Born on the Bayou

Films: Passion Fish
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

There are plenty of movies on my Oscars lists that I watch specifically because they are on the lists. I wouldn’t normally watch something like Passion Fish, which screams “women’s movie” from the cover to the cast to the description. The cast is good, though. I like Mary McDonnell well enough, and I love Alfre Woodard, Vondie Curtis-Hall, and David Strathairn. I went into this with some reservations, but also with the hope that I’d like it.

Passion Fish starts with an inciting incident that we don’t see. Soap opera actress May-Alice Culhane is struck by a car while getting out of a taxi and is paralyzed. After gritting her way through some physical therapy and with nowhere else to go, she returns to her family home in bayou country in Louisiana. Angry and bitter, May-Alice begins drinking heavily and entertaining herself more or less by driving away all of her nurses.

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Director 1969

The Contenders:

Arthur Penn: Alice’s Restaurant
George Roy Hill: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
John Schlesinger: Midnight Cowboy (winner)
Sydney Pollack: They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
Costa Gavras: Z

Guadalcanal

Films: Pride of the Marines
Format: Turner Classic Movies on rockin’ flatscreen.

I like John Garfield, and I think it’s one of the real tragedies of classic Hollywood that he died so young. Had Garfield lived even into his 40s, we’d be talking about someone who won at least one and probably multiple Oscars. He was versatile and always compelling on screen. I didn’t know that Pride of the Marines was one of his films, so I was immediately interested when I discovered this fact.

It’s also worth noting that the genre of men returning home from war is one that crops up immediately after we finish fighting a war. The classic of the genre from the World War II era is The Best Years of Our Lives, but Pride of the Marines may well be the first. It was released a couple of weeks before VJ Day, meaning that this was a movie that concerns the plight of wounded men returning home from battle while the war was still going on.

Wednesday Horror: Cronos

Films: Cronos
Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on laptop.

The school I work for has an extensive online library that recently has included a film library. If only this had shown up a few years ago! Still, better late than never, right? There’s plenty of interesting films in the Kanopy library, including Guillermo del Toro’s first film, Cronos. This is an auspicious debut. While it’s unpolished in certain ways, it also shows a lot of the themes that del Toro will hit on for pretty much his entire career. One of his main themes is that for del Toro, the worst monsters are always human. Sure, there are monsters in his films, but many of them are just doing what they are more or less programmed to do. While they can be terrible and frightening, they are no more evil than a shark or a hungry lion. People are always capable of the greatest good and the worst evil.

Cronos is something like a vampire story. It’s very different from the traditional vampire tale, though. This isn’t a grand Gothic romance. In fact, it’s far closer to a tragedy, where the people we are going to be following are caught up in events that they have no control over, and that will change them terribly through no fault of their own. We start with a little bit of voice over that tells us of a 16th-century alchemist who wanted to extend his life. He created a device he labelled the Cronos device. He disappears, only to be discovered in 1937 in the collapse of an old building, his heart pierced by a piece of the debris.

Really Dangerous Liaisons

Films: Elle
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

I have to wonder what is in the water. In Elle, Isabelle Huppert believably plays a woman in her mid-40s. She’s actually in her mid-60s. When I discovered this, the first thing I did was wonder about the woman who plays her mother. It’s one of those fun little Hollywood games—finding places where a pair playing parent and child are actually very close in age. That’s not the case here. Judith Magre was 90 when Elle was made, and she can easily pass for early/mid-70s. I started to wonder if everyone in the film was actually 20 years older than his or her role.

Before I get into the actual film, I feel like this is more I need to say about Isabelle Huppert. She is just about unique in the list of actresses I have seen in multiple movies. I think she is always worth watching, at least in the films I have seen her in, and never like the characters she plays. I love her in this, in Amour, The Piano Teacher, Story of Women, and I dislike each of those characters. In I Heart Huckabees, she’s perhaps the closest to being something like likable, except that may just be in comparison with everyone else, since just about everyone in that film is terrible as a person. And yet I like Isabelle Huppert every time I see her.

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Picture 1959

The Contenders:

Anatomy of a Murder
Ben-Hur (winner)
The Diary of Anne Frank
The Nun’s Story
Room at the Top

Off Script: Mad Love

Films: Mad Love
Format: Turner Classic Movies on rockin’ flatscreen.

In a sense, Peter Lorre is proof that there is a bias in Hollywood. Lorre looks like what you would get if you could turn a pug into a human being. If a woman looked like Peter Lorre, she’d never have a chance at a serious career in Hollywood. Lorre, though, had a fantastic career and even was placed in roles where he played characters with romantic intentions. Of course, in most cases like that, Lorre played a character like he did in Mad Love, where he is completely insane and his love is not merely unrequited but shunned completely.

For a film that runs a mere 68 minutes, Mad Love has a great deal going on. I’ll go through this quickly so try to keep up. Doctor Gogol (Peter Lorre) is a doctor specializing in transplantations and other similar surgeries. He happens to be the greatest such surgeon in the world and works to restore the limbs of children and save the lives of the people of Paris. He’s also obsessed with an actress named Yvonne Orlac (Frances Drake), who performs nightly in a sort of Grand Guignol drama in which she is tortured. Gogol is madly in love with Yvonne and is unaware that she is already married to a man named Stephen Orlac (Colin Clive), a concert pianist.