Drop Dead Gorgeous

Year 18, Day 65 - 3/6/26 - Movie #5,265

BEFORE: With two weeks left in the romance chain, it's time to make some final decisions over how I'm going to wrap this thing up. This means taking a look at what's left over and how that all might fit together for next time - I've got a chain of 21 films, which is not bad, especially a year in advance. BUT I might not be able to add other films to it if I watch too many films now, certain actors (marked in green) are valuable "connectors" that could allow me to add on another small chain of three or five or nine, and then we're really talking about a good-sized chain. This year's chain's going to be about 47 films long when it's all done, and that's only possible because I held back something last year, maybe. So I'm dropping "Best Man Down" because I've done the wedding thing and also it's the only link to a film called "Comet". It's OK, the chain's just going to close up around the empty space, and now TWO people are going to carry over from "Untamed Heart", they are Claudia Wilkens and James Cada. Both films were shot in Minnesota, so this kind of makes sense, they could be local actors?

Now I have to decide about two other films - "17 Again", which is a body-swap film that might have a little problematic romance in it, like "Big" did, and "Life as We Know It" which is another mismatched-pairing romance with a couple of godparents who are thrown together and probably fall in love. These are both potential "drop-ins", they'd be the middle film in a potential group of three, but before including them I want to make sure they're not crucial for next year, and it seems like everything they connect to is part of a larger chain, so watching these two films this year isn't likely to screw anything up for next year. So one film is out, another two are being added, and I'm going to hit St. Patrick's Day right on the button. All settled? 

Now the only other issue is whether tonight's film constitutes a "romance" - it doesn't seem like it, but the IMDB has it under 7 or 8 categories, like "black comedy" and "satire" and "thriller", but "romance" is in that mix, so I'm going out on a limb here. In my notes I just have the message to myself that this would seem to be helpful in linking romances together, but it may not actually be one. It's also, however, another film from the 1990's that needs to be dealt with so it's off the list and not taking up space. So I'm going to proceed, the die is cast, God help me. 

A quick look at the TCM line-up for Day 23 of "31 Days of Oscar", the theme for Saturday, March 7 will be "Oscar Goes on an Adventure":

4:15 am "Anthony Adverse" (1936)

6:45 am "Mighty Joe Young" (1949)

8:30 am "The Jungle Book" (1942)

10:30 am "Mogambo" (1953)

12:30 pm "The Old Man and the Sea" (1958)

2:15 pm "Born Free" (1966)

4:00 pm "King Solomon's Mines" (1950)

6:00 pm "The Adventures of Robin Hood" (1938)

8:00 pm "The Flight of the Phoenix" (1965)

10:30 pm "Mutiny on the Bounty" (1962)

1:45 am "The Last of the Mohicans" (1936)

3:30 am "The Flame and the Arrow" (1950)

Damn, another case where I've seen the more modern remakes of some of these films, but never went back and watched the originals. Still, I've seen "The Old Man and the Sea", "Born Free", "The Adventures of Robin Hood", "The Flight of the Phoenix" (I've seen both) and "Mutiny on the Bounty" (I've seen all 3). So that's 5 out of 12, not too bad, bringing me to 106 seen out of 258. Still 41%.

That's the end of what TCM was calling "Part 1" of their Oscar programming, I have to stop and find the other PDF for "Part 2", but there should only be 8 days left. 

THE PLOT: A small-town beauty pageant turns deadly as it becomes clear that someone will go to any lengths to win. 

AFTER: In my color-coding system, I have a bunch of cast lists all typed out in a Word document that I can search through, and some actors are colored green - this is meant to alert me that this person also appears in a romance film, a horror film or a Christmas film. This is done so I can find the intros and outros to those chains very quickly. But if an actor is colored green IN a romance film, that alerts me that they're also in ANOTHER romance film, so when the chains come together, I can quickly see there's another connection within that topic that I can rely on if I need to move things around or shake up a chain. This came in VERY handy last October when there was nearly a break in my horror chain, I could immediately see that there was another path I could follow, and I found four films to replace the four I had to remove, so the green-colored actors showed me an exit ramp off the main highway, plus the entry back on, so it was kind of like I had to drive on the service road for a bit because there had been an accident, which is easier than, say, building a whole new highway. It was just incredibly lucky that there was a four-film chain that fit right into the four-film hole I had to create because of a bad link. 

The cast list for "Drop Dead Gorgeous" has a LOT of green in it, which meant it could have fit into the chain in a number of different places, but I saved it for the moment that I had two pieces of romance chain that needed to be spliced together, and then I made a note for myself (in purple) that this film links a lot of romance films, and could come in handy to connect things. I'm so good to myself, leaving myself little notes or tips if I think of something that could make my task easier down the road. I really only recorded this film to fill up a DVD with "Beautiful", another comedy about beauty pageants. The VHS with "Beautiful" on it sat on my workbed in the man-cave for quite some time, because I was waiting for another film with Minnie Driver or Holly Hunter in it, and that just wasn't happening. OK, so another film about pageants, that will do. 

But I don't know what the heck this film is supposed to be! It's not funny enough to be a comedy, it's not dramatic enough to be a drama, and it's not thrilling enough to be a thriller. It just wants to live in some kind of in-between space where things don't make any sense. Sure, maybe beauty pageants don't make much sense in this day and age (or the 1990's) but this just goes way over the top. The principle of "reducto ad absurdium" is just applied to a beauty pageant, which is already quite ridiculous, then it's just a matter of asking what could possibly go wrong, with the answer being everything. The contestants wear ridiculous patriotic headgear, costumes are misplaced or stolen, and the "fitness routine" is performed with prop step-stools that were recently painted, so the contestants end up with blue paint all over their hands and their butts. 

But really things started a few weeks before that, when one front-runner mysteriously exploded while riding a tractor on her family's farm. Did the girl explode or did the tractor explode, because those are two very different things. Amber Atkins desperately wants to quit the pageant, because she's got a great tap-dancing routine and may have a chance to win, but someone else realizes she's another front-runner, and soon after that, her trailer catches on fire and her mother is seriously (OK, semi-seriously) injured in the fire. But her mother won't let her quit, even after all that. Then during the pageant another contestant wants to swap numbers with her so she can perform sooner, and she winds up with a stage-light falling on her head, killing her. You'd think that a killer targeting these girls would be able to tell them apart, but apparently not. 

It's all quite stupid - there's no attempt to hide that the pageant coordinator is the mother of one of the contestants, or that the whole voting process is completely rigged, and none of that is funny. If the audience were to find out about that in some subtle way it COULD be funny, but there's zero subtlety here. If the mother was the one killing all the other contestants who weren't her daughter you might think that was way too obvious, but you would be wrong, it's exactly as obvious as it needed to be. Then to make things even more confusing, the girl who wins, Becky Leeman, daughter of the pageant coordinator, dies the next day in a freak accident that was NOT a murder, but how are we, the audience, supposed to know the difference? So Amber, the girl we've all been rooting for, moves up from 1st runner up to pageant queen, and moves on to the state finals of the American Teen Miss Pageant. 

At this point there's only about 10 minutes left in the film, but they manage to hold two more pageants during that time, Amber also wins at the state level because she's the only one who doesn't eat the shellfish from the buffet, and every other contestant gets food poisoning and can't perform because they're all vomiting so hard. And then it's all for naught because the state winners are sent to the national pageant in Alabama, only to find the entire Sarah Rose Cosmetics company, main sponsor of the pageant, has been shut down for tax evasion. So every effort here felt very wasted, both within the storyline and also in the production of a very horrible, pointless film. We've got a contender here for worst film of the year, and that will be reflected in the scoring. 

I think what happened here was that someone saw how successful the film "Fargo" was in 1996, and the way that audiences reacted to a black comedy with a number of injuries, the memorable scene with Steve Buscemi's character in the wood-chipper, and tried to copy that exact same style, only they set the film at a beauty pageant and just imagined it as a very violent, cutthroat place full of violence and murder lurking just below the surface. Small town teens enter a beauty pageant, now what can we possibly make go wrong?  But it's so ill-intentioned and seems to exist only to make all of the characters suffer, either physically or emotionally. They're not wrong about pageants, but then neither is the resulting situation comical in any way.  

There's also a tremendous waste of talent, across the board - we now regard Kirsten Dunst and Allison Janney as great actors, Ellen Barkin and Amy Adams too, it's just a shame they weren't given much to really work with. The screenwriter plays the third pageant judge, the one who never talks and looks sad all the time. That tracks. And then any humor at the expense of perverted contest judges, previous winners with eating disorders or men with learning disabilities working at hardware stores just really didn't age well at all. I'm just going to treat this film as mortar between the bricks and try to forget about it, I suggest you do the same. 

Directed by Michael Patrick Jann (writer of "Let's Go to Prison")

Also starring Kirsten Dunst (last seen in "Bachelorette"), Ellen Barkin (last seen in "The Out-Laws"), Allison Janney (last seen in "A Thousand Words"), Denise Richards (last seen in "Love Actually"), Kirstie Alley (last seen in "She's Having a Baby"), Sam McMurray (last heard in "Klaus"), Mindy Sterling (last seen in "Biggest Heist Ever"), Brittany Murphy (last seen in "Riding in Cars with Boys"), Amy Adams (last seen in "Nightbitch"), Laurie A. Sinclair, Shannon Nelson, Tara Redepenning, Sarah Stewart, Alexandra Holden (last seen in "How to Deal"), Brooke Elise Bushman, Matt Malloy (last seen in "The United States of Leland"), Michael McShane (last heard in "A Bug's Life"), Will Sasso (last seen in "Happy Gilmore 2"), Lona Williams, John T. Olson, Casey Garven (last seen in "The Mighty Ducks"), Dale Dunham (ditto), Ashley Dylan Bullard, Jacy King, Nora Dunn (last seen in "Runaway Jury"), Mo Gaffney (last seen in "Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie"), Adam West (last seen in "The Flash"), Mary Gillis (last seen in "Fathers' Day"), Richard Narita (last seen in "Midway" (1976)), Patti Yasutake (last seen in "Clockwatchers"), Seiko Matsuda, Allyson Kearns, Tom Gilshannon, Amanda Detmer (last seen in "Boys and Girls"), Eric D. Howell, Matthew G. Park, Kristin Rudrüd (last seen in "Pleasantville"), Jimmie D. Wright, Peter Aitchison, Richard Ooms (last seen in "Wilson"), Robert-Bruce Brake, Bruce Linser, Samantha Harris (last seen in "Beautiful"), Kari Ann Shiff, Maria Awes, Larissa Lowthorp (last seen in "Grumpier Old Men"), Emily Moore, Jamie Olsen, David William Watts and the voice of Thomas Lennon (last seen in "Monster Trucks").

RATING: 2 out of 10 dessert bars

Untamed Heart

Year 18, Day 64 - 3/5/26 - Movie #5,264

BEFORE: Well, the alumni meet-up last night was something of a bust, nobody else from the Tisch School of the Arts attended, which makes me wonder if I'm not being invited to the right events. I'd love to go to one of these where all the famous filmmakers and actors attend, but that just doesn't seem to be happening. I don't mind talking with interesting people who went to the Law school or the Nursing school, but I'm also there to network and for that I need to be around film and animation people. There was a survey in my e-mail this morning asking for my thoughts on the event, and I almost never fill out things like that, but today I had something to say. 

Marisa Tomei carries over from "Love Is Strange". Just two weeks to go until I can call this romance chain over - I've made great strides this year in getting some of the older films off the list, based on both when they were made and when they were added to my list. So yeah, we're in the "clearance sale" section of the chain right now, everything's got to go because I've got to make room for the new merchandise coming in. 

Tomorrow, Friday, is Day 22 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" so I know we're getting close to this year's ceremony. The themes for March 6 are "Oscar Goes International" and "Oscar Goes to Space": 

6:15 am "Immortal Love" (1961)

8:15 am "Yojimbo" (1961)

10:15 am "Autumn Sonata" (1978)

12:15 pm "Bicycle Thieves" (1948)

2:00 pm "I Vitelloni" (1953)

4:00 pm "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" (1964)

6:00 pm "The 400 Blows" (1959)

8:00 pm "For All Mankind" (1989)

9:30 pm "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968)

12:15 am "Marooned" (1969)

2:30 am "Forbidden Planet" (1956)

I'm claiming three today, because I DID watch every Ingmar Bergman film I could a couple years back. Also "2001" and "Forbidden Planet", which are sci-fi classics. I remember arguing with my boss over the ending of "2001", which he claimed had no meaning and was nonsense. Well, sure, if that's the way you want to look at it, but I will think much less of you if you say that. Anyway I'm past the century mark at long last and I'm up to 101 seen out of 246, still 41%. 

THE PLOT: A waitress hardly notices a shy busboy who secretly loves her, until one night she's attacked and he comes to her rescue. From there a relationship sparks but one secret could mean disaster for these fated lovers.

AFTER: This one came out in 1993, that's like 33 years ago - surely I MUST have seen this film at some point, right? It's annoying when the film feels very familiar, because that suggests that I HAVE seen it, but then I only really started keeping good records by rating films on IMDB, and I started doing that in 2009, which is already 17 years ago. I'm taking a chance by saying that I have NEVER seen this film, I admit that it's possible, however it just can't be proven. Well, when in doubt, if it's not rated on my IMDB account, and it can help me with the linking, then it's fair game, right? So I started watching this and no, it did NOT feel familiar - so I think I'm OK. If I did watch this, it was so long ago that I forgot everything about it, so even THEN, with the remote chance that I watched this in the 1990's, I don't remember it at all, so it's still like watching it for the first time, OK?  And now it's been on the list for a few years so it needs to be gone, linking to it now is the only answer. 

It's a pretty short film, and a simple one at that, so it costs me nothing to include it here in the final third (?) of the romance chain. (33 down, with 14 to go, yeah I'd say I'm in the home stretch here.) Today's romance is set in Minnesota, where the winters are cold and people have to work two jobs, like washing dishes in a coffee shop and also carrying around Christmas trees that are for sale in the lot downtown. Adam is a quiet guy, though, and keeps to himself, doesn't talk much so even his co-workers are convinced that he's either mute or he is mentally disabled, and these menial jobs are the most he can handle. But he's not disabled, it's more like he just never had anything to say? He could have what we now call social anxiety, or maybe seasonal affective disorder because it is December in Minnesota, that's maybe enough to make somebody depressed and withdrawn. 

Or you know, maybe he's just creepy. Adam's apparently been following Caroline home from the coffee shop when her brother forgets to pick her up when her shift is over, or he falls asleep - Adam just wants to make sure Caroline gets home OK when she has to walk, but still, that's a bit creepy. The guys who banged on the cigarette machine and then ordered a meal from her are worse, sure, they keep harassing her and chasing after her and before you know it, that's escalated to actual assault, with intent to rape even, but Adam appears on the scene, beats the two men up and then carries Caroline home to her front porch. This is when Caroline first learns that he can talk after all, and again, not creepy at all that he hasn't been able to vocalize his feelings until just then.  

From then on, Adam can escort her home up close, now that he's gained her trust, and he even shows her where he lives, in a basement apartment, with a dog and a lot of books and records. But then she still has to walk home from his apartment alone? Why didn't he escort her the rest of the way, if he was so concerned about her. Sure, he's HOME, I get it, but do the decent thing and walk her home while you're walking her dog and then walk back home by yourself, that would be the decent thing to do. Anyway, there's a budding relationship here and she's thrilled when he brings enough Christmas trees to fill every room in her house, and somehow snuck into the house and crept into every room and decorated the trees without waking anyone up. That really is super-creepy, and he follows that up with the fact that he sometimes goes into her house just to watch Caroline sleep. Umm, yeah, she doesn't think that's creepy? She finds it adorable, which is very questionable.  

Adam also has a scar from heart surgery or something, however he was told a story by the nuns in the orphanage that his father was an explorer that was killed in a battle against the Baboon King, who felt so guilty that he offered up his own heart to replace Adam's. And Adam believes this is what happened, so that brings us back to the theory that he's mentally not all there. After Adam is beat up and stabbed and hospitalized, the doctor confirms that he does have a heart defect, which confirms surgery at some point, however it's been untreated and neglected for far too long. Adam then breaks himself OUT of the hospital, and nobody thinks that's weird or takes the time to explain to him why that's a bad thing and he needs to go back in. There's things here that just don't seem to add up, but it's explained away by saying Adam thinks he's special with his "baboon heart" and doesn't want to get a transplant, because then he wouldn't be special. Yes, but he'd be ALIVE for a longer time, so why don't the people who care about him try to change his mind on this point? 

Instead the relationship moves forward, in spite of all the danger, after Caroline identifies Adam's two assailants in a police line-up, and we can assume they'll be going to jail for a while. For Adam's birthday Caroline takes him to his first hockey game, and he catches a stray puck, which seems rather unlikely, but it's what we have to work with. Adam also bought her flowers and a gift, which suggests that he doesn't really understand how birthdays work. Geez, Valentine's Day was RIGHT THERE if a screenwriter was looking for a holiday where they could both exchange gifts and that would have made a lot more sense. But by this point we kind of know where the story is going because they play up the heart defect so much, pointing out that not taking care of it could have devastating effects. 

Originally the screenplay had this film set in New Jersey, but when the filmmakers couldn't shoot there, for reasons, they scouted other locations and settled on Minneapolis. Marisa Tomei studied to get something of a Minnesota accent, while Rosie Perez just did not do that. It's weird that she's supposed to be midwestern but instead sounds like she's from Brooklyn. The film was called "Baboon Heart" at one point but changing the title was probably a good idea. Minnesota offered a tax credit to have the film shot there, but I wonder how the state film board felt after the film depicted all the men in the state as either spoiled rich kids, creepy weirdos or violent rapists. The coffee shop was real, as was the hockey team although shortly after this they moved out of Minnesota to become the Dallas Stars. 

The film's tagline was "He doesn't make sense. She doesn't make sense. Together they make sense." Umm, I have to respectfully disagree. 

Directed by Tony Bill (director of "Flyboys" and "Crazy People")

Also starring Christian Slater (last seen in "Blink Twice"), Rosie Perez (last seen in "Night on Earth"), Kyle Secor (last seen in "The Purge: Election Year"), Willie Garson (last seen in "Freaky Friday"), James Cada (last seen in "A Serious Man"), Claudia Wilkens (ditto), Gary Groomes, Pat Clemons, Charley Bartlett, Vincent Kartheiser (last seen in "My Friend Dahmer"), Wendy Feder, Nancy Marvy, Paul Douglas Law, Joshua Schaefer, Marquetta Senters, Joe Minjares (last seen in "Wilson"), Sally Wingert (ditto), John Beasley (last seen in "Daddy's Little Girls"), Steve Cochran (last seen in "Grumpy Old Men"), Buffy Sedlachek (ditto), Richard Grusin (last seen in "Born on the Fourth of July"), Tom Sierchio, Aaron Kjenaas, Allen Hamilton (last seen in "Only the Lonely"), Kay Bonner Nee, Lia Rivamonte, Greg Sain, Margaret McGraw, John Paul Gamoke (last seen in "The Mighty Ducks").

RATING: 4 out of 10 sugar jars (I fail to see how empty sugar jars meant that Caroline got "good tips", but please, don't bother to explain that. Can't she just count the money?)

Love Is Strange

Year 18, Day 63 - 3/4/26 - Movie #5,263

BEFORE: I'm going out tonight to an NYU alumni event, just a little get-together in Manhattan, so if I'm late posting tonight, that's why, I maybe came home full of hors d'oeuvres and drinks and went straight to bed - 

Alfred Molina carries over from "Enchanted April".

Tomorrow, Thursday, March 5 is day 21 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, and the themes are "Oscar Goes to Book Club" and "Oscar Goes Into Politics". Here's the line-up:

6:00 am "A Farewell to Arms" (1932)

7:30 am "Of Mice and Men" (1939)

9:30 am "A Tale of Two Cities" (1935)

11:45 am "Great Expectations" (1946)

1:45 pm "Tom Jones" (1963)

4:00 pm "Madame Bovary" (1949)

6:00 pm "The Picture of Dorian Gray" (1945)

8:00 pm "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" (1939)

10:15 pm "The Great McGinty" (1940)

12:00 am "Seven Days in May" (1964)

2:15 am "The Fog of War" (2003)

4:15 am "The Candidate" (1972)

Well, I've managed to watch the WRONG versions of a lot of these films, the remakes, in other words, which were of course less likely to receive Oscar nominations. I recently watched more recent versions of "Of Mice and Men" and "Great Expectations", just not the versions that TCM is focused on, aka the classic ones. But I've seen "Tom Jones" and "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington", and "The Candidate", plus I watched "The Fog of War" in one of my Doc Blocks. So another four today, which brings me to 98 seen out of 235, or 41.7%. Statistically with just 11 days to go I think I've leveled off, it would take a complete sweep or a complete blow-out to really move the needle now.

THE PLOT: After Ben and George get married, George is fired from his teaching post, forcing them to stay with friends separately while they look for cheaper housing - a situation that weighs heavily on all involved. 

AFTER: This story feels like it had to come from real life - most likely the writer/director had a gay uncle who maybe lost his apartment for a similar reason. The nephew character here is some kind of filmmaker, so that could easily be the character that represents the director, Ira Sachs. Yeah, you learn to spot that sort of thing after watching a few thousand movies. The details on HOW this gay couple lost their co-op apartment are so specific, it feels like it really happened to someone. 

The chain of events, of course, was probably kicked off by the legalization of gay marriage. I still LOVE the story about how this became legal across the country, it happened because while some states had settled on a "domestic partnership" compromise, where long-term gay couples could share benefits without any of the downsides of marriage, however conservatives passed the Defense of Marriage Act to ban gay marriage at the federal level, and this was deemed to be unconstitutional. And therefore, using reverse logic, if it's illegal to ban gay marriage, then by default it's legal! Perhaps this is an over-simplification of what occurred, but I think it's still darn elegant. The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment guarantee equal protection and due process to all citizens, and therefore DOMA was repealed and the legal argument made in 2003 that government cannot discriminate against marriage on the basis of gender was therefore expanded to the whole country. 

But there had to be some ramifications somewhere - in 2015 naturally there was a sudden wave of gay people getting married, some of whom had been waiting a very long time. For a select few, perhaps the legislation made no difference and some people just continued in their long domestic partnerships - like if you didn't care BEFORE what the government thought about your gay relationship, why should you care AFTER the legislation was passed? But whatever, there were a bunch of happy brides with brides and grooms with grooms. The caterers and cake designers were probably also very happy about the uptick in business, not to mention gay divorce lawyers. Yes, if there's going to be gay marriages there will be gay divorces, gay alimony, gay custody battles.  

In this film, we have George, a music teacher who finally marries his long-term partner Ben, however George teaches in a Catholic school, which sees fit to fire him because his lifestyle does not match with the teachings of the church. This has a domino effect and Ben and George can no longer afford their West Village co-op apartment, so they have to sell it at a penalty and look for a new place to live. The "flip tax" mentioned here is a very specific thing, which reinforces my belief that all of this really happened to some screenwriter's uncle. What George SHOULD have done is immediately contact a lawyer, because firing someone on the basis of their sexual orientation is probably illegal, even for the Catholic Church. Even if he couldn't keep his job, George could have received a settlement and walked away with enough money to buy a house somewhere or a Manhattan condo. A better real-estate lawyer could have fought the flip tax, too.

The couple gets on the waiting list for affordable housing and then splits up, with Ben going to live with his nephew's family in Brooklyn, and George moving in with their former neighbors, a younger gay couple that is also NYPD cops who like to party and play D&D with their friends until the wee hours of the morning. Sure, the situation is hardly ideal, and probably exaggerated here for comic effect, in another edition of "What Could Possibly Go Wrong" where everything, of course, goes very wrong. 

There were other answers, though, they just wouldn't have been so funny or so tragic. They could have stayed together if they just took the first apartment they could find, or they could have moved to Florida or Pennsylvania or something, but no, they're New Yorkers and some of those people would never, ever move out of the city. They wouldn't even move up to Poughkeepsie to live with another member of Ben's family, even though she had a big house with a spare room for them - but hell no, it's Poughkeepsie and I get why they didn't want to go there. It's at least a 2-hour drive, and that's with no traffic. You know, parts of Long Island are very nice, just saying, and there are some nice restaurants out there, four or five Chinese buffets. 

Instead, Ben moves in with his nephew, his wife and their teenage son, and shares bunk beds with that son. Umm, NITPICK POINT: why did they have bunk beds if they only had one son? Most people only buy bunk beds if they have multiple children, nobody really buys bunk beds because they think their kid might have a sleepover someday, right? Anyway, Ben is always underfoot and chatty when Kate is trying to right, and Joey is always hanging out with this weird kid named Vlad, we don't know if they're skateboarding together or doing drugs together or being gay together, they're at that weird age when everything and anything is possible and fun as long as their parents will hate it. Meanwhile George continues giving private piano lessons and looks for a new job at a new school, instead of hiring a lawyer to sue the Catholic Church for firing him.  

Kate suggests that Ben take up painting again, so he paints a portrait of Vlad on the roof of their building, but later falls down the stairs coming down from the roof. He injures his arm, so there goes the idea of him going up on the roof to paint and staying out of Kate's way. Then there's a weird subplot about Joey and Vlad stealing books from the school library, it doesn't make much sense or it's never really fully explained, whichever. George meets a man at a party thrown in the apartment he's living in, and that man turns him on to a rent-controlled apartment that he's living in but has to give up soon. This would seem to be the answer to their problem over where to live, but it's really too small for two people, and then further tragedy strikes. Well, you know, into each life a little rain must fall and such. 

Directed by Ira Sachs

Also starring John Lithgow (last seen in "Conclave"), Marisa Tomei (last seen in "Love the Coopers"), Charlie Tahan (last seen in "A Complete Unknown"), Cheyenne Jackson (last seen in "United 93"), Harriet Sansom Harris (last seen in "Monster-in-Law"), Darren Burrows (last seen in "Amistad"), Christian Coulson (last seen in "The Four Feathers"), John Cullum (last seen in "Kill Your Darlings"), Adriane Lenox (last seen in "The United States vs. Billie Holiday"), Manny Perez (last seen in "Courage Under Fire"), Sebastian La Cause (last seen in "Eraser"), Christina Kirk (last seen in "Melinda and Melinda"), Tatyana Zbirovskaya, Olya Zueva (last seen in "Salt"), Jason Stuart (last seen in "Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution"), Eric Tabach, Tank Burt, Daphne Gaines, Christopher King (last seen in "Going the Distance"), Maryann Urbano (last seen in "Babygirl"), David Bell, Henry Crouch, Jeff Goad, Dovie Currin, Ira Spaulding, Andrew Polk (last seen in "Armageddon Time"), Jim Newman, Michael J. Burg (last seen in "BlacKkKlansman"), Josephine Pizzino (last seen in "Birdman"), Alexander W. Smith

RATING: 6 out of 10 late night phone calls

Enchanted April

Year 18, Day 62 - 3/3/26 - Movie #5,262

BEFORE: Miranda Richardson carries over from "The Prince & Me" and this enables another Birthday SHOUT-out since she was born on March 3, 1958. There haven't been as many SHOUT-outs this year as usual, I think mainly this is due to more films with smaller casts - fewer actors, less chance of landing a film on someone's birthday, it's just math. I could have dropped in "The Evening Star" here and made a Miranda Richardson triple-play, but I think I need that film to make my links next time around, so again I'm holding one back, and I'll follow a different link tomorrow. 

But considering that one of the TCM "31 Days of Oscar" themes today is "Oscar Goes on a Trip", I think my film choice today is in sync with that. This film covers much the same ground as "A Passage to India" or "The Wings of the Dove", in that it's just a simple, classic story about British people going on vacation. 

Tomorrow is Day 20, and the themes for Wednesday, March 4 are "Oscar Goes South of the Border" and "Oscar Goes Home". Here are the films: 

6:30 am "Juarez" (1939)

8:45 am "Fiesta" (1947)

10:30 am "The Champ" (1931)

12:00 pm "The Brave One" (1956)

2:00 pm "Cowboy" (1958)

3:45 pm "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" (1948)

6:00 pm "The Night of the Iguana" (1964)

8:00 pm "The Best Years of Our Lives" (1948)

11:00 pm "Sweet Bird of Youth" (1962)

1:15 am "Volver" (2006)

3:30 am "Some Came Running" (1958)

That's another five that I've seen: "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre", "The Night of the Iguana", "The Best Years of Our Lives", "Volver" and "Some Came Running", which brings me up to 94 seen out of 223. Just over 42% overall, which I think is a decent score. 

THE PLOT: After World War I, four English women who are unhappy with their lives spend some time away on vacation in a beautiful Italian villa. 

AFTER: It sure seems like Italy is the hot destination this time around, at least in the "classics" division - "The Wings of the Dove", "Much Ado About Nothing" and now this one are all set there, while the French Riviera and Monaco have been visited too, in "The Love Punch" and "The House of Mirth". One thing is clear, that the citizens of the U.K. definitely want to go on vacation when they're in a romantic mood. Who can blame them, when London is so rainy in March, why wouldn't they want to head off to Italy for the month of April? Yes, yes, of course I know it's March and I've placed this in the "wrong" month, but this is where the linking clearly wants the film to be. Let's assume that it's March when our characters start planning their Italian holiday, OK? They've got to plan the trip, back around World War I this would have meant taking a train to the coast and then boarding a small ship across the English channel, right? And then some kind of train on the other side to get to Italy. 

Back then it was a long journey - two of the four women staying at the San Salvatore got their first, the older woman, Mrs. Fisher, and the wealthy and beautiful Caroline Dester. Lotty Wilkins and Rose Arbuthnot must have left later, well in addition to packing they had to run the trip by their husbands first. For Rose this wasn't too difficult, because her husband had just written a new erotic novel (under a pseudonym) and wanted to go on a book tour to promote it. One gets the feeling that he probably was getting a little something on the side after the book signings at ladies clubs, another reason to not use his real name, this way he could keep his affairs off of his wife's radar. Lotty had a bigger problem, breaking the news to her husband, Mellersh, that she wanted to spend a month in Italy. Mellersh had been keeping Lotty on a tight leash, making her write down all of her expenses, yet still she found a way to divert 15 pounds to rent 1/4 of the Italian villa. However, Mellersh surprised her with the idea of an Italian holiday for them both, just before she was going to break the news that she wanted to go there by herself. 

This film maybe shows the beginning of the AirBnB concept, Londoner and oboe player George Briggs owns the Italian villa, and since he was going out on tour he decided to post an advert in the newspaper, offering up San Salvatore for April for 60 pounds. (shillings? was that the same thing? Then what were "quid"?). Anyway Lotty and Rose got the idea to take the month off, and then found two other women willing to help with the expenses. Once they all arrived in Italy, they had to decide who should get which bedroom, and what to do with the extra beds - the single ladies didn't need them, and so they ended up in the rooms of the married women. This plot point could be important later, especially if their husbands should turn up unexpectedly. 

Three of the four women just want to sit in lounge chairs and relax, or lie down on the beach or on some nearby rocks and just clear their minds.  Sure, that's what a vacation is for, but that doesn't exactly lend itself to the most exciting movies. Do I want to watch British women just remaining still for 95 minutes? Of course not, it seems incredibly boring, even if that's how they want to spend the month of April. So this situation needed to be shaken up. After a few days of being bossed around by Mrs. Fisher, Lotty decides to invite her husband, Mellersh, by letter and encourages Rose to invite hers. Perhaps they could both repair their marriages if they could just get their husbands on vacation and get them to relax, too. Sure, it's not like married people fight while they're on vacation...

Mellersh shows up first, because he couldn't wait to network with Mrs. Fisher and Lady Caroline, as they both have a lot of money, and he views them as prospective clients. Mellersh promptly causes some kind of explosion of the hot water heater in the bathroom, and is therefore wearing only a towel and a lot of soot when he meets the other ladies. Rose's husband shows up a few days later, but he never got the letter from Rose, it seems he came there to hook up with Lady Caroline, who is a fan of his erotic stories. Well, I guess somebody had to be - but the trip apparently took a lot out of him, because he falls asleep before he can sleep with Lady Caroline and instead is found dozing in the hallway by his own wife, Rose, who assumes that he came in response to her letter. Well, once in a while in these bedroom farces I suppose somebody does actually screw up and end up sleeping with their own wife, purely by accident. 

Meanwhile, the owner of the villa, George Briggs, turns up and is surprised to find four (no, wait, six) people enjoying the accommodations, when he rented it to only TWO. All is forgiven when he becomes attracted to Rose, who he assumed was a war widow, you know, because there were so many of those after WWI ended. What an opportune time it must have been to be a man in London with so many lonely widows around... Caroline wonders why Briggs didn't focus more on her, but it turns out he's got very bad eyesight due to a war injury. But when he learns that Rose has a living husband, who is also THERE, he switches over to Caroline, and she knows that it's true love because it's not based on her looks, Briggs enjoys talking to her. OK, whatever, everybody kind of gets paired up, except for Mrs. Fisher, but it's OK, she's old. But at least she made some new friends by traveling to Italy.  

This film did get three Oscar nominations (Supporting Actress, Costume Design and Adapted Screenplay) but did not win in any category.  It did win a couple Golden Globes and a NY Film Critics Award, I guess that's something. There's just one love quadrangle that totally gets resolved rather quickly, so overall that's not very complicated. It was originally made for TV and shot on 16mm, but the result was so good that it was transferred to 35mm and released theatrically. It's based on a novel by Elizabeth von Arnim, and they shot much of the film on location in Portofino, Italy, in the same castle where the author stayed when she wrote the book. That's pretty cool...

Directed by Mike Newell (director of "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society" and "Mona Lisa Smile")

Also starring Josie Lawrence, Alfred Molina (last seen in "Not Without My Daughter"), Neville Phillips (last seen in "Carrington"), Jim Broadbent (last seen in "Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy"), Michael Kitchen (last seen in "Proof of Life"), Joan Plowright (last seen in "The Spiderwick Chronicles"), Polly Walker (last seen in "Emma"), Stephen Beckett, Matthew Radford, Davide Manuli, Vittorio Duse, Adriana Facchetti, Anna Longhi (last seen in "The Talented Mr. Ripley")

RATING: 5 out of 10 famous authors Mrs. Fisher once met

The Prince & Me

Year 18, Day 61 - 3/2/26 - Movie #5,261

BEFORE: Julia Stiles carries over from "Save the Last Dance", and there are another two Julia Stiles movies on my list that could have fit in here, however I don't have room for them, and also they have been deemed to make an important connection between other films on the list, so they have been tabled until next year. I have a possible chain for next time that is 21 movies long, and other smaller ones that are five, seven or two films long, maybe I can connect some of those and fill up February of 2027 - but that will be harder if I watch those other Julia Stiles films this year, OK? This film's been on my list for a while, I think it was on that crashed DVR that I had to return, but when I got the replacement DVR a year ago the film was still running on cable so I just re-recorded it. I'll try to get it burned on to a DVD now that I've watched it. 

This is the third film of this year with James Fox in it, though - but leading the pack right now is Celia Imrie with 5 appearances, she's someone who usually plays non-lead characters, but once you see her in British films, you'll notice her a lot. I know her, of course, for playing a Naboo pilot in "Star Wars: Episode I" but I don't have her autograph yet, and I probably should work on that. 

Here's the line up for tomorrow, Tuesday, March 3, Day 19 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar", and the themes are "Oscar Goes on the Air" and "Oscar Goes on a Trip":

6:00 am "Mr. Dodd Takes the Air" (1937)

7:45 am "Foreign Correspondent" (1940)

10:00 am "It's Always Fair Weather" (1955)

12:00 pm "It Should Happen to You" (1954)

1:45 pm "Being There" (1979)

4:00 pm "My Favorite Year" (1982)

6:00 pm "The Sunshine Boys" (1975)

8:00 pm "Around the World in 80 Days" (1956)

11:15 pm "A Passage to India" (1984)

2:15 am "The Man Who Knew Too Much" (1956)

4:30 am "A Little Romance" (1979)

I think I'm hitting for SEVEN today - since I've seen all the Hitchcock movies, that's "Foreign Correspondent" and "The Man Who Knew Too Much", plus I've seen "Being There", "My Favorite Year", "The Sunshine Boys", "Around the World in 80 Days" and "A Passage to India". So this has to improve my standings, I'm now at 89 seen out of 212, that's just under 42% now!

THE PLOT: At college Paige meets Eddie, a student from Denmark, whom she first dislikes but later accepts, likes and loves; he turns out to be Crown Prince Edvard. Paige follows him to Copenhagen and he follows her back to school with a plan. 

AFTER: I'm somewhat torn on this one, because at its heart it's the last gasp of the patriarchy, like even in 2004, how could someone make a "prince falls in love with a regular girl and takes her away from her commoner life" movie? At that point in time, we should have been over all the Cinderella or Snow White fantasies, exemplified in Disney movies where characters sing "Someday, My Prince Will Come". Like, come on, women can vote now and get jobs, we had equal rights legislation and almost an amendment, women are doctors and senators and they're not just dating to get into a higher tax bracket, or to be "rescued", this all should have gone the way of the dinosaur. And the film acts like it KNOWS this, because Paige is in college with hopes of applying to medical school, and she's not dating anyone, and that's by choice. She's complete as she is, no need for a relationship to make her feel "whole". 

But even though the relationship is rocky at first because of how chauvinist "Eddie" is, he turns up as her lab partner, as her co-worker, and she's forced to train him how to slice deli meats, and he slowly wins her over by virtue of spending so much time together. And when the paparazzi eventually track the errant Prince down and take photos of the two of them making out in the library, her first reaction after finding out that he's a Danish prince isn't, "Oh, wow, what an opportunity!" but instead she's mad because he lied about it. Yes, a lie of omission is still a lie. Even more surprising is that she takes him back after that, I guess she starts to see how dating a price could open some doors for her, socially and financially.  Their studying alliance is still solid, where she helps him pass chemistry and he gives her some unique insight into Shakespeare's "Hamlet" - you know, being a Danish prince himself, who could know better about what's going on in Hamlet's brain? 

It wasn't just on-the-job cold cut slicing that Eddie had to learn, he was way off about American culture, as all he knew about it was that American women are likely to take their tops off during spring break or Mardi Gras. That's probably why he wanted to come to America in the first place, though he told his parents that he wanted an American education, and to learn more about how the working class operates. What a bunch of B.S., but it got him to Wisconsin, with his butler in tow. NITPICK POINT: I would have to imagine that special diplomatic arrangements would have to be made for a foreign prince to study at an American university, and the college HAD to know about this, because they gave him a dorm room with bunk beds so his butler would have a place to sleep. Don't you think the news about a European prince attending an American college would leak out at some point, or the college would want to use this information to promote itself? 

We also don't quite know how the paparazzi tracked Eddie down in Wisconsin, only that they were getting bored covering the King's press conferences and not Prince Edvard's torrid affairs. So that's N.P. #2 I guess, because the film doesn't tell us this, the photographers just show up one day - it would have made sense if there had been an American news story about the infamous "lawnmower races" in Wisconsin over Thanksgiving weekend, and if the foreign press had picked up the story, someone in Denmark might have recognized him, that could have been one way to go. 

But we'll never know, because Edvard is called home to Denmark right after finals, because his father, King Haraald, is very sick. He wants to abdicate the throne and crown his son as the new King, but this process apparently takes a while. While giving an oral exam about Shakespeare (NP #3: I thought oral exams were only part of a masters degree, not a basic bachelor's level literature class...) Paige is reminded during a discussion of "Othello" that she loves Eddie, and so she books an expensive flight to Denmark with the help of her friends. Bear in mind this film was made before we had Kayak, Travelocity or even Priceline... 

The king's advice to Eddie is that if he loves Paige, he should marry her for love, it's a better fit than trying to find an available princess somewhere in the world, anyway the arranged marriage thing seems even more outdated than the monarchy itself. The queen is against Eddie marrying a commoner, however after she witnesses her son solving a labor dispute by quoting what he learned on Paige's family's farm, she changes her mind and not only approves of the marriage, but grants Paige access to the royal jewels to wear during the coronation ball. This part is really just female porn, wish fulfillment to have access to very expensive jewelry without having to pay for it. And to have royal dressmakers make her a gown, to have servants ready to make her whatever food she wants to eat whenever she wants it. Sure, a girl could get used to this kind of treatment, I know I could. 

But eventually Paige remembers that she set out to become a doctor working in impoverished countries, and feels that by becoming a princess, she would be betraying herself and not following through with her own career. The acceptance letter from Johns Hopkins that falls on the floor, unread, is just one of several plot threads that never really gets followed up throughout the movie. Anyway, Paige breaks off the engagement and goes back home, and so Denmark is left with a very sad, lonely king. For a while, anyway, because Eddie realizes that it's not the 1600's any more, and that he can wait for Paige to become a doctor or spend time in a Third World country and that a woman's dreams are important, too.  

The problem here is that the film tries to have it both ways, you can't play the wish fulfillment card and have the rich European prince swoop in and rescue the commoner AND also portray a woman who doesn't need rescuing, suggesting that the old ways of the monarchy and patriarchy are a thing of the past. Can falling in love with a prince be both a good thing and a bad thing at the same time? Perhaps, but why make this so much more complicated than it needs to be?  If she can be both a doctor and a princess and that's an obvious fact, why does it take so long for them to figure this out? Why not become a princess first and then use her position to study medicine? They probably have decent medical schools in Copenhagen, why isn't that an option? Or Paige can use her position as a princess to support or fund medical research, which would also be quite helpful? Jesus, if you have the chance to be married to a prince, take the damn win!

The story also calls to mind the story of Meghan Markle, who met Prince Harry in 2016. Although she was famous for being on two TV series and appearing in a couple movies, still she was considered a "commoner" as far as the U.K.'s royal family was concerned. She seems to have taken to the whole Duchess thing, so this 2005 film kind of got something right in advance - it happens. Both "Save the Last Dance" and tonight's film have sequels that DO NOT feature Julia Stiles, so obviously I'm skipping them. The chain must remain unbroken. 

Directed by Martha Coolidge (director of "Introducing Dorothy Dandridge")

Also starring Luke Mably (last seen in "28 Days Later"), Ben Miller (last seen in "Birthday Girl"), Miranda Richardson (last heard in "Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget"), James Fox (last seen in "The Double"), Alberta Watson (last seen in "The Lookout"), John Bourgeois (last seen in "X-Men: Apocalypse"), Zachary Knighton (last seen in "Come and Find Me"), Stephen O'Reilly, Elisabeth Waterston, Eliza Bennett (last seen in "Nanny McPhee"), Devin Ratray (last seen in "Side Effects"), Clare Preuss (last seen in "Loser"), Yaani King (last seen in "In the Cut"), Eddie Irvine, Angelo Tsarouchas (last seen in "The Recruit"), Jacques Tourangeau, Joanne Baron (last seen in "Introducing Dorothy Dandridge"), Stephen Singer (last seen in "Obvious Child"), Sarah Manninen, Tony Munch (last seen in "The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day"), John Nelles (last seen in "Molly's Game"), Claus Bue, James McGowan (last seen in "Suicide Squad"), Jean Pearson, Dagmar Blahova, Henrik Jandorf, Niels Anders Thorn, Jesper Asholt, Andrea Veresova, Winter Ave Zoli (last seen in "Father Stu"), Jennifer Roberts Smith, Zdenek Maryska, Garth Hewitt, Dana Reznik (last seen in "How to Deal"), Amy Stewart, Richard Lee, Robert Russel, Go Go Jean Michel Francis, Michael McLachlan, Patricia Netzer, Andrea Miltner (last seen in "Nosferatu"), Jennifer Vey (last seen in "Get Over It").

RATING: 5 out of 10 different types of turkey in the cold cut section (regular, honey, BBQ, cracked pepper, cajun, hickory-smoked, Salsalito, low-fat, low-sodium and gluten-free)

Save the Last Dance

Year 18, Day 60 - 3/1/26 - Movie #5,260

BEFORE: February is over, but the romance chain still has a way to go - two more weeks at least. That damn Romance Groundhog saw his shadow this year, so we won't be ending this chain any time soon. Some more classics to get off the list, and maybe a couple of weird ones coming up in March. As promised, here are the actor links that will get me to the end of the romance chain: Julia Stiles, Miranda Richardson, Alfred Molina, Marisa Tomei, Claudia Wilkens, Amy Adams, Matthew Perry, Jon Tenney, Sean Bridgers, Jean Smart, Hayley Seat, Chris Pine, Lindsay Lohan, Jane Seymour and Parker Sawyers. I wish I could tell you what's going to happen after that but I can't, because I have no idea. I should probably work on that. 

But I've finally gotten in sync with TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, their topic today was "Oscar Goes Dancing" and my film today is about dancing, too. How about that? Now here's their line-up for tomorrow, March 2, which will be their Day 18, and the themes are "Oscar Goes on the Run" and "Oscar Goes a Few Rounds":

6:00 am "Algiers" (1938)

8:00 am "Odd Man Out" (1947)

10:00 am "Logan's Run" (1976)

12:00 pm "Running on Empty" (1988)

2:00 pm "I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang" (1932)

3:45 pm "The Defiant Ones" (1958)

5:30 pm "North by Northwest" (1959)

8:00 pm "The Harder They Fall" (1956)

10:00 pm "Fat City" (1972)

12:00 am "Champion" (1949)

2:00 am "Golden Boy" (1939)

4:00 am "Somebody Up There Likes Me" (1956)

Well, damn, I think I've only seen four of these: "Logan's Run", "The Defiant Ones", "North by Northwest" and "Somebody Up There Likes Me". Now, I've seen a lot of boxing movies but I just haven't seen THESE boxing movies. And I guess since I watched "The Defiant Ones" I felt no need to watch "I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang" - it's the same movie, right? Anyway, another four seen out of 12 brings me up to 82 seen out of 201, which is just 40.7%. I have a good feeling about tomorrow, though. 

THE PLOT: A white midwestern girl moves from the Chicago suburbs to the city, where her new boyfriend is a black teen from the South Side with a rough, semi-criminal past. 

AFTER: There's a reason I'm programming this film here, you know, this film has a reputation as a classic film made by MTV Films for the MTV generation, which is now officially OVER because the channel is going off the air after what, 45 years? Well, they had a good run, hell I still remember when all they played was music videos, and then a few years later, everything was a music video. But when the novelty wore off MTV turned to reality shows like "Teen Mom" and "Catfish" and now they only show music videos for 1 hour every week, the channel's programming has been absorbed into the giant sponge that is Paramount Plus ("One of US! "One of US!).

Well, in addition to the films "Election" and "Hustle & Flow", MTV Films also made THIS movie, about a white teen who dances ballet moving to Chicago and falling in love with a black classmate. This all comes about because Sara's mother died in a car crash and she was forced to move in with her father, who she barely knows, and he's a nightclub jazz musician in Chi-Town. Look, I'll be honest, this movie really isn't my thing, but it's bound to get some nominations for the Honky Awards at the end of this year, like "Best Romance (High School)" or "Best Romance (Inter-racial)" - yes, that's a category, and any other thing I notice that movies have in common on some level can be a category that I make up. 

But a lot of this I just can't relate to, not the ballet stuff, not the hip-hop stuff, and I also never dated in high school, I waited for college to get started there. (So, yeah, it's my ex-wife's birthday, I'm not in touch with her but that doesn't mean I can't spare a thought for her today - also the Nets were playing the Cleveland Cavaliers, and my ex-in-laws lived near Cleveland.) There are so many other topics that this film touches on, like teen mothers, single mothers, dead mothers, then also gang-bangers, dance clubs, and dance tryouts. Interracial dating, infidelity, teen sex. To say this film is all over the place would be an understatement - I kind of wish there had been a little more focus, like maybe stop and think about what first and foremost a film should be ABOUT, and then realize that every thematic deviation from that is just kind of taking the film in a different direction, and you'll never get anywhere that way, at least I don't think so. 

Sara starts having fights in gym class with Nikki, Derek's ex, and then Sara and Derek start getting it on, meanwhile Sara's father remains the most hands-off parent possible - maybe he just doesn't get bothered by much, I don't know. Derek and Sara also start dancing together, in a style that is a bit hip-hop and a bit ballet, and he convinces her to get back to her dream of studying dance at Juilliard, which she gave up after her mother died. Coincidentally, the people who audition ballet dancers for that school are coming to Chicago in about a month, so they agree to work out a routine for the "modern dance" portion of her interview. Perhaps this is the part she tanked the first time?

But Derek's friend Malakai, who is still involved in the gang lifestyle, pressures Derek to help him with a drive-by shooting, which takes place exactly when Sara's audition does, because of course, we need some kind of conflict, and Derek needs to make some kind of choice between his past and his future with Sara - don't forget he just got accepted to Georgetown, too, that university probably would not want to find out that the inner-city teen they just accepted is still causing mayhem in the streets. So Derek backs out of the gang shooting so he can be there for Sara, but really, he should have done that anyway, for his own college future's sake.  OK, so we know Derek is going to Georgetown and quite probably Sara will be going to Juilliard, so with one in Washington DC and the other in NYC, what is the future for their relationship?  Maddeningly, the film can't or won't tell us, so this all feels kind of unfinished, like the director just gave up halfway through and left it for the audience to figure out. I guess they made a sequel, but with a different cast and it seems that nobody watched it. 

Directed by Thomas Carter (director of "Coach Carter")

Also starring Julia Stiles (last seen in "It's a Disaster"), Sean Patrick Thomas (last seen in "Till"), Kerry Washington (last seen in "The Six Triple Eight"), Fredro Starr (last seen in "Clockers"), Bianca Lawson (last seen in "Primary Colors"), Vince Green (last seen in "Hardball"), Garland Whitt (last seen in "Dolemite Is My Name"), Elisabeth Oas, Artel Great (last seen in "The Soloist"), Cory Stewart, Jennifer Anglin (last seen in "The Watcher"), Andrew Rothenberg (ditto), Dorothy Martin, Kim Tlusty, Felicia Fields (last seen in "Slice"), Ora Jones (last seen in "The Weather Man"), Tab Baker (last seen in "The Ice Harvest"), Kevin Reid, Mekdes Bruk, Ronnie Ray, Tai Davis (last seen in "Widows"), Karima Westbrook (last seen in "The Rum Diary"), Erica Hubbard, Whitney Powell, Brenda Pickleman (last seen in "U.S. Marshals"), Julie Greenberg, Anna Paskevska, Malaika Paul, Jennifer Echols (last seen in "Fathers' Day"), Ellie Weingardt, Safia Jalila

RATING: 4 out of 10 cafeteria lunch trays

The House of Mirth

Year 18, Day 59 - 2/28/26 - Movie #5,259

BEFORE: It's the last day of February, so let's check the format stats for the month:

14 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Cousins, The Extra Man, The Girl Next Door, The Fabelmans, Certain Women, The Tale, New in Town, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy,  Babygirl, The Photograph, We Are Your Friends, Love Again, Much Ado About Nothing, The House of Mirth

3 watched on Netflix: Woman of the Hour, Lonely Planet, A Family Affair

4 watched on Amazon Prime: Puppy Love, You're Cordially Invited, The Love Punch, Imagine Me & You
2 watched on Hulu: Cat Person, Good Luck to You Leo Grande

1 watched on Pluto TV: The Wings of the Dove

3 watched on Tubi: Roger Dodger, The Last Five Years, Spin Me Round

1 watched on a random site: Vita & Virginia
28 TOTAL

Elizabeth McGovern carries over from "The Wings of the Dove", and I'll post the links until St. Patrick's Day tomorrow. But first it's time to check the line-up for Day 17 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, this is for Sunday, March 1, and the theme is "Oscar Goes Dancing". Hmm, that's going to fit right in with my film for tomorrow, I think: 

6:15 am "Hollywood Canteen" (1944)

8:30 am "42nd Street" (1933)

10:15 am "Born to Dance" (1936)

12:15 pm "Swing Time" (1936)

2:51 pm "Royal Wedding" (1951)

4:00 pm "The Band Wagon" (1953)

6:00 pm "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers" (1954)

8:00 pm "West Side Story" (1961)

10:45 pm "All That Jazz" (1979)

1:00 am "The Red Shoes" (1948)

3:30 am "Fame" (1980)

I've seen seven of these 11, so that's good - "Swing Time" and everything after that, except for "The Red Shoes". Am I mistaken, or is there some actor linking going on here? Fred Astaire carries over from "Swing Time" to "Royal Wedding" and then "The Band Wagon", and Jane Powell carries over from "Royal Wedding" to "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers", and then Russ Tamblyn carries over from THAT film to "West Side Story". I think TCM made this same grouping of films a few years ago when they were doing a linking thing, and maybe just liked this order and wanted to repeat it? Anyway, I'm rising to 78 seen out of 189, which is 41.2% - my score went UP!

THE PLOT: A woman risks losing her chance of happiness with the only man she has ever loved. 

AFTER: This story treads some of the same ground as "The Wings of the Dove", the two films are set around 1910 and are based on classic novels about class struggle, one written by Henry James and the other written by Edith Wharton. Wharton could be the female American version of Henry James, for all I know. Hell, they could the same person, for all I know. They both apparently excelled at writing about whatever the opposite of joy was, and of course one was European and the other American, so we've got every possible other thing carrying over as well - both films have a female lead character who has no way to improve her station unless she can get married to a richer guy, and she's having no luck with that. And in both stories the lead character is in a situation-ship with a man who has a job that doesn't make "enough" money - a reporter in the James book and a lawyer in this one. 

Wait, there's more - in both cases the lead female is beholden to her aunt, who controls her financial reputation and gives her a small allowance. The difference comes when in "The Wings of The Dove" Kate takes action to try and get the money from a rich heiress's fortune and fails, and here Lily tries to get money in various other ways - by investing, by working in a millinery, and by inheriting money from her aunt, but nothing really works, except she DOES get $10,000 when her aunt dies, however it takes a long time to collect it, and Lily has outstanding gambling debts that need to be paid, so that inheritance is spent already, essentially.  Supposedly she's going to get $9,000 of investment money from Gus Trenor, her friend Judy's husband, however after a night at the opera Gus reveals that this money is really his, he invested it on Lily's behalf, but he wants a little sumpin' sumpin' in return for that money, and Lily doesn't want to give it to him. OK, fine, but then he wants his $9,000 back. 

That lawyer that Lily romances occasionally is Lawrence Selden, but he's got a couple other relationships going on, including an affair with Bertha Dorset, another one of Lily's friends. A random woman comes to Lily's door one day with love letters sent from Bertha to Selden, and Lily pays the woman $100. WHAT? I thought Lily was deep in debt, but she's got $100 to pay off a blackmailing stranger who found some love letters?  She must really did this Selden guy, but how's he going to support a wife on a lawyer's salary?  Again, WHAT? Were lawyers paid horribly back in 1910?  These days lawyers tend to make a lot of money, but maybe things were different back then? 

Still, Lily can't seem to catch a break - Simon Rosedale does propose to her, and he owns a bunch of fancy buildings, but Lily would seem to prefer to wait for her poor lawyer boyfriend to start making some bank. Bad move, Lily, you should have taken up Rosedale on his offer, you know what they say, "Buy land, they're not making any of it any more."  Lily rejects Rosedale's proposal because reasons, and instead goes on a European cruise with the Dorsets. Sure, if you're short on cash, maybe a cruise will fix everything. Wait WHAT? HOW? She's just digging the hole deeper, isn't she? But she's desperate to get away from the bill collectors in New York. Very relatable. 

On this yacht near Monte Carlo, Lily hangs out with George Dorset while Bertha seems to enjoy the company of a young poet. George freaks out one night when Lily doesn't make it back to the ship, and he accuses Lily of knowing about his wife's affair with this poet. Lily claims to know nothing, and when Bertha is confronted about it, she claims that Lily is having an affair with George. Sure, deny everything, admit nothing, then attack attack attack. Selden, meanwhile, arrives in Monte Carlo himself and starts hanging out with Carry Fisher, yet another friend of Lily's who seems to keep putting herself in-between Lily and any available bachelor. Man, it's rough out there, I suppose. 

Fast forward a bit to New York, after the cruise, when Lily's aunt has died and the Dorsets are breaking up. Most of Lily's aunt's fortune goes to her cousin, Grace Stepney, and Lily is essentially homeless, but Carry Fisher invites her to stay with her at the Gormers' place. Again, Lily has two possible prospects for marriage, the divorced George Dorset, or Simon Rosedale, who proposed to her before and she turned him down.  Well, she blows it with both of them, because George asks Lily for the truth about his wife's affairs, and she says she knows nothing (even though she BOUGHT those love letters from the blackmailer!) and then she offers to marry Rosedale, only now HE'S not into HER. Simon thinks Lily should use those letters to get Bertha to restore her social standing, but for some reason she won't. 

Finally, Lily gets a J-O-B as a secretary and companion for socialite Mrs. Hatch, she needs the money, but working for a living isn't helping her social standing. What a commoner, working for a living. One of her responsibilities is to pick up Mrs. Hatch's sleeping medication, but Lily begins taking it herself to deal with all the troubles in her life. Mrs. Hatch breaks into society, but feels that keeping Lily employed would be a liability, so she fires her. Lily works that sewing job in a hat factory, but by now she's addicted to laudanum and doing a bad job. She tries to borrow money from Grace, her cousin who got most of her aunt's money, but is turned down. 

It really doesn't make much sense here, but Lily burns the letters that Selden wrote to Bertha, letters which she could have somehow used to get either money or social status. Then she finally FINALLY gets her $10,000 of inheritance money, but she turns it right around and pays off Gus Trenor, so there goes most of the money, and remember she still has those gambling debts, too. But this is as close as she'll ever get to a blank slate, I suppose, so with the scales balanced, she overdoses and checks out. Selden figures out what she did for him and declares his love for her, just a bit too late. 

I don't really understand why the title is "The House of Mirth", because there's really no mirth anywhere in this film. It's extremely depressing to have to watch this woman struggle to support herself and fail over and over again. It's relatable, but maybe a bit TOO relatable, especially if I have to dip into my savings account a little each month, just to finish paying my own bills. Maybe in Lily I see the need to improve my situation, coupled with the apparent inability to do so. Anyway, I base my score on how much I enjoyed a movie, and really there's no enjoyment here at all, either. Sorry. 

Directed by Terence Davies

Also starring Gillian Anderson (last seen in "Boogie Woogie"), Eric Stoltz (last seen in "Brats"), Dan Aykroyd (last seen in "Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print"), Anthony LaPaglia (last heard in "All-Star Superman"), Laura Linney (last seen in "Genius"), Terry Kinney (last seen in "Mile 22"), Eleanor Bron (last seen in "Iris"), Jodhi May (last seen in "Einstein and Eddington"), Penny Downie (last seen in "Breathe"), Pearce Quigley (last seen in "The Way Back"), Helen Coker (last seen in "Vanity Fair"), Mary MacLeod, Paul Venables (last seen in "Skyfall"), Serena Gordon (last seen in "GoldenEye"), Lorelei King (last seen in "Shining Through"), Linda Marlowe (last seen in "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy"), Anne Marie Timoney, Clare Higgins (last seen in "Bigger Than the Sky"), Ralph Riach (last seen in "Copying Beethoven"), Brian Pettifer (last seen in "Conspiracy"), Philippe De Grossouvre, Trevor Martin (last seen in "Othello"), David Ashton (last seen in "The Last King of Scotland"), Lesley Harcourt, Mark Dymond (last seen in "Die Another Day"), Pamela Dwyer, Kate Wooldridge, Graham Crammond, Roy Sampson (last seen in "Macbeth"), Alyxis Daly. 

RATING: 3 out of 10 tableaux vivants