BEFORE: OK, I'm back in a New York groove, and I'm back to work, following what turned out to be almost two weeks on the road, living out of a suitcase and I think nine states overall. And so many restaurants, travel stops and gas stations - though our favorite one on the Connecticut/Rhode Island border was closed - no, open, but the registers were down so they couldn't sell anything, not gas or snacks, they just stayed open for the restrooms and the Sbarro that was inside. I mean, jeez, what's the point? And if the registers are down, why not take CASH? Oh, because as a society we've lost the ability to count money or calculate sales tax without a computer to do it for us. Well, at least it should be very easy when A.I. wants to take over the world, just unplug all the cash registers and watch the world's economy collapse overnight.
There's some good news, though, I did NOT watch a movie on Saturday night/Sunday because my linking ran out, so I spent the night stringing movies together and making a plan - this still involves a lot of scrap paper and writing down names of movies with arrows showing me all the connections, because on the computer I can somehow make only one plan at a time, but on paper I can see the big picture and then focus on the part of the chain that I want to expand, or if the chain circles back on itself I can see it right away, and that's going to give me more options. I had a LOT of options after "Wake Up Dead Man", and that was by design - the film was star-studded and I had many, many films I could go to next. The choices for the first step included "Queer" with Daniel Craig, "Back in Action" with Glenn Close, the new "Running Man" movie with Josh Brolin, and this one. There were other choices, but since this isn't the time of year to watch romances or horror or Christmas films, I started with those four and tried to figure out which of them would best get me to Father's Day movies, and possibly then to the Doc Block in the right number of steps. The arrows helped me identify films with the most connections and options, just in case my first pass doesn't produce the results I want, maybe I'll get it on the second or third or forty-seventh.
I went with "Lee" because it's about World War II, and today is Memorial Day, and I saw a way to loop back to "Back in Action", so that's really TWO of the possible paths that I'm combining and following at the same time. If I make any path linking movies, sure, I'm going to see ways it can loop back on itself. I ended up with a framework that will get me to Father's Day, AND the Doc Block (tentative starting date - July 1) and as a bonus, it's going to go through the "Wicked" movies and "Hamnet" and "The Mandalorian and Grogu", and you know that last one is a BIG selling point for me. OK, so maybe it's three days short of a full schedule, but that's OK, I don't have to crowd the month or overcrowd it, I can take days off - any skip days in June will only increase the number of slots available in November or December, really, and who knows, I may need them. So I'm going to keep an eye on the actor birthdays and my work schedule, and if I need to delay a film here and there, it's only going to help - but knowing me, once I go through the list of films new to streaming in May, I'll probably fill all those gaps.
So here's the linking for the rest of May, and then I'll get to June when we get to June: after Josh O'Connor there's Andrea Riseborough, James Dryden, Dee Bradley Baker, Alan Tudyk, and Kalyn Harper, that should get me to May 31 or a little after, if I need to skip a day. It looks like May will only have 17 or 18 films in it, but again, I've been traveling and so that's all OK, once I get through the Doc Block I can count the days to the end of the year and see where that leaves me. The Doc Block is only 32 confirmed films right now, last year I think I did 49, so if I get some time next week I can go through some more cast lists and see if I can beef it up a bit.
THE PLOT: War correspondent Lee Miller travels to the front lines of World War II to embark on a mission to uncover the hidden truths of the Third Reich. But in the wake of betrayal, a reckoning will come over the truths of her own past.
AFTER: All right, let's get back to it - this turned out to be the perfect film for the day - because it's a mix of a Memorial Day film and a Mother's Day film. That sounds pretty rare, I can't really think of another movie that would qualify as both of those things. And even though it's been over two weeks since Mother's Day, that was only THREE films ago for me, so I'm going to say that I'm still on topic. I mean, mothers are everywhere, they're in a lot of movies - but how many mothers are seen going to war? That sure wasn't common back in the 1940's.
So first off, let's deal with the war - Lee Miller worked as a photographer and war correspondent, and her photos for Vogue helped break the news of the Holocaust to the world - before the liberation of the concentration camp prisoners, all people knew was that a large number of Jewish people were "missing", along with gypsies, disabled people, political dissidents and such. The true horror regarding the number of people Hitler had killed outright was yet to be known, and obviously the figures were (and are still) quite staggering. However there was a feeling among some magazine editors that the world was not ready to know about the extent of the horror, the war was over and perhaps their readers just wanted to either celebrate or move on with their lives, or both. But that would really be doing a disservice to the public, it's a reporter's job to report and it's a publisher's job to publish, and in the end what you don't report on or what gets censored says a lot about the society you're living in. And it's not even a politician's job to decide what the public can find out about - thank God in America we still have the freedom of the press and the freedom of speech. Well, mostly, maybe we should try to enjoy it while it lasts - if our President can silence comedians, get TV shows taken off the air, aren't we getting a little too close to Hitler-like power?
We first meet Lee prior to the war, living a Bohemian lifestyle in France as a former fashion model and aspiring photographer, whose hobby seems to be eating lunch with her friends while topless. She catches the eye of Roland Penrose, an art promoter and historian and freelance poet, and they fall into a relationship, moving to London, where Lee finds employment taking photos of bombed buildings once the Blitz starts in 1940. Once the U.S. enters the war in 1941, she becomes a war correspondent (for America, not the U.K., which refused to send a woman into a war zone, this was an important plot point in the film) alongside photojournalist David Scherman.
After D-Day, she photographed combat operations during the Battle of Saint-Malo, and after the liberation of Paris, she photographed the French people who were shamed for "collaborating" with the Germans, also known as "doing what they needed to do to survive". While in Paris, she tracked down her old friends Solange d'Ayen and the Eluards, who first inform her about all the thousands of people who went missing during the occupation. This leads her to travel to Germany to document the atrocities at Dachau and Buchenwald, also snatching a few photographs inside Hitler's apartment in Munich, unaware that he was holed up in a bunker in Berlin at the time. I suppose if Hitler had come back to his apartment while she was there, it could have been very awkward.
She then returned to Roland in London (who apparently busied himself painting camouflage on sheds and other municipal buildings while she was away) but became furious when she realized her concentration camp photos would NOT be published by British Vogue, however they were passed along to the American edition of the magazine. NITPICK POINT: I know the issue was with censorship in the U.K., but there were other magazines, if the photos were so important, why didn't another magazine offer to publish them? I guess it depends on copyright law, whether Vogue magazine "owned" the photos because they paid the photographer, or whether she would have been able to shop them around.
Of course, this is all told in flashback, with the framing device of a young man interviewing the older Lee Miller, and this is the other part of the story. Not to give anything away, but the interviewer turns out to be Lee's adult son, Antony, whom she had never told anything about her wartime experiences. He did find thousands of photographs and manuscripts in her attic after she died, and they were later archived by Antony. This part of the film really hits home for me, because I similarly had to go through our family's photo albums in conjunction with my mother's funeral, I had to pick some good photos of her for the wake, and also I posted some of the more personal one on my Instagram feed. This wasn't easy because my mother WAS the photo-taker for the family, so there are plenty of pictures of family vacations and parties, but mostly without her IN them, because she was taking the photos.
Like Antony, I shared my mother with the world, or at least a lot of other people, because she was active in the local parish, the entire Boston diocese, her college fraternity (mu phi epsilon, mostly for music teachers I think) and she headed up her high-school class reunions. Then there were her elementary school students, and community theater participants, and so many church activities. So yeah, I had a working mother and I spent a lot of time with my grandparents, but I get it, Mom had shit to do. I usually got breakfast and dinner from her, and then of course we did go on those family vacations and road trips together. So we did spend time together, but of course after she's gone that just never seems like enough, although it has to be.
I think by the end of this blog (SPOILER ALERT) I'm going to find out that anything I attribute to the Chain's ability to program movies that are important for me to watch was really just a part of ME, my subconscious or whatever, sending messages to the other parts of me that really needed to get those messages. But that's kind of crazy, right?
Directed by Ellen Kuras (assistant director on "Killers of the Flower Moon")
Also starring Kate Winslet (last seen in "Insurgent"), Andy Samberg (last heard in "Zootopia 2"), Alexander Skarsgard (last seen in "Infinity Pool"), Marion Cotillard (last seen in "Macbeth" (2015)), Andrea Riseborough (last seen in "To Leslie"), Noemie Merlant (last seen in "Tar"), James Murray (last seen in "6 Underground"), Arinzé Kene (last seen in "Love Again"), Vincent Colombe, Patrick Mille, Camilla Aiko (last seen in "Kraven the Hunter"), Samuel Barnett (last seen in "The Lady in the Van"), Zita Hanrot, Sean Duggan (last seen in "Disenchanted"), Enrique Arce (last seen in "On the Line"), Marinko Prga, Orlando Seale (last seen in "Death on the Nile"), Harriet Leitch (last seen in "Phantom Thread"), Claire Lavernhe, Caroline Lena Olsson (last seen in "Children of Men"), Vanessa Glodjo, Ena Kurtalic, Toni Gojanovic, Ian Dunnett Jr. (last seen in "Belfast"), Riley Neldam (last seen in "The Union"), Patrick McCullough (last seen in "Red Sparrow"), Katalin Ruzsik, Joe Anders (last seen in "1917"), Anita Major (also last seen in "Infinity Pool"), Adam Boncz (ditto), Sanchia McCormack, Agnes Fekete, Jazmin Elizabeth Brenner, with archive footage of Adolf Hitler (last seen in "The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare")
RATING: 5 out of 10 loaves of unsliced bread
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