-in-law are unemployed and moved in with her, but they're always bickering with each other and it's starting to get violent. Meanwhile her daughter has some kind of mystery illness that turns out to be another human growing inside of her, which nobody saw coming, and she won't tell her mother who the father is, because apparently the whole thing comes from her acting out. Well, we all have to learn some lessons the hard way, I guess. Money's tight because Iris works in that commercial bakery and I guess they don't pay very well, everyone in town seems to be either unemployed or living paycheck-to-paycheck. We all know now that Reaganomics didn't really work, right?
She keeps meeting Stanley out in the world, he helps her when someone on the bus steals her purse, they go to the same laundromat, and he works in the cafeteria at the bakery - hey, even the factory workers need to eat a square meal for lunch, they can't just scarf down the imperfect muffins or buy the imperfect loaves of bread in the company store, they need a meat-and-two-sides lunch if they're going to frost cakes (with their hands, apparently, and NO GLOVES) for 8 hours a shift. She asks Stanley for a Tylenol and he offers her a bottle of Rolaids, so she determines that he can't read, which is a bit of a problem for the plant manager, because he can't risk having a cook who can't read the labels on products and might easily confuse a container of rat poison for salt or sugar.
This is the main point of the film, that things are very difficult for a man in his late 40's who can't read or write - as a result he can't open a bank account, he can't get a driver's license, or read a map, and he can only qualify for a certain level of jobs, like cleaning bathrooms or other menial labor tasks, but even for those jobs, it would be preferable that he would be able to read labels on cleaning products so he doesn't mix ammonia and bleach, for example. A bigger question might be how he got so far in life without trying to solve this problem at some point, I guess he was too busy hanging out in the Grand Canyon feeding white-tailed deer and not talking to other people for a week at a time. OK, but then how did he travel back to Connecticut if he couldn't buy a bus ticket or drive a car, or even know the difference between a $1 bill and a $10 bill? I still have questions, let's say.
But Iris helps Stanley out, or at least tries to, with learning his A-B-C's and forming simple words, he's reluctant to do his homework, though, and she gets frustrated with him very easily - but eventually he's in a place where he can read a whole letter and then study for his driver's test. This was the only thing holding him back for decades, and now he can have a real job and an adult relationship with Iris, still I just wonder what took him so long. I guess the real moral is to help out whoever you can, because you never know when that person can become successful and then (ideally) come back and rescue you from your drab existence, and you can then move from the industrial ass-end of Connecticut to beautiful Detroit, Michigan. Wait a minute, that can't be right...
De Niro is nominated for the Oscars this year, in the Best Supporting Actor category for "Killers of the Flower Moon". He already has two oscars, for "The Godfather Part II" and "Raging Bull", and I haven't seen any of the films nominated in this category, so I really have no idea what his chances are. The IMDB says that the front-runner is Robert Downey Jr. for "Oppenheimer", but Ryan Gosling's a "could win" for "Barbie". OK, sorry, Bobby D. I'm going to be out of town on Sunday, but this is a good reminder today that I want to record the broadcast of the ceremony and I'll try to watch it on Tuesday, as soon as I'm back home.
Also starring Robert De Niro (last seen in "De Palma"), Swoosie Kurtz (last seen in "A Shock to the System"), Martha Plimpton (last seen in "Adrienne"), Harley Cross (last seen in "Kinsey"), Jamey Sheridan (last seen in "Lizzie"), Feodor Chaliapin Jr. (last seen in "Lost in a Harem"), Zohra Lampert (last seen in "Splendor in the Grass"), Loretta Devine (last seen in "Introducing Dorothy Dandridge"), Julie Garfield (last seen in "Ishtar"), Karen Ludwig (last seen in "Thirteen Days"), Kathy Kinney (last seen in "This Boy's Life"), Stephen Root (last seen in "Over Her Dead Body"), Laurel Lyle, Mary Testa (last seen in "The Bounty Hunter"), Katherine Cortez, Eddie Jones (last seen in "The Grifters"), Fred J. Scollay, Dortha Duckworth (last seen in "The Man with One Red Shoe"), Jack Gill, Bob Aaron, Gordon Masten (last seen in "The Words"), Conrad Bergschneider (last seen in "The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio").
RATING: 5 out of 10 street signs
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