The Photograph

Year 18, Day 47 - 2/16/26 - Movie #5,247

BEFORE: The safe move here would be to follow Nicole Kidman over to another romance film, but then my month would be too short, so I'm going to get to that other Kidman film in a couple days, I just found a way to squeeze three more romances here in-between. So we're not going to take the safe and easy route, which is fine because romance is a long and twisty path sometimes, or something to that effect. Maxwell Whittington-Cooper carries over from "Babygirl" instead. 

Here's the TCM "31 Days of Oscar" lineup for tomorrow, Tuesday, 2/17, and the themes are "Oscar Goes to the Desert" and "Oscar Goes Nuclear": 

6:30 am "The Desert Song" (1943)

8:30 am "The Wind and the Lion" (1975)

10:45 am "Morocco" (1930)

12:30 pm "Road to Morocco" (1942)

2:00 pm "Sahara" (1943)

3:45 pm "Khartoum" (1966)

6:15 pm "Them!" (1954)

8:00 pm "On the Beach" (1959)

10:30 pm "The China Syndrome" (1979)

12:45 am "Dr. Strangelove" (1964)

2:30 am "Seven Days to Noon" (1950)

Another wash-out for me, I've only seen "Them!", "The China Syndrome" and "Dr. Strangelove" out of this set. So 3 out of 11 brings me up to 25 seen out of 58, or 43%. Hopefully better days lie ahead. 

THE PLOT: When famed photographer Christina Eames dies unexpectedly, she leaves her daughter Mae a safe-deposit box that contains a photograph. Mae's investigation into her mother's early life leads to an unexpected romance with a journalist. 

AFTER: This film was released on Valentine's Day in 2020, and "Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy" was released on February 13 last year - so I guess people still go to the movies to see romantic films on Valentine's weekend, it's kind of comforting that that's still a thing. "Hey, let's stay home on Feb. 14 and stream something..." doesn't really have the same effect, unless you're going to "Netflix and chill" maybe. Nobody talks about "Hulu and chill" or "Tubi and chill", do they? 

There is a simple romance at the heart of this film, but really it's not that simple at all, it never is. These two people are affected by the past in their present, their past trauma dictates their actions, even if they're not fully aware of it.  Michael just got out of a relationship with Tessa, a girl from New Orleans, so sure, he's a little gunshy. Mae is still dealing with the effects of her mother dying, and with her final letter she told Mae who her father is, so she's spent a lifetime not knowing that, which has to have some effect on her dating life as well. Jeez, it's a wonder that any two people get together these days when they're all dealing with so much. But we all have to deal with hardship and loss and we have to be willing to try again, or else we're just running out the clock. 

Michael is a reporter interviewing people in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and he asks a man named Isaac about his photographs, one in particular is a photo of a woman from his past, who left him to become a photographer. Back in New York, he visits Mae, the photographer's daughter, who works at the Queens Museum. By chance the photographer had passed away a month or so ago, and they swap numbers and agree to talk more in the future. But after some time passes and Michael doesn't hear from her, he goes to see a movie at the museum to set up a "chance meeting" with her again. They start dating but the timing isn't great, as Michael is applying for a job in London. 

Back in the past, we see Christina, Mae's mother, in a relationship with Isaac that her mother doesn't approve of. After living with Isaac for some time, she leaves to pursue a career in photography in New York. When she calls a friend in New Orleans to share the good news about getting a job, Mae learns her mother has died, and when she returns for the funeral, she finds out Isaac has married someone else. Bad timing all around, really.  Years later, when Christina returns with her young daughter, things are even more awkward and Isaac is afraid to even ask if Christina is his daughter, so we all just kind of have to wait while everyone figures things out. 

In the present, after Mae goes to New Orleans to meet her father for the first time, Michael comes back to finish his article and finds her there, so they re-connect and after another wonderful day together, he drops the bomb about moving to London, and they agree that a long-distance relationship isn't practical. But going through her mother's work again, Mae finds a video where her mother says she wished she had put more effort into loving people - so Mae meets up with Michael again and they vow to make things work out. 

It's really a simple story, made a bit more complicated by the jumping back and forth in time - but I suspect that without that, the film would have all been just a bit TOO simple. Some secrets have to be withheld from time to time, and sometimes we the audience figure things out before the characters do. Well, that's just the way these things go sometimes. The important thing is that we don't repeat our parents' mistakes and it's even more important that we don't repeat our own - so get out there and make some all new mistakes!

Directed by Stella Meghie

Also starring Issa Rae (last seen in "The Lovebirds"), LaKeith Stanfield (last seen in "Haunted Mansion"), Chanté Adams (last seen in "Voyagers"), Y'lan Noel (last seen in "Slice"), Kelvin Harrison Jr. (last seen in "Assassination Nation"), Lil Rel Howery (last seen in "The Out-Laws"), Teyonah Parris (last seen in "They Cloned Tyrone"), Jasmine Cephas Jones (last seen in "Honest Thief"), Rylee Gabrielle King, Phoenix Noelle, Marsha Stephanie Blake (last seen in "See You Yesterday"), Wakeema Hollis, Rob Morgan (last seen in "Smile"), Chelsea Peretti (last seen in "Friendsgiving"), Courtney B. Vance (last seen in "Ben Is Back"), Christopher Cassarino, Dakota Paradise, Roy Jackson,

RATING: 5 out of 10 debates over Drake or Kendrick

Babygirl

Year 18, Day 46 - 2/15/26 - Movie #5,246

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