BEFORE: Loretta Devine carries over from "Stanley & Iris" and I'm on vacation as of tonight, not a full week or anything crazy like that, just four days off in a row, and three days of that will be spent in Atlantic City. It's a long drive there, but worth it if we get 48 hours to ourselves with no work in sight.
Here's todays' line-up for TCM's "31 Days of Oscar", Day 29:
Best Picture Nominees:
6:15 am "Our Town" (1940)
7:45 am "The Story of Louis Pasteur" (1936)
9:15 am Johnny Belinda" (1948)
11:00 am "The Yearling" (1946)
1:15 pm "Father of the Bride" (1950)
3:00 pm "The Music Man" (1962)
5:45 pm "Mister Roberts" (1955)
Best Picture Winners:
8:00 pm "Rain Man" (1988)
10:30 pm "Annie Hall" (1977)
12:15 am "The Apartment" (1960)
2:30 am "Gigi" (1958)
4:30 am "The Great Ziegfeld" (1936)
Another 7 seen out of 12 today - all of the films between "Father of the Bride" and "Gigi", inclusive. This brings me to 134 seen out of 332, which is BOOM 40.3%. I made it over the hump, now I just need to maintain that for the next two days. The biggest, most popular Best Picture nominees are still coming, so I've got a shot at this.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "How Stella Got Her Groove Back" (Movie #4,042)
THE PLOT: Based on Terry McMillan's novel, this film follows four very different African-American women and their relationships with men.
AFTER: Yeah, that was TWO years ago, February 2022, when I watched that other African-American female-oriented romance film, and I tend to pair movies when I make my lists, because it makes the linking job twice as easy - or is it half as difficult? But sometimes this process strands one of the films, like I could link TO "How Stella Got Her Groove Back", but if I watched "Waiting to Exhale" next, it really cut down my linking possibilities at the time, and I couldn't move forward with the chain I wanted unless I dropped that film. So it took me over 600 films to be able to circle back, sometimes that's what it takes.
So I'm crossing this one off the list tonight, which is great, but I'm in the same situation again, this film links to "Men, Women & Children" via Dennis Haysbert, and I'm not watching that one next, even though I dropped it from last year's Adam Sandler chain and swore I'd re-program it ASAP. Not gonna do it, because that would not link up with the path I have in mind, but you see how frequently this happens? With just six films to go in the romance chain I wouldn't want to add anything else at this point anyway, I've got to start on the path to Irish films and an Easter tie-in. I realize I'm going to be leaving the list of romance films in a big mess, but hey, I've got 10 months to sort it out again.
Oh, I just want to call a mulligan tonight because I'm way outside this film's demographic and probably anything I say about it is going to sound racist. I'll try to muddle through - but I've seen so many romance films already this season, like BOTH "Think Like a Man" movies, and I'm having trouble caring about the relationship problems of four black women living in the greater metropolitan area of Phoenix, Arizona. I didn't even know there WERE four black women living in the greater metropolitan area of Phoenix, Arizona. See, even that sounds like a racist thing for me to say, of course black people live there, but I'm just saying I didn't know that fact directly, because I've never been there. Ask me about San Diego or Portland, Oregon, I've been to those cities several times each.
The film's synopsis says these stories are about four "very different" women, but are they that different? I don't mean because they're all black American women, but because three of their stories end up sounding like the exact same stories, three of them are dating married men who never seem to get around to leaving their wives, and then when they come to realize this, they have difficulty finding a new romantic partner. If I can play Dr. Phil for just a minute, what did they THINK was going to happen when they were dating a married man, that he'd just dump his wife and then fall madly in love with his side-piece and then marry her? Even if that WERE going to happen (and it's not) then how could anybody trust that man going forward, because if he did that to his first wife, he'll do that to his second wife, once he gets tired of her. That's the behavior of a man acting like a serial cheater, which is the opposite of a monogamist - he's ALWAYS going to have another girl on the side, and he's ALWAYS going to be looking to "trade up", and betting on him to stay faithful is, well, a losing bet.
OK, the three women maybe get to this point in different ways, but three of them end up in the same place, and that just feels like lazy storytelling - or at least you shouldn't say they have "very different" stories when they're not. There's Savannah Jackson, who's a TV producer with a married lover, who believes that he will leave his wife for her - and when she finally realizes that he won't, she starts dating an old friend from her hometown who is, and you'll never believe it, married, but he says that he and his wife are getting ready to split up (they aren't) and he's only staying married for the sake of his young daughter. And Savannah falls for this line, just like she did the last time. Robin is a high-powered executive and the mistress of a man named Russell, who keeps saying he's going to leave his wife, but he never seems to get around to doing it, and then starts hanging out with a new lover, and I'm not sure but I think he's a drug dealer (oh, why couldn't he just be a married man?).
Then there's Bernadine, who's married at the start of the film, but one night before a party he asks if she wouldn't mind not going to the party - which seems romantic, they can stay in and just spend time together, sounds great. Only he still wants to go to the party, with another woman, oh and by the way, he's breaking up with Bernadine. I see what the screenwriter tried to do there, but it just wasn't funny, and also, nobody breaks up with somebody like that. Anyway he's leaving her for a white woman, which I guess is an insult to black women everywhere, but Bernie retaliates by putting all his clothes in his car and setting the car on fire, which is known colloquially as a "car-beque".
Revenge is best served cold, however, and when she calms down she can do better for herself by getting a good divorce lawyer and getting a large settlement. Umm, why wasn't that Plan A and the carbeque Plan B? Then she has to face dating again, but she meets a new man in a bar who she starts a relationship with, only he's married (SEE? Same story!) but the difference here is that his wife has a terminal illness, and he's up-front about the fact that he can't leave her, although he seems to be fine with loving two women at once. Statistically, though, I'm bothered by the fact here that 3 out of 4 black women depicted made that same choice, to date a married man. Is this anything close to accurate, depicting the real world? I mean, why do 75% of this movie's characters make this decision and expect some kind of better result that never comes? For starters, maybe make better choices and date single men, then at least you've got something to work with, right? Is it just me?
The fourth story is different, of course - salon owner Gloria is divorced, but still hopeful that she can get back together with her ex-husband, who comes by occasionally to visit their son. However on the next time he visits, he declares that he's not just bisexual, which she knew already, but now identifies as gay. Which is fine, at least we cleared that up and Gloria can now have some closure and move forward, which she does when a widowed neighbor moves in next door. Well, that was very convenient, and they bond, but then have some difficulty when Gloria's son wants to go on tour in Spain with a musical group. Gloria's against it, because she's an overprotective mother, but her neighbor points out that he's got to grow up and leave the house at some point, also when he's gone they can have more alone time. OK, problem solved, at least for one of our four women.
This film was something of a social phenomenon back in the mid-1990's, and not just because it had an all-black cast - the characters all had large houses, owned businesses or had executive-level jobs, and extravagant wardrobes, it sure looked like they were all doing well. It must have been the booming job-market and low real-estate taxes in the greater metropolitan Phoenix area, which is why so many affluent African-American single women and so many unfaithful married African-American men chose to settle there. But did they?
Look, I get it, men are dogs (or pigs, whatever) but if you take in a dog and you KNOW it's a dog, you don't treat it like it's something else. So if you know that men tend to be dogs, then why keep dating those men? Making the same mistake again and again and expecting different results is part of the problem here. Just saying.
Oh, and there's a carnival (or state fair, whichever) in a romance film, AGAIN. This has got to be the 5th or 6th romance film this year where characters go on carnival rides. But here it's not romantic partners going on a ferris wheel or the spinning cups ride, it's two of the female characters who go on a carnival ride to discuss their relationship problems. Only nobody does that on a carnival ride, do they? That just felt all kinds of awkward.
Also starring Whitney Houston (last seen in "Scandalous: The Untold Story of the National Enquirer"), Angela Bassett (last seen in "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever"), Lela Rochon (last seen in "Brooklyn's Finest"), Gregory Hines (last seen in "Sammy Davis Jr.: I've Gotta Be Me"), Dennis Haysbert (last seen in "Think Like a Man Too"), Mykelti Williamson (last seen in "Species II"), Michael Beach (last seen in "The Harder They Fall"), Leon (last seen in "Cliffhanger"), Wendell Pierce (last seen in "Malcolm X"), Giancarlo Esposito (ditto), Donald Faison (last seen in "Game Over, Man!"), Jeffrey D. Sams, Jazz Raycole, Brandon Hammond (last seen in "The Fan"), Kenya Moore, Lamont Johnson (last seen in "The Great White Hype"), Starletta DuPois (last seen in "The Notebook"), Kelly Preston (last seen in "The Last Song"), Wesley Snipes (last seen in "Coming 2 America"), Wren T. Brown, Graham Galloway (last seen in "Higher Learning"), Delaina Hlavin (last seen in "Licorice Pizza"), Luis Sharpe, Ezra Swerdlow,
RATING: 4 out of 10 weekly phone calls to Mom
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