BEFORE: And with a flip of the calendar page, I'm off of plane crashes and treks across Siberia, kidnappings and killings, and on to affairs of the heart. February is here, and that means a lot of holidays and observances that I tend to ignore with my movie selections, like Groundhog Day, Super Bowl Sunday, Presidents Day and Black History Month. Instead, I focus on two things: Valentine's Day, and TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming. (I always think it might be respectful to do a Black History chain, once I run out of romance films, but I never run out of romance films...)
So, let's get things going - I've got at least 31 days of romance and relationship films coming up, with Miles Teller carrying over from "War Dogs". You can see how if I hadn't dropped in "War Dogs", there would have been TWO actors carrying over from "Bleed For This", right? But just because I'm on the romance topic, that doesn't mean that the subject matter is going to be easy, all flowers and candy and sunshine. Nope, a peek at the plotline means this is still heavy subject matter, coincidentally a similar jumping-off point as those "Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby" films.
Now, as for TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, after the terrible alphabetical organization system they employed last year, this time they're organizing the films by award category, which makes much more sense. There's still no artistry to it, but at least they're paying tribute to the awards themselves with this system. Day 1's programming features nominees and winners from the Best Original Song category, and they are:
6:00 am "Gold Diggers of 1935" (1935) - nominee for the song "Lullaby of Broadway"
8:00 am "An Affair to Remember" (1957) - nominee for the song "An Affair to Remember"
10:00 am "Lady Be Good" (1941) - winner for the song "The Last Time I Saw Paris"
12:00 pm "The Strip" (1951) - nominee for the song "A Kiss to Build a Dream On"
1:45 pm "Robin and the 7 Hoods" (1964) - nominee for the song "My Kind of Town"
4:00 pm "High Society" (1956) - nominee for the song "True Love"
6:00 pm "Neptune's Daughter" (1949) - nominee for the song "Baby, It's Cold Outside"
8:00 pm "Swing Time" (1936) - nominee for the song "The Way You Look Tonight"
10:00 pm "The Harvey Girls" (1946) - winner for the song "On the Aitchison, Topeka and Santa Fe"
12:00 am "Love is a Many-Splendored Thing" (1955) - winner for the song of the same name
2:00 am "Days of Wine and Roses" (1962) - winner for the song "Days of Wine and Roses"
4:15 am "Born Free" (1965) - winner for the song "Born Free"
Man, I got really excited when I saw two Frank Sinatra films, back-to-back - I thought maybe they were linking by actor, too, as they've done in the past. No such luck - but I do like how they're ending the broadcast day with three films that won Oscars for their title musical tracks. Now, thanks in part to last year's focus on Sinatra and Fred Astaire, I've seen exactly half of these films: "An Affair to Remember", "Robin and the 7 Hoods", "High Society", "Swing Time", "Days of Wine and Roses" and "Born Free".
I use this to keep track of my progress from year to year - last year I think I had seen 36% of all the films that aired during "31 Days of Oscar" - but here on Day 1, I'm at a whopping 50% viewed rate! Wow, I should just stop calculating, that's incredible, I can't remember a clearer sign of my movie-watching progress! But you know I just can't stop. Tomorrow's a new day in MovieLand, and here's the schedule for Day 2, Friday, February 2:
Best Original Score Winners & Nominees:
6:00 am "Our Town" (1940)
7:30 am "This Is the Army (1943) - winner
9:45 am "The Old Man and the Sea" (1958) - winner
11:15 am "A Star Is Born" (1954)
2:15 pm "On the Town" (1949) - winner
4:00 pm "Annie Get Your Gun" (1950) - winner
6:00 pm "Now, Voyager" (1942) - winner
8:00 pm "Limelight" (1952) - winner
10:30 pm "Fiddler On the Roof" (1971) - winner
1:45 am "Yankee Doodle Dandy" (1942) - winner
4:00 am "Cover Girl" (1944) - winner
Woo-hoo, I've seen 7 out of these 11! (Or 6, really, I'm going to watch "Annie Get Your Gun" in about 2 weeks, so I'm going to count it.) I have not seen "Our Town", "This Is the Army", "Limelight" or "Yankee Doodle Dandy", but this still brings me up to 13 out of 23, or 56.5%, so I'm off to a great start. I'm going to record "Fiddler on the Roof", because even though I've seen it before, I don't have a copy in my collection. My mother made me watch it back in the day, and I played Lazar Wolfe in a stage production in junior high.
THE PLOT: Life for a happy couple is turned upside down after their young son dies in an accident.
AFTER: For some reason I've had a sudden influx of grief-based films, movies about dying mothers and fathers, spouses committing suicide and such. These things tend to come in waves, I'm not sure how or why. Yeah, it's going to be a fun year, especially around Mother's Day and Father's Day...
But you've got to take the bad with the good, here in Year 10 I have to theorize that maybe I watched all the happy films already, and now I'm dealing with the rest. But romance films are not just about coming together, they can also be about people breaking up, or falling apart. The only way out is right through it, and that goes for me as as a viewer as well as for the characters in the film.
We first see Becca and Howie about 8 months after their son has died, and even though it seems like they've dealt with the majority of the grief, things still aren't back to normal, nor are they going well. They attend a weekly group counseling session for parents who have lost children, and Becca can't help but point out the lack of logic among the religious people there. "God called her home because he needed another angel..." and Becca wants to know why God didn't just skip a step and make himself an angel, if there was some kind of shortage. I'm with her on this point - the religious nuts always fall back on "God works in mysterious ways" to explain away tragedies, when the simpler answer is that God's not working at all, in fact he's slacking off so much as to appear non-existent.
Becca is then seen having various arguments with her newly-pregnant sister and her mother, who keeps comparing her grandson's death with the death of her own son, who lived to adulthood, though they're not really the same thing. But in some sense they are the same, grief over the death of a loved one is universal, it's something we all understand, and we go through the same stages of anger, depression and finally acceptance. Becca and Howie seem to be stuck on anger and depression, repeat as necessary, and everyone around them ends up not knowing what to say or do when they're around.
They end up fixated on other people for a while, Howie smokes pot and plays skee-ball with another woman from the counseling group, and Becca follows a high-school student around, one that her family has a connection with which we, the audience, eventually figure out. He turns out to be a nice teen with the ability to write and draw comic-books, and one in particular that suggests alternate, parellel universes and is titled "Rabbit Hole", just like the film. As in "Alice in Wonderland", down the old rabbit hole.
Their actions represent two separate methods for dealing with their loss - Howie watches videos of their departed son over and over on his phone, while Becca sets about giving away his clothing so she won't have to think about him every time she opens the closet. One keeps going to the counseling sessions, the other chooses to opt out. One thinks they should sell the house and move away, the other one doesn't - so in many ways, they're just not on the same page, and may never be again if they don't take steps to work through it all. Will they get past their grief and get themselves back to some place where they can have fun again, maybe invite people over to their giant house on the Hudson River again for a garden party?
(OK, I guess I'm wrong, this wasn't shot upstate, but in Queens, where I live. But that house is out in Douglaston, which is the last neighborhood in Queens before you hit Long Island.)
Also starring Aaron Eckhart (last seen in "Bleed For This"), Nicole Kidman (last seen in "Australia") Dianne Wiest (last seen in "The Lost Boys"), Tammy Blanchard (last seen in "The Music Never Stopped"), Sandra Oh (last seen in "Tammy"), Giancarlo Esposito (last seen in "Bob Roberts"), Jon Tenney (last seen in "Tombstone") Stephen Mailer, Mike Doyle, Patricia Kalember (last seen in "Run All Night").
RATING: 5 out of 10 frames of bowling
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