BEFORE: Well, I hope you all had a lovely Valentine's Day, we just stayed in and ate leftovers, and had some nice desserts - we'll go out to a restaurant tonight, when it should be less crowded, theoretically anyway. I'm only about 1/3 of the way through the romance chain, so there's still a LONG way to go, and there may be some ebb and flow here, it looks like things might heat up a bit and get steamy tonight. Dolly Wells carries over from "Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy".
Let me just catch up on TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming for today and tomorrow - previously I was at 12 seen out of 23.
Today it's Day 3, February 15, and the programming is "Oscar Goes Bad (Crime)":
7:00 am "Little Caesar" (1931)
8:30 am "The Letter" (1940)
10:15 am "Key Largo" (1948)
12:00 pm "Double Indemnity" (1944)
2:00 pm "Strangers on a Train" (1951)
4:00 pm "Rear Window" (1954)
6:00 pm "Bonnie and Clyde" (1967)
8:00 pm "White Heat" (1949)
10:00 pm "In Cold Blood" (1967)
12:30 am "Dog Day Afternoon" (1975)
2:45 am "Shaft" (1971)
4:45 am "The Window" (1949)
I'm claiming the middle seven here, starting with "Double Indemnity" and ending with "Dog Day Afternoon". I've seen the "Shaft" remakes but not the original, I know, for shame. But another 7 out of 12 brings me up to 19 seen out of 35, which is 54.2%.
I'm going to calculate one more day to get out ahead of this thing, so if there's anything I want or need to record, I'll have a day's notice, and you will too. The topics for Monday, 2/16 are "Oscar Goes to a Family Reunion" and "Oscar Goes to Class":
6:00 am "Our Dancing Daughters" (1928)
7:30 am "Edward, My Son" (1949)
9:30 am "The Magnificent Ambersons" (1942)
11:00 am "The Brothers Karamazov" (1958)
1:30 pm "I Remember Mama" (1948)
3:45 pm "I Never Sang for My Father" (1970)
5:30 pm "Auntie Mame" (1958)
8:00 pm "The Children's Hour" (1961)
10:00 pm "The Corn Is Green" (1945)
12:00 am "Blackboard Jungle" (1955)
2:00 am "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" (1969)
4:45 am "Good News" (1947)
I can really only claim three here, "The Magnificent Ambersons", "The Children's Hour" and "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" (finally, they're running the 1969 remake, which I've seen!) so another 3 seen out of 12 brings me up to 22 seen out of 47, which means I'm down to 46.8%. Last year I finished with 42.4% seen, so I was hoping to do better, but maybe not.
THE PLOT: A high-powered CEO puts her career and family on the line when she begins a torrid affair with her much-younger intern.
AFTER: This film was getting a lot of buzz around this time last year, I want to say, but then it only got one Golden Globe nomination and zero Oscar noms, so after that it kind of cooled off very quickly. It's a bit weird, a gender-swap on the usual story of a male CEO having an affair with a female company intern, it almost feels like someone was trying to justify that by making it some kind of female empowerment story, but that effect was totally lost, like cheating is cheating and you can't really justify the unjustifiable. If the woman is in the position of power, that's not really an improvement, if the woman is just as self-serving and self-indulgent as the typical man, and having a male intern trying to get ahead by sleeping with the female CEO, same issue, if it's wrong for a woman to use sex to advance or to blackmail the boss, then it's just as wrong for a man to do that. Whatever novelty was gained here by swapping the usual gender roles is negated by this being just as sleazy of a story as it was before.
I guess maybe there's some form of fantasy fulfillment here, like maybe some people are watching this JUST for the torridness and naughtiness of it all, so this is porn on some level for some people, maybe. If you just want to fantasize about an office romance that's cheap and tawdry and very, very down and dirty, sure, that's your right as a movie-viewer. But we already HAVE porn for that, we don't need to stoop so low in a regular Hollywood movie, do we? Although it's Nicole Kidman, and she was also in "Eyes Wide Shut" and "Billy Bathgate" and "Dead Calm" and "Hemingway & Gellhorn" and geez, are there any movies that she has NOT been naked in? Is there anyone out there who maybe has NOT seen her naked in a movie? And I hate to be ageist, but she was 57 when this film came out, at what point is she maybe too old to do nude scenes?
Look, I'm not going to say her penchant for nude scenes caused her most recent divorce, because there's no way to know that, but it couldn't have helped that she was frequently out making movies while Keith Urban was out on tour making music, and you know, two people grow apart if they're not spending that much time together. Nicole's character here in "Babygirl", of course, has a much different problem. She clearly wants something sexual that she's not getting from her husband, though the film opens with them having sex. So, umm, what exactly is the problem? It's got something to do with her wanting or needing to be told what to do, like OK, maybe I can understand that? But if you can't communicate that in bed with your husband, the person you're already closest to, how are you going to justify getting that from a relative stranger? More to the point, how did that stranger know that was what she wanted, that the boss wanted to be bossed around?
I guess we have to assume that Samuel the intern is some kind of mind-reader, or human psychology expert? He's somehow an innate dog trainer, what does that mean, or is that part of the fantasy? He ends up telling CEO Romy to get down on all fours, so there's that. I have to think this is not a serious drama or even a think-piece on relationships, it's just like the next "50 Shades of Gray", women want to see a film about some man who's going to order them around sexually and it's going to touch some nerve, some secret desire to be dominated, when that's just NOT the energy they're giving off in the workplace, where they worked so hard to become the boss. How is this NOT a giant step backwards for women's rights? I don't think "equality in the workplace" should extend to women taking advantage of male interns, sorry - and this can't be anything but if she's in a position of power over him and they have sex. Even if she surrenders power in the bedroom and tries to retain it in the boardroom, it's still not OK.
Samuel keeps working his way into Romy's life, finding excuses to deliver things to her from the office. OK, maybe she DID forget her laptop that day, but him turning up there because he was the one tasked with delivering it to her house, that's a pretty big coincidence. Maybe Samuel DOES hold some kind of power over her, because he can get her in trouble with just one phone call to HR, and she caves every time he threatens to transfer to another job in the company that's not directly under her. Well, file this one under "It's Complicated", I guess.
And things get even more complicated when Samuel starts dating Romy's assistant, and that assistant is the one who wants to blackmail Romy to get ahead. Romy is forced to confess to her husband that she's been having an affair, though she's light on the details regarding who it's with, how long it's been going on, and what she's getting out of the affair that she can't get from her own husband. Perhaps it's better that way. Romy ends up learning a valuable lesson from her lesbian teenage daughter, who's in a committed relationship with one girl but is "having fun" with another one. OK, so maybe that's all this was, an older woman "having fun", sure, let's just sweep this all under the carpet, it's not like everyone involved has been psychologically damaged and probably needs to be in therapy. You know what, just to be on the safe side...
Really this is a throwback to the erotic thriller films of the 1980's and 1990's, like "Fatal Attraction" and "9 1/2 Weeks" and "Indecent Proposal" (which all came from the same director, Adrian Lyne). This theory is backed up by some of the songs used in the film, like George Michael's "Father Figure" and INXS's "Never Tear Us Apart". But bottom line while I applaud the depiction of older women still being interested in sex, I think that if they have to drink milk out of a saucer on the floor just to feel something, I'm not sure they're doing it right.
Directed by Halina Reijn
Also starring Nicole Kidman (last seen in "Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story"), Harris Dickinson (last seen in "The Iron Claw"), Antonio Banderas (last seen in "Bullet Head"), Sophie Wilde, Esther McGregor, Vaughan Reilly (last seen in "The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes"), Victor Slezak (last seen in "That Awkward Moment"), Leslie Silva (last seen in "Vox Lux"), Gaite Jansen, Robert Farrior (last seen in "Stop-Loss"), Bartley Booz, Anoop Desai, Mary Ann Lamb (last seen in "Rock of Ages"), Gabrielle Policano, Michael Kirchmann, Mareau Hall, Tess McMillan, Molly Price (last seen in "The Life Before Her Eyes"), Maxwell Whittington-Cooper (last seen in "Rustin"), John Cenatiempo (last seen in "Mechanic: Resurrection")
RATING: 5 out of 10 Botox injections
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