BEFORE: I'll catch up with Renée Zellweger again in a couple of days, but I found that by splitting up her films, I could fit more films into the chain - so I'm following the other path, with Ewan McGregor carrying over from "Miss Potter". We're leaving this morning for 2 days in Atlantic City, and luckily the next two films are available on Netflix, so I can watch them on my phone and not lose a day - though I may not be able to post reviews until Tuesday.
Here's the schedule for tomorrow, February 26, on TCM's "31 Days of Oscar", just a few days left in the countdown now, with more Best Picture nominees and winners:
6:00 am "Test Pilot" (1938)
8:15 am "The Magnificent Ambersons" (1942)
10:00 am "The Lives of a Bengal Lancer" (1935)
12:00 pm "The Talk of the Town" (1942)
2:00 pm "Libeled Lady" (1936)
4:00 pm "Dark Victory" (1939)
6:00 pm "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (1958)
8:00 pm "The Best Years of Our Lives" (1946) - winner
11:00 pm "Mrs. Miniver" (1942) - winner
1:30 am "Grand Hotel" (1932) - winner
3:45 am "It Happened One Night" (1934) - winner
This time, it's another 8 out of 11 already seen! This might be my best score of the month, thanks to the combination of "The Best Years of Our Lives" and "Mrs. Miniver", which I watched back-to-back in July 2016. Also seen: "The Magnificent Ambersons", "The Talk of the Town", "Dark Victory", "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof", "Grand Hotel" and "It Happened One Night", and another 8 out of 11 brings my total up to 111 seen out of 290. Up to 38.2%
AFTER: I recently had a reason to record the film "In & Out", with Kevin Kline (Starz was airing it, I realized I had seen the film but I didn't OWN a copy, and I needed to fill up a DVD with "The Emperor's Club", another film where the same actor plays a teacher) and that film from 1997 was all about a man in his 40's being accidentally outed in public, because somehow everyone else knew that he was gay, and somehow he didn't. This made very little sense, because how do you not know that about yourself? I mean, did he know and not know? Did he know but just not tell anyone, including his fiancée? Or did he know but keep the information on some lower subconscious level? Anyway, as a movie made in 1997 it represented Hollywood's complete misunderstanding of the subject matter, turning the hot topic of homosexuality into a madcap slapstick comedy of sorts.
Fast-forward to 2010 and tonight's film, "Beginners" (I'm sure there were other films on this topic in-between, but work with me for a sec...). This film presents us with an older man, in his 70's, who finally gets a chance to come out after his wife passes away. And he knew he was gay the whole time, duh, because this makes more sense. But since he came of age in the 1950's, which was a much different time, with different rules, he could only love another man secretly then, because of various laws, scandal and the court of public opinion. Over the course of the film we see this man become happy and secure with his new status, and in the flashback scenes, we see him through his young son's eyes, a man keeping up pretenses, married to a woman he didn't love, a woman who mistakenly thought she could "fix" him.
It's hard to call this a comedy, but it does have comic moments. Despite my problems with the structure (wait for it...) it's a huge leap forward in Hollywood's understanding of gay culture, and what it means for straight family members to accept, or try to accept, the lifestyles of others, even if they don't fully understand them.
But the timeline is horribly fractured, because we see this man's son, Oliver, at three different times in his life: as a young boy trying to understand his parents' relationship, as an adult dealing with his father's newfound status as a gay man, and later on, a few months after his father's death, as he starts a new relationship with a French actress. (They meet at a costume party, while she has a bad case of laryngitis, so he doesn't even hear her talk until their second or third date, and the symbolism wasn't lost on me - the female character literally doesn't have anything important to say...).
But the constant toggling between the three timelines - it's exhausting. And you know what I always say, this sort of structure is most likely a crutch to justify putting these scenes together, when doing so in a linear timeline would have exposed all sorts of story problems. This is a case where I bet that they DID organize everything in the proper order, and it was excruciating to watch. The middle part with the father celebrating his newfound freedom would have been joyous, then there would have been this depressing part, and then it would be a long, slow, uphill slog back to something joyous again. At that point, you might as well chop up the film into little bits, throw them up in the air, and hope that they land in some sort of randomly artistic fashion. (EDIT: According to the IMDB, the film was SHOT in chronological order, which most Hollywood films don't do. So I'm betting that I'm right here...)
I realize this is probably semi-autobiographical, the director is Mike Mills, and his father was also a museum director, and he himself also worked as a graphic artist on album covers, like the main character. (This is not the same Mike Mills who was in the band R.E.M., however, it seems that their IMDB credits are scrambled together somewhat, and someone should really get in there and straighten them out...).
My other complaint is that I think the film was going for a cutesy "Breakfast of Champions" sort of vibe with its tone, but instead that came off as very condescending. "This is 2003. This is what the sun looked like in 2003. This is what fireworks look like." Gee, thanks, I never would have guessed. And then most of the graphic artist's work was so obtuse that in most cases, I just didn't get it. What point, exactly, was made by writing "1983 - Chicken McNuggets" on a wall? It's just nonsense, right?
Also starring Christopher Plummer (last seen in "Danny Collins"), Melanie Laurent (last seen in "By the Sea"), Goran Visnjic (last seen in "The Counselor"), Mary Page Keller (last seen in "The Negotiator"), Kai Lennox (last seen in "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty"), China Shavers, Melissa Tang (last seen in "A Good Day to Die Hard"), Lou Taylor Pucci (last seen in "The Music Never Stopped"), Jodi Long (last seen in "Robocop 3"), Bruce French, Jennifer Lauren and Cosmo the dog.
RATING: 4 out of 10 cans of spray paint
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