Pearl

Film: The Rose
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

There are a few important things I need to say before I delve too far into The Rose. The first is that I am an unabashed fan of Bette Midler as a human being; I think she’s aces. The second is that I’m not a huge fan of Bette Midler as a performer. Her style on stage as a singer doesn’t do a lot for me. Third, since that this is more or less an unofficial biopic of Janis Joplin, I should come clean on the fact that I genuinely dislike Janis Joplin as a singer. This means there are going to be some pain points for me here—we’ve got someone I don’t love as a performer acting as someone I don’t like as a performer, and she performs a lot.

So, yeah, this is an unofficial Janis Joplin biopic, which is clear pretty quickly. In fact, the only reason it’s not an official biopic is that Joplin’s family wouldn’t allow it. This is how the name of this movie went from Pearl to The Rose in the first place. And, unlike a true biopic, The Rose covers a very short period of time, a period that is awash in bad behavior, drugs, and alcohol.

Ship to Shore

Film: Cinderella Liberty
Format: Turner Classic Movies on big ol’ television.

Once again, I’m presented with a movie that I completely didn’t expect. Cinderella Liberty has the sound of a happy movie about a breezy romance. It’s anything but. This is a movie that goes to some horribly dark places and sits there and never lets up. That it ends with a slight uplift is forgivable here—this is a film that needs it. I’m not entirely sure of my final take on it, but that’s par for the course for a film that digs deeply into the sort of petty, selfish wickedness of people.

John Baggs Jr. (James Caan) is a sailor during peacetime who checks himself into the medical facility at the Seattle Naval base. He has a minor medical complaint, but it turns out he needs some tests, and the tests won’t be complete before his ship sails again. This means that, like it or not, he’s on shore until he can be placed on another ship. He’s given what is called a “Cinderella liberty,” which means he is free to leave the base, but the liberty ends at midnight, much like Cinderella’s magic. On the leave, he wanders into a bar and encounters Maggie Paul (Marsha Mason), who is a prostitute and pool hustler. John loses a couple of games to her, then ups the bet to more money than she has. The bet then becomes, more or less, for her services, and he wins handily.

Married to the Land

Film: The River
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

There is a mystique about the American family farm that for whatever reason has long been a staple of a certain brand of American story. It’s only natural that film producers would jump on this particular bandwagon from time to time. The mid-‘80s was definitely that time. The River came out in 1984, a year before John Mellencamp released Scarecrow about the plight of the small farmer and the year before FarmAid, the benefit concert to benefit the same. It’s not much of a shock that The River would highlight the same basic plight.

Just so you know what we’re getting into here, The River is going to be two hours of misery even if we wind up with an uplift in the last couple of minutes. We’ll have good guys who we root for and who get constantly kicked and a bad guy who we’ll root against. And for two hours we’ll watch the good guys get screwed by the bad guys and we’ll feel bad for them. I wasn’t 10 minutes into the movie when I figured out that this was going to be one of those misery parfait movies of bad things piled on top of people who struggle mightily under the weight of the rich guys who want to run them off their land.

I Sold My Soul to the U.S.O.

Film: For the Boys
Format: Streaming video from Netflix on The Nook.

For the Boys has been sitting in my streaming queue on NetFlix for a couple of years. I can’t say I was looking forward to it, but there’s a large “eating my vegetables” component of this project and I try to knock out a couple of films I’m not particularly looking forward to every month…or week. Lots of those films end up being as difficult as I expect them to be and now and then I get a pleasant surprise of something that’s really worth seeing. For the Boys falls in the second category, at least for the majority of its running time.

This is a “takes place in flashback” movie, so we start in the film’s present. Jeff Brooks (Arye Gross) arrives at the apartment of Dixie Leonard (Bette Midler) to take her to the production of a live television broadcast. She and her former stage partner Eddie Sparks (James Caan) are being awarded with a presidential medal for their services in keeping up the morale of American troops fighting in wars overseas. But Dixie doesn’t want to go and doesn’t want to share the stage with Eddie Sparks again. When asked why, she starts to relate the story of her life and we go “doodley-doodley-doop” into the past for most of the rest of the running time.

On Golden Pond

Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

One of the necessities of my regular Friday feature is that I have to have a completed Oscar category ready to go. I’ve got enough for some weeks into the future, but I’m mildly panicked about running out, which means that I try to complete a category (or two) every week. Because of this, my NetFlix queue is pretty top-heavy with films that are the last one I haven’t watched or rewatched for a given category. It means that sometimes a film shows up that I’m not really excited about seeing. Such was definitely the case with On Golden Pond. I mean, my favorite genres are horror and science fiction. Do I really want to spend close to two hours watching a couple of old people get older?

There are a few hidden perks in this film even if it does spend a great deal of its time trying to force the audience to reach for their hankies. The primary pleasure of On Golden Pond is watching Henry Fonda act like a cantankerous son of a bitch to all and sundry. Much of the reason this works is because it’s Henry Fonda. Much like Once Upon a Time in the West trades on Fonda being a bad guy after a career of playing an everyman, On Golden Pond makes him mean and spiteful after a career of playing the guy you’d love to live next door to.