BEFORE: I spent Wednesday morning at my doctor's office, trying to explain the noises that I was hearing at home (and also now at work) and my belief that they were coming from inside my head - thankfully I wasn't treated as a crazy person, they believed me and offered some possible treatments. First I have to take ear drops for a couple of days, to make sure this problem isn't caused by excessive wax build-up on my eardrums or anything like that. Then I have to start taking medication to lower my blood pressure, because that's another possible cause. There's also the possibility that the noise in my head is a leftover effect of the month-long cold I had, and once these things get ruled out, only then will they investigate the possibility that this is something more serious.
In the meantime, they checked my hearing, and it turns out I have lost some hearing in my right ear - which comes as no surprise to me, because when I talk on the phone I'm always shifting it over to my left ear, so I can hear better. So I sort of knew this already, but this makes it official. But they said that some hearing loss is "normal at my age". However, this doesn't make me feel any better, because growing old seems to be a succession of things that gradually become "normal at my age". At some point, incontinence will be "normal at my age", or inability to climb stairs will be "normal at my age". Eventually I think I'll reach a point where death will just be "normal at my age", and that will be that.
But for now, let's look forward to tomorrow's TCM line-up, for Friday, February 9, featuring nominees and winners in the Best Costume Design category:
6:15 am "Seven Samurai" (1956)
9:45 am "Nicholas and Alexandra" (1971)
1:00 pm "The Facts of Life" (1960)
3:00 pm "Travels With My Aunt" (1972)
5:00 pm "Tess" (1980)
8:00 pm "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane" (1962)
10:30 pm "A Room With a View" (1986)
12:45 am "Darling" (1965)
3:00 am "The Age of Innocence" (1993)
5:30 am "Les Girls" (1957)
As you might expect, the costumed period dramas are a bit longer than average, so they only fit 10 films in today - but I've seen 4 of them: "Tess" (I was forced to watch it in high school), "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane", "A Room With a View" and "The Age of Innocence", so that brings my score up to 35 out of 99, just over 35%.
Amy Adams carries over from "Nocturnal Animals" - and that's back-to-back films with a lead female character who's an art gallery owner, which is an odd coincidence. And I've seen so many dark or downer films in the past week, I feel like I should start to keep score to make sure I'm on the right track this February - is love winning or losing, in the end? By my own count in this first week of February, I have to rule that love endures (at the collective ends of the films) by a slight margin, 4-3. Maybe after tonight it can go up to 5-3.
THE PLOT: A dealer in "outsider" art travels from Chicago to North Carolina to meet her new in-laws, challenging the equilibrium of this middle-class Southern home.
AFTER: After all the dark subject matter, this is really where I want to be right now, just watching simple little films about couples and what they do. Here a man brings his new wife back to where he grew up to meet his family, it sounds like a fairly common occurrence - what could possibly go wrong? Ha ha, I'm just kidding, of course things are going to go wrong. How boring would movies be if everything went right? Since this is an indie film I'd heard about over the years, naturally I expect things to be a little quirky - this film won some big festival awards, and some Independent Spirit Awards, so it's right in the pocket of depicting a little quirky slice-of-life story.
The lead female character, Madeleine, seems possibly European, but she says she was born in Japan, and for sure she's upscale and urban. Naturally one would expect a clash of cultures, therefore, when she and her new husband drive to North Carolina. But she's also there to meet with an "outsider" artist and find art for her gallery - this artist seems like he's not all there in the head, and his medium of choice seems to be crude paintings of Civil War battles, where soldiers and slaves are killing each other in grotesque fashion, while none of them are wearing pants, and all of them have enormous genitalia. Yeah, I bet the Chicago art scene is going to be all over that.
Problems arise when we meet the family, with a dominant mother figure and a distant, possibly senile father, a redneck brother who packages dishes and other home goods, and broods while trying to get his GED, and his very pregnant wife who's very friendly, but just rambles and doesn't seem to stop talking, ever. What's the word for the combination of overly enthusiastic and annoying?
Unfortunately, Madeleine's husband George just seems like a big old blank, we never learn anything useful about him - is he part of the art world? What's his job, what are his hobbies, what are his thoughts on life? I guess it doesn't really matter, but it's a shame to just depict him as the most sane, levelheaded member of his family, and leave it at that. He does a fine job singing a hymn at the church social, but that alone doesn't count as character development. What a missed opportunity. I mean, that's part of the story, that the wife doesn't know much about her own husband, but from a screenwriting standpoint, that's a narrative cop-out.
I'm going to award an extra point for perfectly capturing the essence of visiting one's family, especially if you haven't seen them in a while. You may look forward to getting there and spending time with them, but then after a few days, you can't wait to leave and go back to your regular life.
Also starring Embeth Davidtz (last seen in "Matilda"), Alessandro Nivola (last seen in "Laurel Canyon"), Ben McKenzie (last heard in "Batman: Year One"), Celia Weston (last seen in "Far From Heaven"), Scott Wilson (last seen in "Monster"), Frank Hoyt Taylor (last seen in "28 Days"), Joanne Pankow (ditto), Alicia Van Couvering, Bobby Tisdale (last seen in "You Don't Mess With the Zohan"), Chuck Russell, Tarra Jolly, with cameos from Matt Besser (last seen in "Bad Teacher"), Will Oldham.
RATING: 6 out of 10 baby shower gifts
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