I Remember Mama

Roger Michell’s The Mother (2003) is the kind of movie where half way through you want to take a sledgehammer to your DVD player. Or at least switch over to reruns of Cheaters or Friday Night “SmackDown.” Anything, you think, will be better than this experiment in agony. Yet, for some reason, you stick it out til the end. Probably due to the lovely performance by Anne Reid as the widowed grandmother who pulls a Dolly Levi and decides she won’t let the parade pass her by, at least not yet, and emerges from the dreary doldrums of a bad marriage by boffing the sensitive/brutish young handyman who, coincidentally is also boffing her whining wretch of a daughter. That’s about it. The handyman is, incidentally, Daniel Craig, saddled with a dullard of a character who’s about as awful as everyone else in this plodding potboiler who in some way or another manage to block Granny’s second-act attempt for, you know, a life ripe with meaning. And orgasms.

This, and Sofia Coppola’s surprisingly marvelous, crafty Marie Antoinette are maybe the only two movies I have seen in the past two months. It’s been one of those madcap, difficult stretches (I am terrible at over-committing) during which I have not focused on anything more challenging than the season finale of Workout (big Jackie fan here) and the nightly/early morning offerings at TCM. Thank Heaven for Robert Osborne (and the inspired programmers who can still get me excited about the umpteenth broadcast of Stagecoach.)

Sometimes I find that just a snippet or two from a favorite film is all I need to take the edge off. Believe me, a nice little chunk from It Happened One Night or Bringing Up Baby or The Big Sleep provide the kind of nightcap that only old school Hollywood can provide. Who needs Grey Goose?

I keep a running journal entry of movies that I watch, but lately, it’s more like a list of scenes…favorite moments or maybe films where I land in the middle and snuggle in til the end. Over the past month, “the list” reveals an interesting little catalogue of viewing delights, not a single one in its entirety:

--I Want to Live!

--Morning Glory (in which Hepburn is so bad, so annoying, so over-the-top ridiculous that to this day it remains a mystery and miracle that she’s the same thespian who, five years later would become, at least in my opinion, the greatest American actress of four decades)
--The Shoes of the Fisherman (it goes on for about a day and a half with all the pomp and gravity that accompanied those “prestige pictures” of the 1960s but, taken in small doses, it’s kind of fun)
--Stella Dallas
--Brief Encounter
--A Farewell to Arms (’32 version, featuring Helen Hayes in one of her few screen appearances where she doesn’t play First Lady of the American Theatuh and dare you to resist wanting to smack the crap out of her)
--Lord Jim
--Mary of Scotland (John Ford does a costume drama. Badly.)
--The Catered Affair
--The World of Henry Orient (which I haven’t seen since I was a kid. Very strange movie. But it has Paula Prentiss. Who could ask for anything more?)
--As You Like It (impossible to watch for more than fifteen minutes, but still fascinating and a little bit horrifying. Olivier is adorable and oh-so-gay while Elisabeth Bergner makes you want to stick an ice pick in your ears)
--The Hurricane
--The High and the Mighty
--Yours, Mine and Ours

OK, so not exactly the kind of line-up you would find on the Sight & Sound survey, but comfort-food movies have their place in our hearts, if nowhere else. If you had to play the desert island scenario and you had to pick, say, Clueless or The Passion of Joan of Arc, which one would get your vote?

Last week I checked out Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf, but I just couldn’t do it. So I opted instead for Flower Drum Song, which really may be one of the worst big screen musicals of all time. But there’s something very reassuring about Miyoshi Umeki, in a warm-up for her turn as Mrs. Livingston, singing “A Hundred Million Miracles” while Nancy Kwan vamps like nobody’s businesses. I don’t know, maybe I just wasn’t in the mood for Bergman that night. Or maybe I was still smarting from The Mother.

One more thumbs-up to TCM in anticipation of what I think is it’s first Gay and Lesbian Film festival. Screened Out: Gay Images in Film promises to deliver, over the course of Mondays and Wednesdays in June, “a 44-Movie Festival that examines gay sexuality in the cinema from the silent era up to the films that challenged Hollywood's rigid Code…” Oh boy. Anything that brings us everything from Franklin Pangborn to The Killing of Sister George is something worth celebrating.

You should SO be watching this...

So I received an email from my dear friend Laney the other day. The subject line was:
Oh, you should SO be watching this…, and was an alert that William Wyler’s classic DODSWORTH (featuring Walter Huston and Madame Ouspenskaya, among others) was playing on TCM. And Laney was so right. We should all be watching DODSWORTH right now, especially since there’s not much being offered at the local Cineplex these days.

Maybe I’m getting cranky but it seems to me there is just more and more junk out there. I’m turning into my parents, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Twenty years ago they started in with the “they just don’t make movies like they used to.” I rolled my eyes and took off to see GREMLINS or COCKTAIL.

Scanning this Sunday’s movie listings, I must admit there was nothing that I cared to see, or at least nothing that couldn’t wait til it ended up on DVD at Netflix. OK, I do want to see SPIDER-MAN 3 on the big screen but must wait until the hullabaloo dies down. And despite its boffo box office this weekend, the so-so reviews might make this happen a bit sooner than anticipated. Actually I’m probably the only person who goes to the Spiderman movies in anticipation of another great turn by Rosemary Harris.

But who can possibly attend a big summer blockbuster anymore without resisting the urge to smack a few people? When did going to the movies stop being about the movie and instead, become a gathering place for half-witted yokels to have a family reunion while gobbling tubs o’ corn and guzzling buckets o’ Diet Coke? (And what good do these behemoths think they are doing, downing a gallon of diet cola, when their veins and vessels are already packed with sludge from the nacho cheese goo they have slathered all over their Jumbo Trough o’ Chips at the concession stand?)

Forgive the rant, but it’s becoming impossible to enjoy a movie any more without having to deal with compulsive talkers who, even when attempting a sotto voce whisper, sound like King Kong grunting at Naomi Watts. Then there are the boisterous gobblers attacking their Milk Duds and Twizzlers with a chomping desperation as though it were their last supper. And it’s bad enough when a cell phone goes off, it’s even worse when the person next to you answers it, like the nit witted hag at CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON who ---during the last magical moments of that movie--- answered her phone (with a ringer that sounded like an air-raid warning) and launched into a full-throttle gab session with her gal pal. And that was years ago, but the memory still scars me.

I’m a nice person. Really. And I love movies. But I’m starting not to love people. At least the people who are, more and more, robbing me of the pleasures of a few hours in the dark staring at the silver screen. One of the very few pleasant experiences I have had in the past year was when I attended a 10:45 a.m. matinee of THE QUEEN. Perfect. Of course the entire audience was made up of me and about 200 genteel Rosemary Harris look-alikes. Now that was a lovely day.