Finishing the AFI Top-100

Film: Sophie’s Choice
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on The New Portable.

For the last several years, I’d seen 99 of the AFI Top-100 movies. I avoided and avoided that final movie (film #91 on the list, if you’re curious) for no reason other than the fact that I knew what the story was and didn’t want to subject myself to it. In truth, I never really set out to watch the AFI Top-100; I’d seen the 99 that I had by watching the 1001 Movies list and then seeing virtually every Best Picture nominee as well. The one that seemed to sneak past and that wasn’t on either of those two massive lists is Sophie’s Choice. So it’s yet another Meryl Streep nomination (and win) and yet another Holocaust story.

Sophie’s Choice takes place a couple of years after World War II. A young Southern man with the unusual moniker of Stingo (Peter MacNicol) arrives in New York with the goal of penning his first novel. He moves into a gigantic pink house, painted that color because the late husband of owner Yetta (Rita Karin) got a deal on the paint in question. Stingo takes the room and is soon introduced to Zofia Zawistowski (Streep) and her live-in paramour Nathan Landau (Kevin Kline). As good new neighbors, Zofia (who goes by Sophie) and Nathan invite their new neighbor to dinner, an invite that gets spoiled when Nathan has a manic episode of jealousy and storms out of the house. This is going to be something of a theme.

Manic Pixie Damaged Girl

Films: The Sterile Cuckoo
Format: Movies! Channel on rockin’ flatscreen.

With The Sterile Cuckoo, we’re in familiar territory in a lot of places. This is something like a romance, kind of. It wants to be a traditional romance and doesn’t want to be, which gives it a bit of a multiple personality, and that’s familiar. We’re also in a situation where Liza Minnelli (at this point very early in her adult career) gives a very strong performance of a very unlikable character, something she’d do even better in Cabaret a couple of years later. We’re also dipping our toes into the waters of Manic Pixie Dream Girl-dom, although it’s a bit undecided here, too, but in a good way.

Jerry Payne (Wendell Burton) is heading to college in upstate New York. Waiting for the bus, he meets “Pookie” Adams (Liza Minnelli), who sometimes seems like she could use an extra “d” in her last name. Pookie is almost painfully extroverted and aggressively odd, which comes as a shock to the studious, introverted, and somewhat nerdy Jerry. On the bus, she lies to a nun so that she can end up sitting next to Jerry, and she spends the entire bus ride talking, moving from topic to topic as whim takes her. This is who Pookie is, evidently, and it’s well-established. It’s important to note here that Jerry and Pookie are headed to different schools, but schools that are relatively close to each other. This means they won’t be spending all of their time together, but are close enough that weekends are fair game.

Marriage 2.0?

Films: Starting Over
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

When you think of Burt Reynolds in the 1970s, you probably think of him as more or less the male sex symbol of the decade, and probably in movies like Smokey and the Bandit or possibly gritty action movies like Deliverance. That’s how I think of him, at least. Starting Over is a change for Burt. In this, he plays a recently-divorced man who wants to get back into the world and begin his life again but can’t quite get over his ex-wife. He’s vulnerable, a little sad, and at times a bit helpless. It’s an unusual role for him, especially in 1979. Much like John Wayne had to prove he could act eventually, like comedians have to do a dramatic role to prove that they can, Reynolds had to do something other than be macho to show that he actually belonged on the screen, and Starting Over was the way to do it.

It’s interesting, because it shows a very different side of the man as an actor. This is a guy who seemed much more at home in broad, raucous comedy, and here he’s playing in a film that is almost a comedy of manners. It’s subtle, which seems like the opposite of who Burt Reynolds was. I’m a little surprised (just a little, mind you) that he wasn’t nominated come Oscar time. I’m a little surprised because his performance really is that good and that nuanced. I’m not surprised because Oscar almost never takes a comic actor seriously on his or her first semi-serious role, or the second, or the third. Jim Carrey is best known as a comedian, and got no love for The Truman Show or The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and it took until Lost in Translation for the Academy to notice that Bill Murray existed.

The Hooker with the Heart of Tin

Film: Klute
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.


After the last few movies, I needed something a bit easier on the grey matter and on the retinas. A mystery/thriller with Donald Sutherland and Jane Fonda? Sure, why not? It might be entertaining, and certainly wouldn’t be filled with the attempted gross outs (Mondo Cane), extreme excesses (Satyricon), or realistic wartime horror (Idi i Smotri) I’ve spent the last few days enmeshed in. Challenges are good and all, but sometimes, I need a break.

Klute is a pretty straightforward thriller, actually. A businessman named Tom Gruneman (Robert Milli, who appears only in a photograph) has gone missing. The sole lead in the case is a pornographic letter written to a New York prostitute named Bree Daniel (sometimes Bree Daniels, depending on who’s talking, and played by Jane Fonda). Daniel has told police that she received additional letters as well.

With the case stalled, an executive at Gruneman’s company, Peter Cable (Charles Cioffi), hires a detective named John Klute (Donald Sutherland) to investigate the crime. Klute is a friend of the Gruneman family, and is thus above suspicion in the current case. Klute heads to New York, takes a room in the basement of Bree Daniel’s building, and taps her phones. He also confronts her with questions about the missing man.

Eventually, he admits to her that he’s been bugging her apartment and asks again for help. She tells him that a few years previous, she was viciously beaten by a john, but she doesn’t recognize Gruneman from the photo. She does remember that she got the name of the john from her former “boyfriend” (read: pimp), Frank Ligourin (Roy Scheider). When asked, Ligourin reveals that one of his other girls passed the john on to both Bree and a hooker named Arlyn Page (Dorothy Tristan). The original girl committed suicide, and Page is now a junkie.

Klute and Daniel, now beginning a sort of romance, track down Arlyn, who is completely strung out. She remembers being attacked by a john as well, but says that Gruneman wasn’t the man—the culprit was an older man. A few days later, her body turns up as well, another apparent suicide. Naturally, this piques Klute’s interest, and he starts narrowing down his list of suspects. He also believes (and probably correctly) that Bree Daniel is next on the list of targets.

There are some nice touches in this film. One of my favorites comes quite early. As we learn about the life the Bree Daniel leads, we see her interacting with one of her johns, a businessman from Chicago. During the culmination of their business together, she seems to be enjoying herself, and is whispering sweet nothings into the guy’s ear, and just for a second, she looks at her watch. She doesn’t break stride and he never notices it, but that two seconds of film tells more about the character than any conversation in the film. It’s a great moment, and a revealing one.

We are also privy to the therapy sessions Bree has with her analyst. At first, she seems to suggest that while she wants to move away from her life of prostitution, it has particular benefits for her. Because of the situation, she always knows what to expect, and she’s always in charge of everything that’s going on. While there’s no real connection between her and her clients, she does come away with a sense of being in control, at least for the hour she’s with them. We also see her attempting to launch an acting and modeling career, and that going pretty poorly, which is why she continues to turn tricks. As the film continues, she reveals more and more about herself in these sessions, and the portrait of the character becomes much more complete.

Fonda’s performance is a good one, and carries the film. Sadly, I didn’t find a lot else here that did much for me. It may be that I’m a jaded moviegoer or that films have made me attuned to subtle shifts and glances into character. It may be that when the camera lingers on someone or something for no apparent reason it’s because there really is a reason and we just haven’t been told yet. Maybe I’m just really good at guessing the ending. Whatever it is, I was not surprised by the reveal. I pegged it about halfway through the film or so, and was not surprised by the last 20 minutes of the film.

Additionally, the romance between Bree and Klute feels forced. It doesn’t really work for me except in the sense that we have a male and a female character on screen together for a lot of the time, and so the film naturally squishes them together in the only way men and women fit together in a film. It’s a cobble, and not one that I buy into.

Finally, and tragically, despite the fact that I knew what was coming, the ending builds up a great deal of tension. And then…the mystery culprit does something that to me feels completely out of character and sent the whole house of cards crashing down. The last five minutes or so of the film don’t ring true to me, which is really disappointing.

So, is the film worth watching? Sure. It’s by no stretch of the imagination a great film, or even one of the best noir films out there. It is, however, a film that shows off the real talents of Jane Fonda at the peak of her career. It may very well be her best role (and it did win her an Oscar). That said, it’s not my favorite of her movies—I found They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? to be far more moving and far more watchable.

Jane Fonda’s certainly had her ups and downs, and plenty of people (fairly or unfairly) dislike her because of her political past. Regardless of that, this film is worth watching for her because she inhabits this role beautifully.

Why to watch Klute: Jane Fonda, pure and simple.
Why not to watch: The unfolding of the plot is more ho-hum than it should be in a thriller.

Tricky Dick

Film: All the President’s Men
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on middlin’-sized living room television

I’ve made the comment before that it’s sometimes difficult for me to get into a movie based on reality if I know how the real story turned out. Apollo 13, for instance, was a pretty good film, but I knew going in that everybody got back safely. To overcome this, a film really has to be something special. Fortunately, after last night’s debacle with Independence Day, All the President’s Men is really a tremendous movie.

Anyone my age or older, and quite a few people who are younger than I am, know the basics of the Watergate scandal. The first major political scandal that I have any recollection of, Watergate was the political downfall of Richard Nixon and many players from the Republican Party from the early 1970s. It’s also the source of the “–gate” suffix attached to virtually every political scandal for the last 40 years.

This film, based on the book by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, is not about the Watergate break in. What it is about is the investigation from the perspective of the two reporters. This is about breaking the story, tracking down the sources, and finding out as much information as possible to bring down the president and his cronies. They put together the pieces, dealing with shadowy meetings, and a wall of silence to uncover one of the biggest revealed cover-ups in American political history.

It’s difficult to know precisely how accurate this film portrayal is. It’s nice to see, however, that our two heroes, Woodward (Robert Redford) and Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) are not portrayed as Boy Scouts or as perfect. They have their problems and bad behaviors just like everyone else does, and in no small part, this is something that helps make the film work. Frequently, the two make guesses about things that they believe are right, and using those guesses, manage to trick information out of informants who categorically refuse to go on the record. Woodward claims to is possibly over cautious and paranoid. Bernstein chain smokes and takes chances.

Backing them up throughout are the brass at The Washington Post, specifically Harry Rosenfeld (Jack Warden), Howard Simons (Martin Balsam), and particularly Ben Bradless (Jason Robards). Woodward also gets a great deal of advice from a man known only as Deep Throat (Hal Holbrook), who does not provide actual information, but confirms or denies hunches, and continues to tell the two reporters to pursue the money and follow the trail as far up as it goes.

We live in a day an age when newspapers have ceased to be the way that people get their news. The day and age of the great newspaper man—like Ben Bradlee—are probably gone forever. But there was a time when a reporter (or two) with a notebook, a telephone, and a lot of determination could bring down an entire government.

Honestly, it’s difficult to believe that a story like this could be as engrossing as this one is. There’s corruption and illegal activity throughout, but there’s plenty here to watch. This is a gripping story, with twists and turns. The biggest surprise is that this happens in a film without a single gunshot, death, or even afistfight.

My favorite part throughout is the understated ending. Rather than a big show as convictions roll in, we get nothing but the teletype machine showing us what happened. Brilliant.

Great performances, and a great story. They don’t get a lot better. The backlash of the Watergate scandal was a dark time in American history. Everyone should know this story, and this is a great way to hear it.

Why to watch All the President’s Men: A true story where David really beat Goliath.
Why not to watch: You should already know the ending.